Ep #14: Information Architecture and Structured Documents in an AI world

In this episode, Sean McGrath sits down with Alex Smith, Global Product Lead for Knowledge, Search, and AI at iManage, to unpack what’s really happening at the intersection of AI and the world of legal practice.With a career spanning nearly two decades at LexisNexis, leading innovation at Reed Smith, and now shaping AI-driven knowledge systems at iManage, Alex brings a rare, perspective on how legal information actually works, and why many people misunderstand it.Sean and Alex explore the evolution of digital information from CD-ROM publishing to today’s AI-powered knowledge management systems, the enduring importance of structured data, and why “IA before AI” – Information Architecture before Artificial Intelligence - might be the most important consideration for anyone building legal knowledge management systems with modern AI tools. Along the way, they tackle hallucinations, trust in citations, knowledge graphs, and the gap between what today’s AI can realistically generate and what legal professionals can safely rely on being accurate.This is a deep dive into the infrastructure behind legal knowledge—and why the future of AI in the world of law depends less on better and better AI LLMs models, and more on the quality of the information we feed to these models.