Didn't we do one of these last spring?
A client asks how to handle an employee who wants to take a sabbatical, which their policies do not cover. Your consultant is fairly sure a colleague dealt with something similar last year, wrote a careful note and even drafted a policy. Nobody remembers which client. The colleague has since left. After ten minutes of searching the shared drive, the consultant starts from scratch.
That scene repeats across the week, on carers' leave, secondments, long-term sickness with a phased return, overseas working requests. The consultancy has already solved most of these problems at least once. It just cannot find the solutions.
Why past work gets lost
Advice lives where it was sent: in email threads to one client, in documents saved into that client's folder, in call notes. None of those places is organised by topic. Shared drive search looks for exact words in filenames, which rarely match the way a consultant thinks about the problem.
There is also no signal of quality. Even if a consultant finds an old note, they cannot tell whether it was a senior adviser's considered view or a rushed reply that was later corrected.
What the repetition costs
- Research time spent on questions the business has already answered.
- Different consultants giving different advice on the same situation.
- Knowledge leaving with every consultant who leaves.
- Junior consultants escalating questions that have a good answer on file.
- Documents redrafted from scratch rather than adapted.
Consistency is the one clients notice. Two managers at the same client, speaking to two of your consultants, should not get noticeably different guidance on the same kind of issue.
How we build the advice library
- We index advice from the places it lives today: call notes, case records, emails filed to clients, and documents in SharePoint or your shared drive, starting with the sources you choose.
- Client and employee names can be removed or masked in the library view, so consultants search the substance of the advice, not the client's details.
- Consultants search in plain English, for example 'employee asking to work abroad for a month', and get matching notes and documents even when the wording differs. This uses a search model rather than keyword matching.
- Answers can be marked as approved for reuse by a senior adviser, and approved items rank first. Items can also be marked as out of date when rules change.
- Each result links back to the original record for anyone with permission to see it, so context is one click away.
- Optionally, an assistant built on a model such as Anthropic Claude drafts a starting note from approved items only, citing each source, for the consultant to review and adapt.
| Content | How it is treated |
|---|---|
| Approved guidance notes | Ranked first, reusable |
| Individual client advice | Searchable, identities masked by default |
| Superseded advice | Marked out of date, hidden unless requested |
| Draft documents | Searchable by topic, linked to the final version |
The library helps consultants find what the consultancy has said before. The consultant still decides what applies to this client, and any assistant draft is a starting point, never advice in itself.
What consultants get
We start small on purpose. A first version often indexes only approved guidance notes and the last couple of years of call notes, so senior advisers can see the quality of results before more sources are added. If the search is not useful on your own material, you find out early and cheaply.
The first step on an unfamiliar question becomes a search that often turns up a considered answer from a colleague. Junior consultants answer more questions with confidence and escalate the genuinely new ones. Senior advisers spend time approving good answers once instead of re-explaining them. And when someone leaves, their best work stays behind.
Is your knowledge stuck in sent folders?
- Consultants research the same questions more than once.
- Good advice notes are hard to find a few months later.
- You rely on one or two long-serving people to remember precedent.
- Clients sometimes get different answers from different consultants.
- Shared drive search rarely finds what you need.