The most valuable thing in a professional firm is often the judgment of its most experienced people. It grows with every case, and most of it never gets written down, because the people who hold it are busy serving clients.
Kingsley Napley, a law firm with nearly 90 years of history, set out to change that. Sarah Harris, its Director of Innovation and Knowledge, put the scale plainly: "The amount of new knowledge our business generates each week is phenomenal".
What Kingsley Napley did
In 2024 the firm began working with legal tech start-up Let's Think on The Knowledge Exchange, which its April 2025 press release describes as a knowledge amplification tool built on behavioral science AI. Let's Think's behavioral scientists work with senior lawyers to draw out their expert knowledge. The AI decodes the thought processes behind expert judgments, and the result is stored in a central database that people query through a conversational interface.
The work started with six senior Kingsley Napley litigators. Wendy Jephson, CEO and co-founder of Let's Think, describes a tool "that automates expert knowledge elicitation without impacting billable time". The press release expected a firmwide roll-out later in 2025, and HR Grapevine described the project as rolling out in July 2025. No results have been published yet.
What it already gives the business
Kingsley Napley has a method for moving senior judgment into a shared system without asking its partners to stop and write manuals. HR Grapevine reports the aim is for senior partners' insights from cases to reach more junior staff, with the platform acting as what the firm calls a "continuous legal brain".
Harris frames it as a goal for the firm's people: "Our aim is to leverage and democratise that intellectual capital within our business, to amplify and fast-track the value to our own people and therefore our clients." Kingsley Napley is far larger than most owner-run businesses, so we read its approach as a model a smaller firm can copy.
The ExValu perspective, a hypothesis
Where a Company Brain could take it next
A smaller business can copy the core move without a research partner: structured interviews that ask an expert how they decided, what they weighed and when they would decide differently. An hour of good questions often gets further than a month of asking someone to document their work.
A Company Brain could store those interviews as decision records linked to the matters, clients and outcomes they came from, so a junior colleague sees the reasoning next to the result. For an owner, the same interviews move judgment out of one head and into the business. That is our hypothesis, and the firm's sources do not describe it.
What an owner and a buyer would look for
Track how many experts have been interviewed, how many decision records exist and how often junior staff use them before asking a senior colleague.
A buyer of a professional firm asks whether its judgment stays when the senior people step back. Interview records with dates, approvals and named owners answer that. Client matters carry confidential and privileged information, so remove client details from the knowledge base or limit access by role.
The problem behind this case
Facing the same problem?
About this analysis
* The image is AI-generated and does not show Kingsley Napley staff. The facts and figures on this page come from the published source named below.
This is an independent ExValu analysis of a published case. Facts, figures and names are as reported in the source below, which our team checked on October 14, 2026. The ideas for next steps are our own perspective and make no claim about conditions inside Kingsley Napley. To request a correction or removal, write to [email protected].
Primary source: Magazine article and firm press release, HR Grapevine, July 2025, and Kingsley Napley, April 2025. Available at www.hrgrapevine.com/content/article/2025-07-22-kingsley-napleys-new-ai-built-knowledge-exchange.