# iManage Puts A Firm’s Institutional Knowledge To Work For Agentic AI > Source: > Published: 2026-11-06 18:01:00+00:00 A firm’s institutional knowledge no longer lives exclusively in the heads of partners who have been practicing for 30 years. It’s also in emails explaining why a negotiation changed direction and drafts showing how a difficult provision became an acceptable one. The challenge now is packaging that knowledge into a form reliable enough to prepare the firm for the agentic AI future that is coming for the entire industry. “It’s not just good enough to have the data and point AI hoping that you’ll find the right answer,” said Paul Walker, Global Solutions Director at iManage. The legal industry has long trusted iManage to organize its records, storing roughly 30 billion documents for 3,500 customers in its cloud platform. But the company’s next generation platform platform, released in October, builds on that document management foundation with AI capabilities and connections to tools that firms are already using. “With the advent of AI, we’ve managed to pivot to enable customers to finally leverage that data,” Walker said. “Inside that information is the institutional knowledge of any organization. It’s how we make decisions.” During a recent demonstration, Walker gave Above the Law a rundown of how the platform’s latest features run automatically to help users save time, prepare for meetings and trust what it does. **Putting Institutional Knowledge To Work** A customizable dashboard displays a user’s work alongside a calendar and other widgets that have been part of iManage for years. From there, users can open matters, select documents and launch tasks based on their level of access. The new AI capabilities are embedded into the platform. Inside the calendar, for example, a “Get Ready” button helps users prepare for an upcoming meeting. When Walker clicked the button for a heads of terms review, the platform pulled information from the invite to assemble a detailed briefing. Tasks go into a queue so the user can move on to other work as the briefing is prepared. Meanwhile, the platform displays its own thinking as it progresses through the task, forming an opinion based on the latest, most relevant information among potentially thousands of documents in the matter. In about 30 seconds, the software returned a summary of key information for the meeting as well as the latest details on the transaction, such as financing terms and funding conditions. Besides telling a user what they already have, the platform also identifies what they don’t. The briefing surfaced several gaps in the record, including the lack of an agenda for the meeting and potential risks of the negotiation. It also generated a timeline of the matter and laid out next steps. “These are jobs that would have taken a human being many hours to actually do manually,” Walker says. “Now the machine is doing it in tens of seconds.” The software also shows its work. Users can click on a citation number to reveal folders of documents the AI used to formulate the briefing. Clicking the citation opens a preview window showing the answer in the context of the source document. **Saving Time with Bulk Reviews** Another new feature is Playbooks, which are sets of reusable instructions that let lawyers check agreements against the same review standards across a batch of documents. Each rule is tagged with severity, so the user can prioritize the need to address it. The instructions can be customized to reflect an individual lawyer’s approach, a client’s requirements or standards shared across the firm. Walker demonstrated the feature by running 10 leases through a lease abstraction and risk analysis Playbook. It checked issues such as early termination exposure and rent escalation caps, with criteria designated as required, preferred or optional. In one lease, the system flagged a missing co-tenancy threshold and identified other potential issues. Clicking a citation opened the document at the clause supporting the finding. Walker also demonstrated an AI comparison between versions of a purchase agreement. Alongside a redline, the platform summarized changes and assigned importance levels, distinguishing commercial revisions from language clarifications. **How iManage Makes Sure Your Data is Trustworthy — and Safe** As lawyers are becoming increasingly aware, AI output is only as good as the data it draws upon. Ensuring the underlying data is classified properly starts during onboarding, when iManage translates a new customer’s existing data into a form the platform understands. That’s also when the company helps a firm establish policies that keep the wrong people from accessing restricted content. Those boundaries also apply to AI. Walker gave the example of a client with sensitive patent information that doesn’t want AI reading those files. The platform can restrict access to the matter’s documents and emails, a control that becomes especially important as AI agents take on more work. “If they have too much, too wide of a blast radius of access, they will go and get documents and emails from other matters that they shouldn’t have access to,” Walker said. Firms can connect outside legal technologies and AI tools to information in iManage while maintaining the platform’s security and governance. Walker said the company currently has about 450 plug-ins to other legal tech solutions. Possible integrations with ChatGPT, Claude, Harvey, Microsoft Copilot, and other AI tools mean the firm can test other programs within iManage without sharing their information with anyone outside the organization. An audit timeline provides accountability across the document’s version history, recording who accessed a file, which tool they used, when they accessed it and what they did. Whether the work comes from a lawyer or an agent, the firm retains a record. “There is one version of the truth,” Walker said. “One version of a document is stored within the platform that respects the ethical rules and information barriers.” **Keeping Your Options Open** Walker said freedom of choice is one of iManage’s key value propositions, especially for firms still testing AI technologies. Customers may use five or six AI tools, with other legal tech solutions still in pilot programs. Keeping their information in one place means they don’t have to move it into each product. “Put your data into iManage and then open up the connectivity to the tools you want,” he said. The firm’s accumulated knowledge remains available as its choices evolve, giving tomorrow’s tools a trusted foundation built upon yesterday’s legal work.