Clifford Chance Launches Knowledge Bank — 400,000+ Reclassified Documents, Microsoft-Native Architecture, Permissioned Search by Epiq Advisory

Clifford Chance has launched a full AI-enabled Knowledge Management platform — the Knowledge Bank — developed in partnership with Microsoft and Epiq Advisory for Law Firms. The platform curates 400,000+ firm documents reclassified and summarised, delivering natural language search, summarisation, smart tagging, and generative answers through a modular, scalable architecture built entirely within Microsoft 365 and Azure (SharePoint, Power Platform, Graph API, and Azure AI Studio). The platform's critical security feature is Permissioned Search — developed exclusively by Epiq Advisory — which enables lawyers to discover knowledge while maintaining strict access controls governed by metadata-driven permissions aligned with client confidentiality. The firm's Global Head of Knowledge & Training, Matt Taylor, describes the Knowledge Bank as central to Clifford Chance's strategy of delivering value to clients, noting that it "creates a foundation that liberates Clifford Chance to innovate on its own terms" and enables clients to benefit from AI-driven efficiencies underpinned by specialist expertise. For KM directors at large law firms, the strategic significance is threefold: Microsoft 365 is increasingly the architecture on which enterprise legal KM is being rebuilt (not a separate DMS layer); Epiq Advisory is emerging as the system integrator that handles the complex permission and governance engineering that separates working from deployable; and the 400,000-document reclassification project itself confirms that AI-readiness requires curating and structuring content, not just connecting to a cloud storage volume.