Reflections on Legal and contracts agents

Yesterday, I enjoyed 8 hours in a room with some very smart people (lawyers, Legal Ops and contracts professionals, technologists) designing and building specialized AI agents with skills for Contract Lifecyle Management.

As I reflect on the experience, I feel confident enough to make 4 predictions:

1. Despite months of breathless excitement around Gen AI for Legal and contracts, until now, relatively modest attention has been paid to AI agents.? That is about to change.? In the coming months, agentic service frameworks for Legal and contracts will become a prominent feature of the AI/ML transformation narrative, catching up with a broader trend that has existed for some time in other business and functional areas.
2. Gen AI promises to augment legal and contracts professionals, producing dramatic efficiency and productivity improvements for today’s tasks (e.g. discrete activities such as contract drafting, review, summarization).? Agents, on the other hand, offer tantalizing potential to reinvent current processes from the ground up, in a way that has until now been beyond our reach.? Specialist agents will amplify the potential of legal and contracts professionals by acting as autonomous ‘digital workers’, which quietly and automatically reason and interact with each other in orchestrated workflows, without human prompting, to serve up information, data, analysis, drafting, insights and actionable recommendations to the worker.?
3. Agents could enable us to breakthrough the traditional adoption and change barrier, namely encouraging legal and contracts professionals to work in unfamiliar platforms of record instead of more traditional environments such as Outlook, Word and even chat channels such as Teams or Slack.? Agentic service frameworks can be potentially deployed behind the scenes, with user interactions and experiences accessible from directly within more familiar applications.
4. The value that could be captured from these agent models in a corporate Legal and contracts organization is substantial.? For the worker and management, hours of expensive time could be liberated from mundane labor-intensive research, conversations, analysis, drafting, reviewing, summarizing options and planning, and redirected towards making legal and contracts human expertise available for close business-partnering.? For the client and company, new forms of measurable enterprise value could be generated.? Turnaround times might finally be measured in hours rather than days.? Major business decisions involving complex legal, contracts and commercial questions could be made quickly based on rapid data-backed analysis drawing on a wide range of sources.? Increasingly complex client self-service tools are easy to imagine, via intent-driven workflows curated by Legal and contracts experts, anticipating user needs and guiding business users, at a level of sophistication unimaginable with robotic process automation.?
5. Getting these agents right in terms of process design and workflow orchestration will be manageable, but the real challenges will be in: (a) achieving consistency and fidelity of output for the high accuracy use cases, where specialist developers of agents and skills will likely have much to offer in terms of engineering for the last mile; and (b) doing the hard work of preparing the digital core of the business, so that proprietary data powering the services is ready, secure and accessible.

The potential of agent-led services for Legal and contracts is energizing, and it is going to be a remarkable journey watching how they are adopted in the sector.?