BCG's in-house legal team cut 12,000 documents to 2,500 and reached 73% monthly use

When knowing who to ask stopped working

BCG built its legal team to handle complex matters in-house, and outgrew the network that carried its knowledge.

• The team outgrew its network. At 40 people you knew who had done what. At 200-plus you did not. The culture survived; the mechanisms did not.
• A document store was doing knowledge management. A folder tree makes you choose: training, or subject matter? It went under both, and its author then had to track all ten copies.
• So search returned candidates, not answers. Results mixed live project work with near-identical copies. Mostly they matched, but nobody could see that, so nobody relied on it.
• And the firm paid to rediscover its own work. With nowhere to record what they knew, the answer lived with a person. Matters waited on whoever had done it before.

The main thing with each of these figures is that they're growing. Our weekly engagement grew by a third over the second half of the year … and our search results grew by over 50%.

Structure that follows the work

BCG moved the library across in one pass, then spent the year since making it match how the team works.

• The library was cut, not copied. Elium's duplicate report surfaced near-identical records, so the team could decide which space each belonged in, and whether it needed to exist at all.
• Spaces follow the team; tags carry the nuance. Commercial contracting, corporate by legal speciality, employment locked down. Where regional spaces fragmented content rather than organising it, tags replaced them.
• One record holds the whole answer. The template, the playbook and the training on a topic group into a single article, so a lawyer opening it gets the position, not a fragment.
• Named authors own what expires. Verification dates are on by default, set to a year and assigned to the author, so whoever wrote it is the person asked to confirm it still holds.
• Sharing replaced re-filing. Corporate teams own and lock their content, then share the record itself into the commercial space, so it shows in search once, not three times.

They understood folders, and putting things in folders. As soon as they started to understand you could have everything to do with a particular nuance or client in one article: that's when people had light bulb moments.

Pulled outward

The pull now comes from outside legal. Colleagues elsewhere in BCG have been brought on, and HR users added where the people and strategy work overlaps.

Contract templates are consolidating into Elium as their primary home, with tighter governance over what earns the name, and some will be published outward through public links.

When cross-space sharing kept returning the same record, BCG said so and we built collapsed search. The live work is AI summaries.

We're moving from a reactive point (me as a lawyer, a piece of work has come in, I'm confused, I need to go to Elium) to a lot more proactive, where we're pushing content out to people.

At 40 people, a legal team runs on knowing who to ask. BCG is now more than 200, and the knowledge itself had to become the thing you ask.