Davis Wright Tremaine and Stanford Explore AI Personas Built from Lawyer Work Product
BY INSIDE PRACTICE · AUGUST 24, 2026 · 1 MIN READ
A research collaboration between Davis Wright Tremaine and Stanford's liftlab, presented at the KM&I for Legal conference, is exploring AI personas built from work product and structured interviews — AI models that allow attorneys to engage with a lawyer's judgment, expertise, and communication style even in their absence. The initiative directly addresses KM's oldest unsolved problem: how to make what the firm's best lawyers know available to others without requiring those lawyers to be in the room. For KM directors, the implication is significant: institutional memory capture is moving from document-centric taxonomies to experience-encoded AI representations, and the interview methodology and data governance required to build those representations safely will need to be designed by KM rather than by IT. Participation in early research initiatives like this one positions KM as an architect of firm intelligence infrastructure, not a passive custodian of past work product.