Chief AI & Knowledge Officer: The Future of Law Firm Knowledge Management

A benchmark of 50 leading law firms suggests that firm size remains the strongest predictor of formal knowledge management leadership but that UK and US firms are building noticeably different KM functions. However, AI is now beginning to change both.

Knowledge Management has long occupied a slightly unusual position inside law firms. Almost every large firm depends on it, but firms define the function very differently.

At one firm, KM may mean a Head of Knowledge overseeing Knowledge Lawyers, precedents, training and research. At another, a Chief Knowledge & Innovation Officer may control knowledge management, AI, data, legal technology, pricing and legal project management.

I was having a conversation recently and apparently simple questions, were actually surprisingly difficult to answer:

How large are law-firm KM teams? Who leads them? Where do they report? And how do UK and US firms differ?

To investigate, we reviewed the publicly identifiable KM structures of 50 commercial law firms across the UK and US, covering firms ranging from fewer than 200 lawyers to global firms with thousands of lawyers.

The headline findings

1. Size still matters

Formal KM leadership becomes progressively more visible as law firms grow. Among major firms, a Head, Director or Chief responsible for knowledge is now commonplace.

2. UK firms remain more lawyer-centric in their KM model

Knowledge Lawyers, Professional Support Lawyers (PSLs) and Knowledge Development Lawyers are frequently embedded within practices and form an important part of the total knowledge organization.

3. US firms are more likely to give the senior KM executive a broad operational portfolio

Knowledge increasingly sits alongside innovation, data, research, legal technology, project management and—in some firms—pricing.

4. KM is moving closer to executive management

Where reporting lines are publicly disclosed, the COO, CEO, Managing Partner or another senior executive is increasingly important. KM is not simply an extension of IT.

5. AI is accelerating the convergence of knowledge, technology and legal-service delivery

Titles such as Chief AI & Knowledge Officer and Chief Knowledge & AI Adoption Officer are a visible manifestation of a deeper organizational change.

Size remains the clearest predictor of KM structure

The relationship between organizational scale and KM maturity is not new.

Historic ILTA research found that larger firms were more likely to operate KM as a separate department with its own budget and more likely to appoint a Chief Knowledge Officer or equivalent. Smaller organizations were more likely to have practicing lawyers leading KM.

Our review suggests that basic relationship remains visible today, although the function itself has become considerably broader.

A useful contemporary framework is:

These are organizational patterns observed in the sample rather than industry headcount averages. Precise KM staffing is rarely disclosed consistently enough to support a credible market-wide FTE average. That caveat matters.

A firm may have eight people labelled “Knowledge Management” but another 20 Knowledge Lawyers embedded in practices. Another firm might place research, innovation, legal technology and data inside the CKO's organization.

Comparing the eight-person KM team with the second firm's 30-person function would therefore be meaningless without understanding what sits inside each perimeter.

The UK model: Knowledge Lawyers remain central

The most distinctive characteristic of UK law-firm KM is the continued importance of lawyers whose principal role is knowledge rather than fee earning.

Freshfields provides a clear example. The firm has Co-Chief Knowledge Officers, including Ruth Musgrave, who describes co-leading a global team of Knowledge Lawyers and other knowledge professionals and being responsible for the firm's knowledge strategy.

At Macfarlanes, Dominic Sedghi is Head of Knowledge, responsible for coordinating the firm's knowledge function, information resources and corporate knowledge team.

Public recruitment information provides an unusually useful window into the scale of that organization: the firm's disclosed knowledge structure has included a substantial population of Senior Knowledge Lawyers alongside Knowledge Lawyers and Knowledge & Research Officers.

This illustrates an important benchmarking problem. The visible central KM team is not necessarily the KM function.

At many UK firms, the true knowledge organization is better understood as:

Head of Knowledge → central KM → Knowledge Lawyers/PSLs embedded in practices → Information/Research → Knowledge Technology

The same pattern appears further down the size spectrum.

At Forsters, Head of Knowledge Miri Stickland leads specialist Knowledge Development Lawyers and Library and Information Services professionals. She also works alongside the firm's CIO on legal-technology implementation.

At Farrer & Co, Sandra Smythe's remit as Head of Knowledge Management explicitly includes the core KM team, KM systems and processes, and Library and Information Services.

And KM leadership is appearing at smaller firms too. In 2025, Edwin Coe created a Head of Knowledge role for Wings Turkington. Significantly, the firm said the role would work closely with its Chief Executive, Managing Partner, Management Committee and Operations Committee.

That is not the positioning of a back-office document-management role. It places knowledge close to firm strategy and operational leadership.

The US model: the rise of the broad CKO

The US market looks different. Knowledge lawyers and KM attorneys certainly exist, but the most striking characteristic among sophisticated US firms is the breadth of the executive portfolio surrounding KM.

Consider Holland & Knight. Its Chief Knowledge & Innovation Officer, Glenn LaForce, is responsible for firmwide:

• data;
• knowledge management;
• legal technology;
• artificial intelligence;
• pricing;
• legal project management;
• records;
• information governance;
• research;
• competitive intelligence; and
• change management.
• precedents and legal content;
• research;
• professional development;
• legal technology;
• innovation;
• data;
• AI;
• pricing;
• legal project management;
• client-facing knowledge products; and
• experience/expertise management.

When Holland & Knight created the role, the firm explicitly stated that the CKIO would report to its Chief Operating Officer.

That is closer to an enterprise legal-service-delivery function than traditional KM.

Ogletree Deakins provides another example. David Boland, Chief Knowledge and Innovation Officer, oversees the firm's KM department alongside Research Services, Data Analytics, Practice Intelligence and Legal Project Management. The firm lists the CKIO among its administrative leadership. Littler demonstrates another version of the model.

Scott Rechtschaffen is Chief Knowledge Officer and heads a dedicated KM department supporting a firm of more than 1,200 lawyers. Littler describes its KM organization as bringing together full-time knowledge-management attorneys with researchers, technologists and other specialists.

DLA Piper also maintains an identifiable CKO role, currently held by Barbara Taylor. The implication is important. The US market is not necessarily investing more or less in knowledge than the UK. It is often drawing the organizational boundary around KM differently.

UK versus US: two different KM architectures

The contrast can be summarized like this:

This should not be interpreted as a rigid national distinction. Global firms blur the boundaries considerably.

It does, however, provide a useful way to understand why two apparently similar firms can have very different KM organization charts.

Historically, firms have placed KM under many different functions: IT, library services, professional development, practice management and operations among them. That diversity still exists.

But the more sophisticated KM organizations increasingly appear to operate at or close to executive-management level.

Holland & Knight's CKIO reports to the COO. Edwin Coe's Head of Knowledge works directly with the CEO, Managing Partner and management committees. Ogletree includes its CKIO in administrative leadership. Pinsent Masons' new knowledge and AI leader works alongside transformation leadership on firmwide AI adoption.

Historic ILTA research also found that KM departments tended to report to senior management, particularly as firms became larger.

There is still a legitimate CIO model, particularly where knowledge architecture, search, data and systems dominate the portfolio. But reporting line increasingly tells us something about what the firm believes KM is for.

A function reporting through IT can naturally concentrate on platforms and infrastructure. A function sitting close to the COO or Managing Partner is more likely to participate in questions about service delivery, lawyer productivity, client value, AI adoption and operating-model change.

Neither arrangement automatically determines performance. But the organizational signal is meaningful.

Four models of law-firm KM are emerging

Across the 50-firm review, four broad operating models can be identified.

1. Legal Knowledge

Typical structure:

Head of Knowledge → Knowledge Lawyers / PSLs → precedents → training → practice support

This remains particularly visible in the UK. Its strength is deep integration with substantive legal expertise.

2. Knowledge + Information

Typical structure:

KM → research → library/information services → knowledge systems

Farrer & Co is a good illustration, with its Head of KM managing both the core KM team and Library and Information Services. This remains an important model because external legal information and internally generated knowledge increasingly need to operate together.

3. Knowledge + Innovation

Typical structure:

KM → innovation → legal technology → workflow → data / analytics → client solutions

Ogletree Deakins demonstrates this particularly clearly. The objective moves beyond capturing knowledge towards improving how legal work is delivered.

4. Knowledge + AI

The emerging structure is:

Knowledge → AI → data/context → workflow → adoption → legal-service transformation

Morgan Lewis and Pinsent Masons provide two of the clearest current examples. This fourth model may ultimately absorb elements of all three previous models.

How should firms benchmark KM?

A UK firm with 15 Knowledge Lawyers and five central KM professionals may have a larger substantive knowledge capability than a US firm with a ten-person KM department.

But the US firm might also have another 20 people in innovation, data, research and legal-service delivery reporting to its CKO.

Both could therefore be substantial KM investors while looking completely different on an organization chart.

A practical peer framework

For firms conducting their own review, the most useful benchmark is therefore not simply headcount, but to also keep in mind the below:

• Scale: Number of lawyers, partners, offices and principal geographies.

• Leadership: KM leader, exact title and whether the role is lawyer, professional manager or executive.

• Reporting: CEO/Managing Partner, COO, CIO/CTO, practice leadership or another function.

• People: Central KM, Knowledge Lawyers/PSLs, research/information and knowledge-technology specialists.

• Scope: Whether KM owns or materially influences.

• Governance: Whether KM sits on, reports to or regularly participates in executive or management committees.

Those dimensions produce a much more useful picture of organizational maturity than KM headcount alone.

What the benchmark suggests about the future of KM

The direction of travel is increasingly clear that quality of institutional knowledge is strategically important.

Law firms historically created KM functions because legal expertise was expensive to recreate and difficult to share. Now, they need mechanisms for determining which knowledge is authoritative, current and reusable. And lawyers need training and workflows that allow them to use those systems appropriately. Those are all problems with which sophisticated KM teams are already familiar.

Recent evidence reinforces the connection. Research reported in 2026 found that roughly two-thirds of lawyers at large UK and Irish firms were already using AI for knowledge-management-related work. Meanwhile, the legal technology discussion has increasingly shifted from access to AI models toward the quality of the context and proprietary knowledge supplied to those models.

For years, some law firms treated KM as an important but largely internal support capability. In an AI-enabled firm, knowledge architecture becomes part of the production infrastructure for legal work itself.

That potentially changes the strategic value of the function, and the type of leader required to run it.

The evolution from Head of Knowledge to Chief Knowledge & Innovation Officer, and now to Chief AI & Knowledge Officer, is therefore more than title inflation.

It tells us how leading firms are beginning to rethink the relationship between their lawyers, their collective knowledge and the technology through which legal services will increasingly be delivered.

About the research

This analysis is based on a review of 50 significant UK- and US-led commercial law firms, segmented by lawyer population and geography. Public firm biographies, leadership pages, recruitment information, firm announcements and specialist legal-industry sources were used to identify KM leadership, functional scope and reporting structures.

This is therefore a market benchmark rather than a census of UK and US law firms. Particular care should be taken when comparing headcounts because firms classify Knowledge Lawyers, PSLs, research professionals, innovation staff and knowledge technologists differently.