Preserving Tacit Knowledge in Law Firms
At Let’s Think, we’re tackling an age-old challenge: how can law firms surface, safeguard, and share the expertise that lives in the heads of their top lawyers? On the Pioneers and Pathfinders podcast, our CEO, Wendy Jephson, explained how Behavioural Science AI is making it possible to surface, safeguard and share expertise at scale. Here are some highlights from her conversation.
Beyond Automation: AI That Helps Lawyers Think
Traditional legal AI often focuses on efficiency, helping lawyers summarise documents or automate workflows. But Behavioural Science AI takes a different path. Wendy explained that Let’s Think’s technology is designed to capture how lawyers think, not just what they do. “So unlike something like ChatGPT that’s constantly trying to give you information, our tech is asking you questions to help you get your own thinking out of your head, and then it reframes that in multiple different ways, creating different types of Knowledge Assets from that think-aloud session.”
By prompting experts to reflect on their reasoning, Behavioural Science AI turns the tacit knowledge that usually lives in senior lawyers’ heads into structured insights that can be shared across the firm. Instead of replacing human thinking; it enhances it, encouraging reflective practice to become part of daily work.
Supporting Junior Lawyers
One of the best applications of Behavioural Science AI is in training and upskilling junior lawyers. Wendy described how the technology captures decision cues, strategies, and trade-offs from senior colleagues. “We’re … capturing all that expert know-how people have that, when they leave the firm everyone says ‘oh my goodness, they knew so much,’ and it’s never written down.”
Even in hybrid working environments, junior lawyers can see not just what decisions were made, but why, helping them gain skills and build confidence more quickly.
Practical Benefits for Firms
Behavioural Science AI also supports the day-to-day work of a law firm by preserving expertise before it’s lost through attrition or retirement. It “captures the unspoken rules of how you get stuff done,” and uses them to “train up juniors, [so that] they learn a lot faster and become much more effective quickly — which is what we all want, isn’t it?”
By turning tacit thinking into a lasting asset, firms improve onboarding, consistency, collaboration, and decision-making across teams.
Ethics and Human-Centred Design
Wendy was clear that technology alone isn’t enough. It must be paired with ethical, human-centred design. Each firm’s data is containerised, and the AI is trained on behavioural science frameworks rather than proprietary legal content. Making invisible thinking visible doesn’t just preserve knowledge, it helps identify and mitigate bias, supports cognitive diversity, and ensures that reflection comes first, with AI assisting only after human insight has been captured. In other words, the system is built to enhance judgment, not override it.
A Vision for the Future
While law is Let’s Think’s starting point, Wendy sees Behavioural Science AI extending to other knowledge-intensive professions such as finance, medicine, auditing, and government. She emphasised that the technology is about more than capturing knowledge. It’s about supporting reflective thinking at scale by ”pulling out all the invisible thinking that happens when people do work.”
In this way, the legal profession serves as a testbed for what could become a broader approach to improving learning and decision-making across sectors.
Listen to the full podcast here >> https://www.seyfarth.com/news-insights/pioneers-and-pathfinders-wendy-jephson.html
