The Miller Group is a leading Canadian transportation infrastructure and construction company and a subsidiary of Colas Canada. Operating across road construction, maintenance, rehabilitation, and large-scale infrastructure projects, Miller supports critical public and private sector transportation networks across the country.
With a workforce distributed across multiple operating companies and project environments, Miller’s legal and operational teams play an essential role in supporting complex construction activities, managing contractual obligations, and enabling project delivery at scale. As the organization continues to evolve, so does the need for more structured, accessible, and reusable legal knowledge.
The Miller Group is also a client of Septeo Legal Suite, leveraging legal technology to support the structuring and accessibility of legal knowledge across the organization.
Legal departments have traditionally relied on the expertise of individual professionals to operate effectively. Over time, experienced team members develop deep institutional knowledge, build internal relationships, and accumulate valuable context through repeated exposure to similar matters.
However, this creates a structural challenge when knowledge is not consistently captured or shared.
As Kristin Bisbee, Litigation Paralegal at Miller Group, explains:
“A lot of our knowledge lived in people’s heads. If someone was out or moved roles, it wasn’t always easy for the rest of the team to pick up where they left off.”
In practice, this meant that key information — such as precedents, prior case context, or internal decision rationale — was often dependent on individual memory or informal communication channels.
While this approach can function in smaller teams, it becomes increasingly fragile as organizations scale.
When legal knowledge is tied to specific people rather than systems, organizations face several operational risks:
Kristin highlights this challenge clearly:
“We realized that we were spending too much time re-answering the same questions or trying to reconstruct past decisions instead of moving forward.”
This type of friction does not just affect efficiency — it also impacts team experience and scalability.
At Miller Group, the focus has been on shifting from informal knowledge sharing to a more structured and accessible approach to legal information. Rather than treating knowledge management as a separate initiative, it is increasingly embedded into daily legal operations, ensuring that information is captured as part of the work itself.
This includes improving how legal information is documented, organized, and reused across matters.
As Kristin explains:
“The goal was never to over-engineer things. It was to make sure that what we learn on one matter can actually help us on the next one.”
One of the key shifts emerging from this approach is the transition from individual expertise to organizational intelligence.
Instead of relying on specific individuals to retrieve or interpret knowledge, the focus moves toward systems that make that knowledge accessible to the broader team.
This enables legal departments to:
Kristin summarizes this shift simply:
“We wanted knowledge to be something the whole team could benefit from — not something that disappears when someone is unavailable.”
As legal departments continue to face growing workloads and increasing expectations from the business, the ability to scale expertise becomes essential.
Operational efficiency is no longer just about speed — it is about continuity, resilience, and knowledge retention.
By building systems that support knowledge sharing, organizations like Miller Group are better positioned to maintain performance even as teams evolve.
The experience at Miller Group reflects a broader transformation in legal operations. Knowledge is no longer just an individual asset, it is an organizational capability.
Solutions such as Septeo Legal Suite support this shift by helping legal teams structure, centralize, and surface critical knowledge more effectively, enabling organizations like Miller Group to turn legal information into an accessible and operationally useful resource.
And as Kristin Bisbee’s perspective shows, the real opportunity lies not in storing more information, but in making sure the right knowledge is available to the right people at the right time.
