Knowledge Management Support is the operational capability that ensures legal know-how is captured, structured, and reused across the legal team.  It turns individual experience into collective, deployable intelligence—driving faster turnaround, greater consistency, and better use of legal capacity.

Legal teams solve complex problems every day. Without effective KM support, those solutions stay fragmented—buried in inboxes, personal drives, or individual memory. The consequences are predictable: duplicated effort, inconsistent advice, avoidable risk, and wasted time.

Knowledge Management Support underpins the creation and maintenance of playbooks, clause libraries, FAQs, and guidance materials. Just as importantly, it introduces the operational disciplines that make knowledge usable at scale—searchability, tagging, version control, governance, and feedback loops—so knowledge is actively used, not merely stored.

This Station on the Legal Operations Line exists to recognise that, in larger or more mature legal teams, Knowledge Management Support may sit within — or be enabled by — a dedicated Legal Operations function. 

In these environments, legal ops provides the structure, prioritisation, tooling, and governance needed to keep knowledge current, trusted, and embedded in daily workflows.

In smaller teams, KM will often remain lawyer-led. That reality does not reduce its importance — it simply reflects capacity constraints.

Within the GLS Legal Transformation Tube Map, Knowledge Management is one of the 15 critical in-house legal functions and is covered in depth on the Knowledge Line. It is also one of the most powerful — and under-leveraged — drivers of legal team productivity.

The purpose of this Station on the Legal Operations Line is not to duplicate that analysis, but to call out the legal operations implications: how knowledge is operationalised, governed, and scaled when Legal Operations is involved.

In short, this Station is about turning knowledge into operational performance.

The scope of Knowledge Management Support typically includes:

◼️Playbook Creation: Step-by-step guidance for common legal matters.

◼️Clause Libraries: Approved language for contracts and documents.

◼️FAQs & Guidance Notes: Answers to recurring legal questions.

◼️Searchable Repositories: Platforms that enable fast access to knowledge.

◼️Tagging & Taxonomy: Structured categorisation for easy retrieval.

◼️Version Control & Governance: Ensuring content is current and approved.

◼️Feedback & Improvement Loops: User input to refine and expand content.

◼️Integration with Legal Workflows: Embedding KM assets into daily operations.

The Knowledge Management Support station is considered a Specialist resource within the GLS Legal Operations model.

A Foundational Resource: Is responsible for determining the overall performance capabilities of a “critical” legal function. If it is not optimised, the function can never be optimised. 

A Repeater Resource: Supports the performance of multiple "critical" legal functions and as such represents a "ripple effect" productivity intervention point. 

A Specialist Resource: Is responsible for driving the performance of a very specific part of an individual legal function. Its productivity contribution is limited to that single legal function. 

The best practice features of the Knowledge Management Support Station are as follows:
 

◼️Centralised Knowledge Hub: A single, trusted source of truth for legal knowledge replaces fragmented folders, personal drives, and informal sharing channels. Sharepoint will do it!

◼️ Alignment with Legal Mandate: Knowledge assets are deliberately curated to reflect the legal team’s agreed risk appetite, commercial priorities, and operating model — not an unmanaged dumping ground of legacy material.

◼️ Analytics & Usage Intelligence: KM platforms track what content is used, by whom, and when — exposing gaps, over-reliance areas, training needs, and opportunities for simplification or automation.

◼️ Embedded in Legal Workflows: Knowledge surfaces at the point of work — within templates, playbooks, intake tools, contract workflows, and matter processes — rather than requiring lawyers to search in parallel systems.

◼️ Governed Content Lifecycle: Every asset has a clear owner, review cadence, version control, and retirement logic — ensuring knowledge remains current, trusted, and defensible.

◼️ Feedback & Improvement Loops: Lawyers can comment on, flag, or suggest improvements to content, turning KM into a living system rather than a static library.

◼️ Practical Guidance Focus: KM prioritises “how we do things here” — playbooks, preferred clauses, escalation guidance, FAQs, and decision frameworks — over abstract legal commentary.

◼️ Training & Adoption Discipline: Lawyers are actively trained on how to find, interpret, and apply KM assets, with KM use embedded into onboarding, team norms, and performance expectations.

◼️ Intuitive Information Architecture: Content is logically structured using clear taxonomies, naming conventions, and tagging that reflect how lawyers actually think and work.

◼️ Fast, User-Friendly Search: Lawyers can locate relevant guidance quickly and confidently without knowing where it lives — reducing friction and discouraging workarounds.

The Knowledge Management Support station delivers the following value to the Business:

◼️ Faster Turnaround: Legal advice is delivered more quickly because lawyers are not starting from scratch on recurring issues, contracts, or risk positions.

◼️ More Predictable Outcomes: Consistent legal guidance reduces surprises, last-minute escalations, and conflicting advice across teams and regions.

◼️ Improved Commercial Enablement: Legal teams spend less time rediscovering legal positions and more time supporting deals, growth initiatives, and strategic priorities.

◼️ Reduced Friction: Business stakeholders experience smoother engagement with legal, as responses are clearer, more aligned, and easier to apply in practice.

◼️ Lower Cost to Serve: Reuse of legal knowledge reduces unnecessary external counsel spend and minimises internal legal effort on repeat work.

◼️ Better Risk Control: Agreed legal positions and guidance reduce unmanaged risk created by inconsistent advice or informal decision-making.

◼️ Scalable Support: Legal can support growth without becoming a bottleneck, as knowledge-enabled teams handle increased demand without proportional headcount growth.

◼️ Stronger Trust in Legal: The business sees legal as a reliable, solutions-focused partner rather than a variable, personality-driven function.

◼️ Clearer Accountability: Documented guidance and playbooks clarify where legal risk is accepted, managed, or escalated — improving decision ownership across the business.

Knowledge Management Support Station (together with the Knowledge Line), brings enormous value to the Legal Department including as follows: 

◼️ Reduced Rework: Proven legal positions, advice, and solutions are captured once and reused repeatedly, eliminating constant reinvention and freeing capacity for higher-value work.

◼️ Faster Onboarding: New joiners gain immediate access to the team’s accumulated knowledge, preferred approaches, and practical guidance, dramatically shortening ramp-up time.

◼️ Consistent Advice: Lawyers operate from an agreed and governed knowledge base, reducing variation in advice quality and improving confidence across matters and stakeholders.

◼️ Operational Confidence: Teams spend less time second-guessing past decisions or relying on informal memory, and more time executing with clarity and speed.

◼️ Scalable Performance: Legal output becomes less dependent on specific individuals, allowing the department to scale without loss of quality or control.

◼️ Continuous Improvement: Usage data, feedback loops, and content gaps surface process weaknesses and capability gaps, directly informing legal ops planning and improvement initiatives.

◼️ Transformation Enablement: Knowledge Management provides the foundation required for sustainable transformation by embedding learning, standardisation, and improvement into day-to-day operations.

◼️ Institutional Memory: Critical legal knowledge survives turnover, restructures, and growth phases, protecting the organisation from capability loss and operational regression.

The Knowledge Management Support station is essential for:

◼️Legal departments of all sizes

◼️Legal operations teams

◼️General Counsel and Heads of Legal

◼️Legal tech and innovation leads

◼️Compliance and risk management teams

A legal team operating without Knowledge Management Support will face a wide range of inefficiencies including:

◼️ Permanent Rework Cycle: Lawyers repeatedly solve the same issues because prior advice, positions, and solutions are not accessible or trusted — consuming capacity that should be spent on higher-value work.

◼️ Slower Legal Response Times: Matters take longer than they should, not because they are complex, but because every issue starts from a blank page.

◼️ Inconsistent Legal Advice: Different lawyers provide different answers to the same question, eroding credibility, confusing the business, and increasing unmanaged risk.

◼️ Hidden Bottlenecks: A small number of “go-to” individuals become informal knowledge hubs, creating single points of failure and chronic dependency risks.

◼️ Fragile Onboarding: New joiners take months to become effective, relying on informal shadowing and guesswork instead of structured guidance — dragging down team productivity.

◼️ Lost Institutional Memory: When experienced lawyers leave, their judgment, deal experience, and risk decisions leave with them — forcing the team to relearn hard lessons at significant cost.

◼️ Unscalable Legal Function: Demand grows, but output does not. Headcount becomes the only perceived solution, driving cost without fixing the underlying performance problem.

◼️ Transformation Failure: Process improvement, legal tech, and AI initiatives stall or fail because there is no trusted, structured knowledge layer to support them.

◼️ Talent Attraction & Retention Risk: Strong in-house lawyers see immature knowledge management as a clear signal that the function is not taken seriously. High performers avoid joining — or leave — because it feels like unnecessary hard work in a poorly supported environment.

◼️ Business Frustration: The organisation experiences legal as slow, inconsistent, and unpredictable — reinforcing the perception that legal is a constraint rather than an enabler.

Bottom Line: Ignoring Knowledge Management Support doesn’t save time or money — it locks inefficiency in place, drives avoidable cost, and quietly caps the performance of both the legal team and the business it supports.

Knowledge Management is not a technology problem first — it is a discipline and governance problem. Technology simply amplifies whatever level of KM maturity already exists.

At the foundational level, a well-structured SharePoint (or equivalent) can meet the needs of most legal teams. When properly designed, governed, and maintained, it can support:

◼️clear information architecture,

◼️intuitive folder and taxonomy structures,

◼️consistent naming conventions,

◼️basic tagging and search,

◼️version control and ownership,

◼️and controlled access to sensitive content.

For many teams, this level of maturity delivers the majority of KM value — at a fraction of the cost and complexity of dedicated KM platforms.

As legal teams mature, technology becomes a sliding scale of performance uplift, not a binary switch. More advanced environments may introduce:

◼️dedicated KM platforms,

◼️AI-enabled search and retrieval,

◼️embedded playbooks and guidance within workflows,

◼️integration with document, contract, and matter management systems,

◼️usage analytics and feedback mechanisms to drive continuous improvement.

At this end of the spectrum, technology enables knowledge to surface at the point of need, rather than relying on lawyers to go hunting for it.

Critically, adopting advanced KM technology without first establishing structure, ownership, and discipline will not fix poor knowledge practices — it will simply make them more expensive.

The legal operations role is to right-size the KM technology stack based on team maturity, volume, risk profile, and transformation ambition — ensuring the tool supports the operating model, not the other way around.

In short, SharePoint done well beats sophisticated tools done badly. World-class KM is built on structure first — technology second — with investment increasing only as the discipline justifies it.