Has AI Made Knowledge Management Easier?
Nearly every lawyer cares about knowledge management. Lawyers have an innate hunger for knowledge—to know more, remember more, and apply their knowledge in more contexts. Yet knowledge management among lawyers is rife with misconceptions. From entire law firms down to individual teams and even solo practitioners, many have made mistakes and faced setbacks. You might have collected countless articles and practical tips that gather dust in your bookmarks; you might have painstakingly organized templates and workflows that no one uses or deems useful; you might have purchased a dozen note-taking apps, built one so-called knowledge management system after another, only to abandon them all and end up jotting things down in WeChat’s File Transfer Assistant. Now that DeepSeek, IMA, Kimi, Doubao and other AI tools have taken off, uploading all your files into them seems to have given knowledge management a new lease on life.
Below are several common misconceptions the author often hears—see if any strike a chord with you:
Misconceptions About Knowledge Management
Misconception 1: Setting overly ambitious goals for knowledge management
You often hear lawyers and law firms asking: How can we unify knowledge across the entire firm or entire team? How can we ensure everyone actually uses it? What constitutes a complete knowledge system? How can we standardize all knowledge formats? When your questions include words like “all,” “every,” and “complete,” and you envision a large, comprehensive, perfect system, you have set your sights too high. Overly ambitious goals lead to burnout before you even start, while overly rigid rules feel like dancing in shackles, growing heavier with every step. People are inherently lazy. When swamped with cases and projects, struggling to meet client demands as it is, how can you expect them to prioritize these important-but-not-urgent tasks?
Misconception 2: Spending excessive time on organization
Many lawyers invest massive amounts of time organizing knowledge: creating elaborate categories, assigning keywords and tags, building tree diagrams and nested folders, even arguing endlessly over a single directory structure for knowledge management. Some lawyers write lengthy manuals and operational guidelines, yet in daily practice, few lawyers actually read them carefully. Even if they do, they may not understand them; even if they understand, they may not follow them.
In reality, much knowledge may never be reused, since no two cases are identical. All too often, by the time you need it, new laws have taken effect or judicial interpretations have shifted, rendering much of your knowledge obsolete. For a great deal of information and knowledge, management may truly be a pseudo-problem. Knowledge management must also consider cost-effectiveness.
Misconception 3: Saving all materials equals knowledge management?
Many other lawyers skip the organizing step entirely: they download and save every article they see, hoping to use it someday. But this is equally useless. Saving is easy; mastering and understanding are hard; actual application is the greatest challenge of all. The more specialized an article, the narrower its focus, the more it consists of isolated, fragmented points—easily floating like duckweed on a stream, carried away without leaving a trace.
Misconception 4: Knowledge management requires choosing the perfect software?
The market is flooded with tools: a dizzying array of note-taking apps—old standbys like Evernote, Youdao Note, OneNote, and built-in phone memos; newer options like Notion, Obsidian, Wolai, Cubic, Flomo, not to mention various workflow and template tools.
But this approach is wrong! What matters is not the software, but the method or system! Software is merely a tool, a reflection of your approach. If your method is flawed, no software will fix it.
What Should Knowledge Management Achieve?
Leaving aside abstract concepts and returning to real-world scenarios, knowledge management ultimately exists to serve lawyers and law firms. So ask yourself: in what situations do you wish you had better knowledge management?
Scenario 1: Onboarding for Newcomers
You’ve never handled this type of case, researched this issue, or drafted/reviewed this document or contract—you wish you had a template, a mentor, or a practical guide to reference. Lawyers are quick learners, but time is often scarce when deadlines are tight and workloads heavy. Well-organized knowledge, contracts, and templates let new practitioners quickly build a framework in a field and get up to speed fast.
Scenario 2: Avoiding Critical Mistakes
Doing legal work well is hard; making mistakes is all too easy. Small errors range from typos and mindless copy-pasting that goes uncorrected, to substantive or procedural mistakes that are impossible to list exhaustively. Firms and lawyers often create handbooks or emphasize key warnings during onboarding to help young lawyers avoid missteps, much like a mistake notebook from school. The difference is that a school mistake notebook only costs a few points, while professional errors can mean losing client or judicial trust—or outright legal liability.
Scenario 3: Capturing Best Practices
Beyond avoiding mistakes, lawyers also summarize successful experiences: a case or project that delighted a client, a well-crafted contract (or other document), a highly effective court hearing, a well-received lecture… all deserve reflection on what worked, to serve as a foundation for even better performance next time. Of course, pre-organized track records also save enormous time during bidding and can tip the scales in your favor.
There are many other scenarios, such as breaking down knowledge silos in team or integrated management. In any case, you must identify which scenario’s knowledge you most want to manage first. Only by clarifying the scenario can you carry out targeted knowledge management.
How to Practice Knowledge Management?
There is no perfect method for knowledge management, but the following tips, drawn from the author’s years of experience, may prove helpful:
Tip 1: Align knowledge as closely as possible with your workflow
While guidelines and manuals are rarely used, the process of creating them is still highly valuable. It forces you to systematize and processize knowledge, drawing on experience and memory for deep reflection—something the end user does not experience. Thus, guidelines and manuals often benefit the creator more than the user.
How, then, to make knowledge fit your work better? Templates are an excellent tool. Lawyers’ work almost always produces documents as deliverables. Even for tasks requiring on-the-spot performance, such as hearings and negotiations, you can template the preparation—for example, hearing or negotiation outlines. All of these can be turned into templates.
The templates described here are not blank fill-in-the-blank documents, which offer little value beyond formatting. A good template includes detailed content and annotations. For content: a power of attorney could pre-include authorization language for different scenarios; a complaint could offer sample claims (for monetary payment, specific performance, damages, interest calculation, enforcement of security interests and priority, etc.). For annotations: notes can flag key considerations for each section, integrating guideline content directly into the final deliverable.
Beyond templates, consider the PARA framework. Short for Project-Area-Resource-Archive, PARA is a method for organizing information. It rests on two key assumptions: first, that information is nearly indestructible when stored in the cloud and accessible anywhere; second, that knowledge management therefore depends more on search within the system than on manual organization.
To learn more about the PARA method, see this book.
The method recommends grouping all ongoing work with a clear deliverable (e.g., a case, a lecture, an article) as a Project in the Project folder; all mid-to-long-term work in a specific domain without a fixed outcome but high importance (e.g., hiring, learning a skill, firm or bar association work) in the Area folder; long-term, interest-based information with no immediate use case (e.g., legal interpretations and monographs) in Resource; and completed materials no longer in frequent use in Archive. This system runs smoothly precisely because it aligns with workflow.
Tip 2: Build a knowledge tree and think structurally
I once read an article by Liu Run that divides knowledge into four layers: experience, lessons, methods, and theories. The earlier layers are concrete and specific; the later ones abstract and general. While raw experience matters, distilling lessons and methods from it is even more important. Beyond clarifying which layer your knowledge falls into, you should build a knowledge tree to integrate all lessons and methods coherently. Avoid fragmented learning—until you have built a system, all learning is wasted effort.
For example, different cases have different factual details, involving distinct claims and defenses, making it difficult to summarize a complete framework for litigation strategy. After participating in an in-firm course on dispute resolution strategy, I began to think systematically about the factors to consider in strategy design, their interrelationships, and specific methods to optimize strategies. Over time, new cases I handled and successful cases shared by colleagues continuously enriched the course materials, refining the system and embedding these lessons and methods in my mind. Every time I teach the course, these strategies are reactivated, remaining fresh and relevant.
Tip 3: Output is the best form of knowledge management
If you cannot explain something clearly, you do not truly understand it. Often, halting, unclear speech stems not from a clumsy tongue, but from muddled thinking. Speaking and writing are often the best forms of knowledge management, forcing you to think systematically and deeply. Mere writing or speaking is not enough; more importantly, you must organize knowledge with an audience in mind, giving it purpose—such as solving a problem in a specific scenario or for a specific group—so that it becomes genuinely useful.
For instance, in 2023 we collaborated with L-council on a course about statutory damages, liquidated damages, and deposits, prompted by many in-house counsel requesting training on these topics. Initially, we thought these were basic issues with little to cover, but as we organized the material, we realized a systematic review of the respective rules and interconnections was essential to offer meaningful insight. The final course spanned over 200 slides and two hours, receiving excellent feedback, and also allowed us to thoroughly research and structure a topic that arises in nearly every case but is rarely studied systematically. Without this opportunity, we might never have explored it so deeply.
Lecturing and writing each present distinct challenges. Lecturing demands immediate feedback and requires designing content to hold an increasingly distracted audience; writing, meant to be read and re-read, must be logical and systematic, and readily exposes gaps in detail.
In any case, output marks the start of real learning, and those who teach and write always gain more than their audience and readers.
Tip 4: Knowledge management can be as simple as “shouting”—use collective power
Knowledge is always personal and never fully objective. Many statutes you never truly understand until you apply them in a case, after which you gain entirely new insights. Hearing someone else explain something a thousand times is no substitute for doing it yourself. Moreover, since every case is unique, even the most thorough analysis by a previous lawyer rarely applies directly to a new matter.
Thus, rather than trying to turn research memos into generic, objective legal studies, it is better to ensure your team or firm knows what cases everyone has handled and what problems they have solved. Living knowledge in someone’s mind is more valuable than dead knowledge in a book. Knowing who has done what is often more important.
Internal experience and case sharing sessions, or even quick case updates, can therefore be highly efficient forms of knowledge management. Knowledge management can be as simple as calling out in the team or firm: “Has anyone handled XXXXX before?”
Tip 5: Understand and leverage AI
As noted earlier regarding software, in a sense, folders and Office may be the best knowledge management tools available. Find a sufficiently large, secure cloud drive, store all case materials properly, and summarize the key highlights and features upon closing—this may achieve 90% of effective knowledge management.
Looking ahead, AI is certain to disrupt and transform traditional knowledge management models. Many AI tools now offer knowledge base features, limiting output to content provided by the user. For firms and lawyers with existing knowledge repositories, this can drastically reduce time spent searching and summarizing information.
For example, if a firm has organized its past track records, AI can quickly identify relevant precedents from the database for a new business development pitch. If a firm regularly compiles research memos, AI can rapidly locate similar issues and conclusions when similar questions arise later, even generating a new conclusion directly based on the query.
Finally, I borrow a line from a peer at a Magic Circle firm I saw on social media: Done is better than perfect!
