Primitive 06 of 06
Research
A compounding stock, not a flow.
The traditional model treats research as an event: a question arises, someone researches it, an answer comes back, and the work evaporates into a folder. Next year the same question is researched again from zero. Treat research as a stock. Every answer compounds into a searchable body of firm knowledge, versioned and current. Machine speed on a curated stock is the compounding edge no rival can buy.
Why it matters
Machines are extraordinary at retrieval and synthesis over a well-structured stock, and dangerous at invention over nothing at all. A firm that treats research as a compounding asset gets faster every year it operates; a firm that treats it as a one-off event resets to zero every time a lawyer leaves.
How to systematise it
- 01Pick a single place every research answer gets filed - searchable, not buried in a matter folder.
- 02Tag each answer with the question it resolved and the date, so it can be found and updated later.
- 03Before researching a question from scratch, check the stock first - every time, as a rule, not a courtesy.
- 04Schedule a quarterly pass to update stock entries against anything that's changed in the underlying law.
What automation looks like, once this is systematised
An agent checks the firm's own research stock before generating anything new, starts from the prior answer, and flags what's changed - rather than re-deriving the same analysis from zero on every matter that touches it.
Common failure modes
- −Research memos are written, used once, and never referenced again.
- −The same question gets answered independently by three different lawyers within a year, with no one aware of the overlap.
- −The stock exists but is unsearchable - a drive full of PDFs nobody can find anything in.
Self-check
- ?Could a colleague find your firm's prior answer to a recurring legal question in under two minutes?
- ?How many times in the last year was the same question researched from scratch by different people?
- ?Is your research stock actually searchable, or is it a folder you'd have to browse by hand?
Next primitive
Matter→