Clifford Chance

Clifford Chance held decades of accumulated firm knowledge scattered across its systems, with no way to safely surface it through AI without breaching client confidentiality. Before any generative AI layer could be built, someone had to decide which of the firm's documents counted as reusable knowledge versus clutter, then reclassify and summarize them at scale.

Over a six-month project, Epiq Advisory for Law Firms (which combines the Fireman knowledge-management consultancy and Inflection IT) worked alongside Microsoft to build an AI-powered knowledge library of more than 400,000 curated and summarised documents. The platform uses permissioned search so lawyers can query access-controlled, client-confidential material, and was built on Clifford Chance's existing Microsoft 365, Power Platform, Azure, and Azure AI Studio environment.

The library delivers curated firm knowledge directly into the everyday tools lawyers use, while Clifford Chance retains full control over governance, quality, and the platform's future evolution. It extends the firm's existing Microsoft AI stack, which already includes its Clifford Chance Assist gen AI tool (built on Azure OpenAI, deployed 2023) and firmwide Copilot for Microsoft 365 (rolled out 2024).

• Reclassifying and summarizing 400,000 documents was the labor-intensive prerequisite for AI deployment, not an afterthought — the knowledge curation work outweighs the generative AI layer itself.
• Permissioned, access-controlled search lets a law firm expose decades of institutional knowledge to AI tools without compromising client confidentiality.
• The project was built as an extension of Clifford Chance's existing Microsoft investments rather than a new standalone platform.