Internal Knowledge Search for a Professional Services Firm

Consultants spent hours searching shared drives and legacy project folders to find relevant past work. File naming conventions were inconsistent, and folder structures varied by practice area.

Institutional knowledge was locked in documents that only original authors knew existed. Senior staff frequently answered the same questions from junior team members.

New consultants took months to become productive because they could not easily find examples of past work relevant to their current projects.

We inventoried all documentation repositories including network shares, SharePoint sites, and legacy archives. The corpus totaled over 100,000 documents.

We built an indexing pipeline that processes documents into searchable embeddings. All processing runs on the firm's own infrastructure with no data sent to external services.

The search interface uses semantic matching so queries like 'client onboarding for financial services' return relevant results even without exact keyword matches.

Each search result includes citation links back to source documents. Users can trace any answer to its original context.

We implemented access controls that respect existing document permissions. Consultants only see results from documents they are authorized to access.