Your Law Firm Has Already Done This Work. You Just Can't Find It.

Thomson Reuters' 2025 Future of Professionals Report found that lawyers spend between 40 and 60 percent of their working hours on document-related tasks: drafting, reviewing, and researching.

We spoke with partners and associates at boutique litigation and real estate law firms across Ontario about how they find information from past matters. Every single time, the answer was the same: the document exists. Nobody can find it.

Almost every firm describes the same workflow. A lawyer needs a precedent, a past argument, or a specific clause they've used before. They search the shared drive. They check email. They ask a colleague. If the colleague isn't available, they either keep searching or they start from scratch.

Most of the time, the document they're looking for exists. They're just not able to find it because it's buried in their computer.

The normal workflow

They search by folder. Most firms organize files by client name or matter number. To find a relevant precedent, you need to already know which client file contains it, which means you need to remember which past matter is closest to the current one. If the matter predates your time at the firm, or if the file was organized by someone who has since left, the search often ends there.

They ask someone.The most common retrieval method in a small law firm isn't searching, it's asking a senior colleague. The institutional memory of a firm lives largely in the heads of the people who have been there the longest. This works until those people are busy, unavailable, or gone.

They rebuild it.When the first two options fail, they start over. A research memo gets rewritten. A release clause gets redrafted. A motion argument gets reconstructed from scratch, and hours of work that the firm has already paid for gets paid for a second time, except this time it's overhead instead of a billable.

Why this happens

The first thing that came to mind, for the Reamind team at least, was that lawyers are disorganized.

Not true. Most of the firms we spoke with had folder structures, naming conventions, and in some cases dedicated practice management software. The files are organized. The problem is that organization and retrievability are not the same thing.

A folder structure answers the question: where did we put this? It cannot answer the question: what's the strongest slip and fall argument we've made against a commercial occupier in the past three years?

That distinction matters because the second question is what lawyers actually need to answer before they sit down to draft. And no folder structure, however well-designed, can surface the answer to it.

The other factor is time. Law firms accumulate documents at a rate that compounds every year. A firm that's been practicing for a decade has ten years of precedents, memos, factums, and correspondence sitting somewhere in its system. Naturally, as the firm ages, the gap between what exists and what can actually be found grows larger.

The problems compound

There's a version of this problem where firms notice immediately: the associate who spends an hour looking for a document and comes up empty.

There's another version that's harder to see.

When a senior partner retires or moves to another firm, they take with them an understanding of where things live, which precedents are strongest, and what research the firm has already done. None of that is written down anywhere. When they leave, it's gone forever.

The documents themselves remain in the system, but the knowledge of how to find them disappears: which client file to look in, which matter was most similar, which memo covered this exact issue.

The result is a firm that technically has ten years of institutional knowledge and practically has access to very little of it. Junior associates rebuild work that senior partners completed years ago, not because they're inefficient, but because they have no way to know it already exists.

What fixing it looks like

The firms that have addressed this problem haven't done it by reorganizing their folders or switching practice management systems. They've done it by making the documents themselves searchable, not by file name or folder path, but by meaning.

The difference is asking a question:

• What's the strongest contributory negligence argument we've made in a slip and fall matter?
• How did we draft the limitation clause in our last commercial tenancy dispute?
• Pull up everything we have on the Morrison file.

When a firm's document library is indexed and searchable in plain English, the institutional knowledge that has been accumulating for years becomes accessible to everyone.

Where Reamind comes into play

Reamind connects to your firm's existing files (Google Drive, Dropbox, SharePoint, or direct upload) and makes everything searchable in plain English. No migration. No new filing system. No change to how your team stores documents.

Ask a question, get the answer, see the exact document it came from.

For litigation firms specifically, the most immediate applications are precedent retrieval before drafting, surfacing client history when a call comes in unexpectedly, and tracking active matter details (limitation dates, outstanding undertakings, next steps) across a full caseload.

The documents your firm has spent years producing should be working for you. If they're sitting in a folder nobody can find, they aren't.