How to Build a Knowledge Management Function That Actually Works

Law firms have spent significant money on knowledge management technology in the past five years. Most are not seeing the returns they expected. The problem is almost never the tool.

The problem is what sits underneath the tool: the absence of a knowledge management function capable of making the technology actually work.

Why KM initiatives fail

The pattern is consistent. A firm identifies a KM problem - usually a combination of institutional knowledge sitting in individual attorneys' heads, inefficient document management, and slow onboarding for new laterals. It selects a technology solution. It hires someone to implement it. And twelve months later, the technology is underused, the hire is frustrated, and firm leadership is skeptical about whether KM is worth the investment.

The failure is rarely caused by a bad technology selection or a bad hire. It is caused by deploying a solution into an environment that was not structurally ready for it. The knowledge management function itself - the people, processes, and governance that make knowledge systems work - was never built.

The four layers a high-performing KM function requires

Knowledge capture: the systems and habits that extract institutional knowledge from individual attorneys and make it accessible to the firm. This includes practice group-specific precedent systems, matter management infrastructure, and the cultural norms that encourage attorneys to contribute rather than hoard.

Knowledge curation: the ongoing editorial and governance function that keeps knowledge assets current, accurate, and findable. This is often the layer firms skip. Without it, even well-populated knowledge systems degrade rapidly as the law changes and matters evolve.

Technology infrastructure: the tools that surface, connect, and deliver knowledge assets across the firm. This layer receives the most attention and investment. It is also the layer least likely to succeed in the absence of the others.

People and training: the human infrastructure that drives adoption. Technology without adoption is not an asset. Someone has to train attorneys to use new systems, build the feedback loops that improve them, and carry the organizational credibility to make behavioral change stick. This role is almost always underestimated when firms plan KM investments.

The hiring sequence that matters

Firms that build effective KM functions typically hire in a specific sequence. They start with a senior KM leader who has built or restructured a knowledge function before - someone who can assess the current state, design the target architecture, and earn the trust of partners who are skeptical about why this matters. This is not a coordinator hire. It is a strategic leadership role that requires genuine executive presence alongside functional expertise.

With that foundation in place, more specialized hires follow: knowledge engineers who understand how to structure and tag content for retrieval, training and adoption specialists, and - as the technology layer matures - AI specialists who can connect the knowledge infrastructure to the firm's generative AI tools and workflows.

Hiring these roles in the wrong order, or collapsing them into a single hire, is one of the most common reasons KM investments underperform.

What this means for your next KM hire

If your firm is building or restructuring a knowledge management function, the first question is not which technology to deploy. It is what kind of leader you need, at what stage, to build the function that will make the technology work.

Onward Legal Innovation places KM and innovation leaders at law firms. Our report, The Modern KM and Innovation Function, covers this framework in depth, including a self-assessment tool to identify where your firm's function is underbuilt. If you would like to talk through what the right hire looks like for where your firm is right now, we would welcome that conversation.