Kingsley Napley is leveraging behavioural science to develop an AI-based ‘knowledge amplification’ tool. It will help to crystallise the lawyers’ collective knowhow.
The UK law firm is working with the Let’s Think consultancy on the project, which focuses on the lawyers’ ‘expertise, learning and cognition, to elicit expert knowledge, before storing and organising it in a centralised database, and then enabling it to be retrieved, via a conversational user interface [via genAI]’.
In short, it’s kind of a DMS and a wiki and an AI chatbot all joined together. And if you get past the jargon then it makes a lot of sense. I.e. past work product is one thing, but guidance notes and ‘good ideas’ based on lawyer experience are not always retained. If this can help to bring all of that good stuff together in a way that is easily searchable, then it sounds like a win.
To get things started six senior Kingsley Napley litigators are sharing their knowledge and experience so it can be ‘codified into a continuous workflow tool that will be the core engine of the product’.
This product will be refined, tested and populated with a wider group of senior and junior lawyers in the months ahead, before final launch across the firm expected later this year, they added.
The aim is that this AI knowledge amplification tool will:
‘Protect and catalogue intellectual capital at the firm so that it’s not lost when senior lawyers leave or retire;
Improve tacit knowledge sharing between senior and junior lawyers, and other experts across the firm, even if they are working remotely;
Be a knowledge reflection tool for senior lawyers, helping them to crystallise learning points from their work and ways of applying it;
Be a ‘continuous legal brain’ at the firm, accessible to all, which will benefit lawyers and clients alike.’
Sarah Harris, Director of Innovation and Knowledge at Kingsley Napley, said: ‘Much of the narrative around the use of AI within the legal sector is about what people can get the technology to do and how closely it can replicate more routine legal tasks. Whilst that is, of course, an important part of any AI strategy, we wanted to look beyond that to what it means existentially for lawyers.
We asked: What is it about our lawyers that our clients find value in? With a firm like Kingsley Napley, it is the fact that their lawyer has a great deal of lived experience of dealing with similar disputes or situations and can therefore help clients practically navigate their matter. Our aim is to leverage and democratise that intellectual capital within our business, to amplify and fast-track the value to our own people and therefore our clients. If we can use technology to enable greater and earlier exposure to legal decision-making we can look again at how we provide value and how it is priced.’
While Wendy Jephson, CEO and co-founder of Let’s Think who is a dual qualified lawyer, business psychologist, and serial tech entrepreneur, concluded: ‘Senior employees at law firms have a wealth of expert knowledge yet research shows 90% of this ‘tacit knowledge’ is unwritten3, which means it’s lost when people retire or leave. Let’s Think aims to close this gap with ‘The Knowledge Exchange’ – an easy-to-use tool that automates expert knowledge elicitation without impacting billable time, then stores and organises it so that it can be easily accessed by others working in any office or remote location.
‘By making ‘invisible thinking’ visible, The Knowledge Exchange helps law firms better understand how to use experts and their expertise to improve people, productivity and profits, and gives their clients broader access to the firm’s expertise. With Behavioural Science AI, we aim to amplify and share human expertise, not replace it.’
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Is this a big deal? Well, the jargon does blur things, but the overall output here makes total sense: your knowhow, your insights, retained and codified and then made easily accessible via genAI’s language understanding.
The key benefit here, as explored above, is that law firms have way more inside them than old documents – they have wisdom. But, can you reach that? Is it on tap? Well, this looks like a way of doing that.
It will be interesting to see how this evolves.
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You can find more about Kingsley Napley here.