Clifford Chance announced today (20th July) the deployment of a new knowledge management platform. The platform’s design was led by Epiq Advisory for Law Firms, the knowledge management and technology consulting arm of global alternative legal service provider Epiq, and received technical input from Microsoft.
Delivered in six months, the project signifies a break from the traditional model of buying third party software for legal knowledge management and retrieval. The firm’s reasoning for this is to control its own roadmap for knowledge management. The firm still uses iManage as its core document management system.
The new knowledge bank, now holding more than 400,000 of the firm’s documents and allowing natural language search, is built entirely within Microsoft 365 and Azure, which follows a historically close partnership between the firm and the technology company. Clifford Chance was one of the first firms to roll out Copilot for Microsoft 365 to its lawyers in February 2024.
One feature, claimed to be exclusive by Epiq, permits knowledge retrieval according to metadata, in a bid to keep pace with clients’ increasingly complex confidentiality requirements.
The firm reports strong adoption following the initial rollout and engagement between practice groups, individuals and the knowledge management team on ideas for its development.
New developments are expected to come from increased use cases or features more specific to individual practice groups. Each is expected to follow the formula of keeping things within Microsoft, keeping control, and ensuring increasingly complex client confidentiality requirements are met.
We’ll bring you more when we speak with Clifford Chance, as no spokesperson was available at the time they published the release.
