By Rob Simcock
Something interesting is happening in the Knowledge Lawyer market at the moment.
I was reading MRA Search’s latest Q1 2026 report and was struck by how clearly it reflects a pattern we’ve been seeing in our own work. There’s a noticeable uptick in movement across these roles — and behind that, a growing recognition that people and their knowledge are just as critical as the technology underpinning it.
At Kutana+Brochet, we’re often brought into conversations that start out as legal tech projects, typically document automation or template design. Fairly standard starting points.
But more often than not, what looks like a tooling issue quickly opens up into something broader (and usually a bit messier).
You start to hear familiar themes: multiple versions of the same document in circulation, uncertainty over which precedent is actually the “right” one, and what was assumed to be standardised house style turns out to depend heavily on who last touched it.
And crucially, the one person who really understood how it all fit together has often moved on – taking that knowledge with them.
Where things start to creak
For a long time, I’ve had a general sense that knowledge in law firms is pretty much “handled”. If you spend any time around the legal conference circuit, you’ll meet plenty of people doing serious, thoughtful work in knowledge teams. From the outside, it looks like a relatively mature part of the firm.
But once you get into the detail, it’s still evolving.
Precedents are a good example. Most firms have built up extensive banks over time, which is exactly what you’d expect. The issue is how they grow. In practice, they tend to expand rather than refine. New versions get created, small changes are preserved, and very little gets retired.
Individually, those decisions make sense – collectively, they create sprawl. And over time, that sprawl makes it harder to navigate what’s there, harder to know what to trust, and harder to use those materials consistently.
What automation is really doing
As firms invest more in automation and AI, there’s a clear shift happening. The more you try to structure and scale legal work, the more dependent you become on the quality of the underlying knowledge – and on the people who understand how that knowledge actually works in practice.
Technology is very good at enforcing structure. It’s much less good at dealing with ambiguity.
So when you try to automate something that isn’t quite aligned, the gaps become obvious very quickly. Variations that were manageable when things were done manually start to cause issues. Assumptions that lived in people’s heads rather than in the documents themselves suddenly matter.
In that sense, automation is doing something quite useful. It’s not just driving efficiency – it’s surfacing where things aren’t as joined up as they might appear.
Why this is starting to matter more
We’re increasingly being asked to help firms that are stuck in that space. Not just implementing tools, but working through the underlying material, bringing some structure to it, rationalising where needed.
Seen through that lens, the movement in the Knowledge Lawyer market that the report highlights feels like part of a broader shift. Firms are starting to feel the operational and commercial impact of knowledge that isn’t quite keeping pace with how they want to work.
A shift, rather than a fix
From our perspective, this isn’t about suddenly elevating one function over another. It’s more a recognition that knowledge is moving closer to the centre of how firms operate. It’s becoming part of the delivery layer, rather than something that sits alongside it.
And when it’s not quite where it needs to be, it shows up quickly – often framed as a problem with the tech, but rarely caused by it.
Interested to hear whether this resonates…particularly for those who’ve been through automation or AI projects and found themselves dealing with more knowledge questions than expected!
Take a look at the MRA Search report.
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