Beyond the value of legal knowledge: How AI will boost law firm efficiency and increase the ROI of untapped value

Originally published in Briefing November

When designing solutions that work for law firms, Peppermint’s chief innovation and technology officer Mike Walker says that understanding data is the heart of the matter

In the ever-evolving world of legal services, understanding the value hidden within a law firm’s knowledge base is crucial to driving operational efficiency and strategic growth.

Leveraging a firm’s content to build AI-driven opportunities is not just about technology, but also collaboration and trust. At Peppermint, our work with firms emphasises the importance of transforming their existing information into actionable insights that deliver real value to both lawyers and clients.

The size of the challenge is considerable: legal firms hold enormous volumes of content, yet much of it is underutilised. Nevertheless, instrumenting information to achieve maturity — ensuring data is accurate, properly classified and trusted — is crucial.

Prioritisation within law firms is always a challenge, given the competing demands on time and resources. However, the effective use of AI must not be left on the back burner, as it brings many benefits. AI helps reduce the time lawyers spend searching for and validating information. Moreover, it helps unlock insights from existing knowledge, transforming static data into a dynamic asset. We see tremendous opportunities by encouraging a proactive approach to information management and AI-driven value extraction.

Making your knowledge work harder

Trust is the key dimension here; the saying “garbage in, garbage out” perfectly captures how poorly managed data can undermine any AI initiative. Equally, data governance — understanding who owns the asset, and how it’s maintained — is critical to getting AI right.

The maturity assessment of data is a critical first step in this journey. Ensuring your information is accessible and trustworthy means everything else, like AI-powered classification, analysis and decision-making, falls into place more naturally.

One key improvement area lies in how Peppermint extracts intelligence from knowledge stores. By using AI to enhance metadata — tagging documents by status, timeline and version — we can classify content more effectively to drive efficiency in how that information is later retrieved, and ensure only pertinent data is considered.

Without good discoverability, even the best-managed information might as well not exist. Our Peppermint Connect solution helps lawyers find the right content easily and seamlessly when they need it within their day-to-day applications, thus maximising the return on the firm’s knowledge investment.

Telemetry is another cornerstone of our approach. Tracking how information is used can help quantify the value of that content — providing key insights into what’s being accessed and its impact on legal work. Firms may have valuable information locked away and overlooked, meaning its worth remaining untapped. If this data is accessed frequently and supports strategic legal decisions, its value becomes clear. Much of this content — including expensive, third-party information — already exists within firms, yet its potential isn’t fully realised. By refining and rewarding the quality of this data, firms can enhance efficiencies, creating a virtuous cycle of value creation.

Another facet of our work is helping firms use AI to anonymise data, transforming it into reusable templates or generalised knowledge assets. This ensures compliance and privacy are maintained while creating valuable, reusable resources. AI isn’t just about extracting insights, it’s about refining the data itself, making it more adaptable, more usable, and ultimately more valuable.

A new path to more valuable knowledge

The journey of information — from inception to classification and reuse — is fundamentally different when AI is involved. From the moment a document is created, AI can begin adding value. Computational AI and generative tools can provide additional metadata to extract key details, adding depth and value that might otherwise be lost. As the content lifecycle progresses, AI helps ensure data remains accurate and actionable, while anonymising and standardising it so it can be repurposed securely and effectively.

Once this knowledge is structured, it can be made available seamlessly — which is where our Peppermint Connect solution plays a leading role here. AI can then support lawyers by identifying related content, highlighting gaps, and assisting with drafting — not by taking over, but by augmenting their expertise. This assistance ultimately makes AI a genuine copilot in the legal workflow, stepping in where needed, but always working under the direction of the lawyer.

This is where the journey leads us to the Copilot Studio. We are thrilled to be working with Microsoft to develop new agents sitting within core applications that can act as bespoke assistants fine-tuned to a lawyer’s specific needs. These can transform how lawyers interact with their knowledge base, offering them the information they need at any time, directly within their workflow.

Our journey is not just about technology — it’s about changing how information is valued and used, which will help build a foundation that supports today’s needs and tomorrow’s innovations. By using AI responsibly, in tandem with a focus on usability and trust, we can help law firms ensure their most valuable asset — their knowledge — works harder, smarter and more effectively than ever before.