If your firm’s “knowledge management” (KM) relies on someone’s memory, you don’t really have knowledge management.
You have a set of smart people doing their best to cover the gaps.
And here’s the cost. The gap doesn’t show up as a line item. It shows up as rework, write-offs, slower matters, and that constant background stress of “have I missed something?”
Across conversations with UK legal services firms, one thing keeps coming up. The knowledge is there. But it’s not findable when it matters.
And when knowledge isn’t findable, people do the safest thing. They redo work. They re-read. They ask around. They over-prepare. They build a private safety net. That feels responsible. It’s also expensive. Before we go further, one important point.
Omnient doesn’t replace your case management system. It works with it.
This guide is about the whole system. The tools. The people. The habits that form when everyone is busy and the stakes are high.
And it’s practical. No theory. No “KM is important” speeches.
Just what’s actually going wrong, what it costs, and what good looks like in 2026.
This is a hypothetical scenario. It’s stitched together from patterns we hear a lot.
It’s Tuesday. 4:47pm. A client calls. They want a straight update before they brief their board. The fee earner is good. Calm. Professional. But the story of the matter is scattered.
So they do what everyone does:
Twenty minutes goes.
Not because anyone is slow. Because the firm’s knowledge is split. Here’s the thing, that twenty minutes doesn’t just “waste time”. It changes behaviour.
Getting up to speed takes too long, which means: people stop trusting search and start asking the team.
Which results in: interruptions, delays, duplicated work, and a client who feels the wobble even if you don’t say a word.
That’s what knowledge management is really about. Not a library. Not a folder.
It’s whether the firm can answer the questions that matter, fast, with confidence.
Most firms talk about KM like it’s a thing you store.
A bank of precedents. A know-how folder. An intranet page that looks tidy for a month.
That’s not useless. But it’s not the point. Knowledge management in a legal services firm is closer to this:
If the answer is “yes, but only if Sarah is in the office,” then you’ve built a people-dependent system. People-dependent systems don’t scale.They also don’t survive change. Holidays. Resignations. Lateral hires. Maternity leave. A partner moving teams.
Knowledge lives in people. Which means: continuity depends on availability. This results in: slowdowns, rework, and a firm that feels “busy” even when it’s staffed.
That’s why “knowledge management” has become a leadership topic, not a back-office one.
Let’s take the blame out of it. Silos don’t happen because people are selfish. They happen because the work is tricky, time is tight, and nobody wants to be wrong.
So people create safety:
It’s rational behaviour. It’s also how firms drift into a weird reality where there are five versions of “the truth”, and everyone is slightly anxious about which one matters. There’s also a systems reason.
Many firms have a case management system, a document management system, and a set of communication tools that don’t naturally tell a single story.
The Law Society has pointed out that disparate systems that don’t share data can create inefficiencies and problems. has pointed out that disparate systems that don’t share data can create inefficiencies and problems.
The gaps get filled by people, which feels fine until you do the maths. The information sits in too many places which means every task starts with “finding”. This results in less time on real work, and more time proving to yourself you’re safe to act.
Knowledge workers lose a significant chunk of their week just looking for information.
One UK review found lawyers and paralegals can lose around 2.3 hours a week searching, but not finding, the right documents and another 2 hours recreating documents that can’t be found, contributing to an estimated 9.8% loss in productivity per lawyer per year in an IDC-backed study.
You rebuild. You re-read. You draft again. You ask around.
That’s why document search pain spreads beyond fee earners. Ops feels it as capacity loss and process drift.
IT feels it as support noise, “can we improve search?”, “where do people store things?”, “why is everyone using shadow tools?”
Partners feel it as slower matters and clients who start chasing. Here’s a question: If your systems were truly working, why does the firm still rely on “who knows” to get anything done?
Yes. And you need it. However, a case management system is not the same thing as a firm’s working memory. It captures what it’s designed to capture and then real life fills the gaps. The “real story” still happens in; email threads,meeting notes & transcripts and other unofficial places.
We call this a split brain. Official record vs lived reality. The CMS contains the formal record, not the full context. This means: people still have to hunt for “why” and “what changed” resulting in slower decisions and more mistakes from missing detail.
This is where you need to be clear on what you’re solving. You’re not trying to replace the CMS.
You’re trying to stop people paying a daily tax to reconstruct context around it.
Later in this guide, I’ll explain how an “answers layer” fits into that picture.
It’s tempting to treat this as a “nice efficiency gain”. It’s not,It’s a profit leak.
Legal Futures, reporting on BigHand research, has highlighted how firms are dealing with profit leakage and write-off pressures, including findings such as 59% of firms confirming write-offs increased over the past year.
Now, knowledge silos aren’t the only cause of write-offs. But they are one of the few causes you can actually reduce without asking people to work longer hours.
Because a lot of write-off pressure comes from work that feels necessary in the moment, but doesn’t show up as a clean billable output.
A quick secondary note on wellbeing, because it’s part of the environment you’re operating in.
LawCare’s “Life in the Law 2025” report includes findings like 59.1% of respondents scoring in the “poor mental wellbeing” range, and 78.7% saying they work beyond their contracted hours.
Again, one tool doesn’t “solve wellbeing”.
But if your firm keeps funding unnecessary friction, it shouldn’t be a shock when people feel stretched.
Most firms don’t need a bigger knowledge base. They need knowledge that behaves differently.
Here’s what “good” tends to look like in practice:
A useful way to think about it is this: KM isn’t “where you store”. It’s “how you retrieve and act”.
If retrieval is slow, KM is slow. If retrieval is unreliable, KM is unreliable and if KM is unreliable, people don’t change behaviour.
They just work harder.
This is the practical change we’re seeing. Firms are moving away from “everything must be put in one place” thinking. Not because it’s a bad idea.
Because it’s a hard promise to keep in a live firm, with live work, and clients who don’t wait. Instead, the direction is, keep your core systems but add a layer that helps people get to the right context, fast.
That layer needs to do a few things well:
Because legal work needs confidence, not guesses. Meet Omnient.
Omnient is the answers layer across your CMS/DMS/email not a rip-and-replace project. To be explicit, because clarity matters:
Omnient is your knowledge assistant, allowing for a conversational search for your firm. .
It’s built for the “Tuesday 4:47pm” moments. The moments where you don’t need more information. You need the right context, now, with proof.
One honest limitation to state: no tool removes judgement.
But tools can remove friction.
And friction is where your time goes.
Two next steps (low effort, high value)
1. Get the 10-minute KM audit by email.
If you want a quick way to put numbers on what’s currently a feeling, we’ve built a short “findability audit”. It’s designed for Ops and IT to run without a big project.
Here are three checks from it:
If those questions make you think twice, you’ll probably find the full audit useful.
2. Request early access to Omnient (limited onboarding capacity).
If you’re already past “we should look at this” and you want to see what an answers layer looks like in practice, get in touch for your personalised demo.
We’re onboarding a small number of firms each month, mainly because onboarding properly takes time.
Knowledge management fails quietly. Nobody announces it. It just shows up as, longer matter cycles, more chasing, more write-offs, and teams who feel permanently behind.
You already have the knowledge, which means: the waste is avoidable. This leads to the most frustrating kind of cost the kind you keep paying because it’s become normal.
If you want, get the audit by email and run it with Ops and IT. You’ll know soon enough whether this is a “small annoyance” or a real profit leak.
