SUCCESS STORY
Bringing Legal Intelligence Directly into Microsoft Word
A Microsoft 365 solution developed with Microsoft and Wolters Kluwer to surface relevant legal knowledge directly within lawyers' existing workflows.
Client
Microsoft
Services
Microsoft 365 · Application Integration · Intelligent Search
The Challenge
Legal professionals work with large volumes of complex information, while much of the knowledge they need sits outside the document they are actively working on.
Microsoft's Modern Work Customer Co-Innovation team and Wolters Kluwer set out to explore a different approach: instead of requiring lawyers to interrupt their work to search for relevant information, could useful legal knowledge be identified and surfaced directly within their existing workflow in Microsoft Word?
Doing this required more than adding search functionality to Word. The solution needed to understand the context of the document being edited, interact with external knowledge sources, and return relevant information quickly enough to become a natural part of the lawyer's workflow.
The Solution
Tecknowcore collaborated with Microsoft and Wolters Kluwer to develop the Microsoft Word integration and document-search capabilities of the solution.
The Word add-in analyzed the document currently being edited and used its content to identify relevant information from external legal knowledge sources. Vector-based search techniques helped transform document content into a representation that could be used to find related material, while Azure Cognitive Search supported retrieval across additional knowledge sources.
A central technical challenge was making this process feel seamless inside Word. Processing potentially long documents, interacting with external services, and returning useful results all had to happen without disrupting the user's work.
The result was an integrated experience where related legal content could be surfaced directly alongside the document the lawyer was already working on.
The Impact
The project produced a working Microsoft Word prototype that brought legal research closer to the point where it was needed - inside the lawyer's existing workflow.
Rather than moving between Word and separate research tools, users could receive relevant legal material based on the context of the document they were working on. Microsoft reported that the prototype could analyze litigation documents and retrieve related legal commentaries, court decisions, and documents from internal knowledge sources.
Beyond the prototype itself, Microsoft reported that the collaboration helped accelerate broader integration activities with Wolters Kluwer and prompted exploration within the SharePoint team of support for third-party content-annotation services in Microsoft 365.
Technology & Capabilities
Microsoft 365 · Microsoft Word Add-in · Vector Search · Azure Cognitive Search · Enterprise APIs · Document Processing · Intelligent Search
