Legal AI platform, August, is launching a new feature that allows AI agents working inside a company to request help from lawyers – which could drive more work to law firms. It’s a novel take on the use of legal agents and echoes a recent thought experiment by Damien Charlotin in Artificial Lawyer titled ‘Humans for AI’ – see here – about how agents will need to call upon human lawyers to fully function.
In this case, August – which offers a broad range of legal AI skills – explained that ‘companies now use agents for procurement, sales and other business work. Those agents regularly reach questions about what they can sign, share or approve. ‘August for Agents’ lets them put those questions to the company’s lawyers from inside the workflow’.
August notes that for some companies this may be ‘their chosen firm’, but equally AL would say that this could be the inhouse legal team, if it’s a company with one. Naturally, externalising such queries would work when those issues where either ones that an inhouse team could not answer, or where a company is at a stage where they don’t have an inhouse legal group yet.
As they explained: ‘August for Agents is designed around that allocation of responsibility. It is not a substitute law firm, and it does not ask a client to trust an anonymous legal answer from the open internet. It gives the client’s chosen firm a new way to deliver work: faster than a traditional intake process, but still within a service the firm defines and supervises.’
They then gave the following example: a procurement agent is renewing a supplier agreement and might find a restriction on how customer data may be processed. It can send the clause and the proposed action to a service run by the company’s law firm. The firm’s agent (via August) answers right away, if the firm has authorised it to handle that issue. Otherwise a lawyer at the firm reviews the question and signs off.
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August also said that law firms could build ‘packages of repeatable legal work as a service with defined inputs, a clear scope and a fixed price’.
The law firm also then decides which materials the agents may use, and August provides access controls, supporting sources and a record of each request. Plus, the law firm stays responsible for the advice to the client, which is connecting to them via the agents.
Thomas Bueler-Faudree, co-founder of August, commented: ‘Companies are handing real work to agents, and those agents keep hitting questions only a lawyer should answer. With August for Agents, a client’s agent can ask its own law firm at any time, and the firm answers through a service its lawyers built and supervise.’
Is this a big deal?
Well, it’s a smart move, if it can be made to work smoothly. And as noted, it would function just as well for a company that can channel requests to their inhouse team, as well as smaller ones without their own lawyers, which are sending out legal requests to favoured external counsel.
August streamlines a legal process, the agentic solution answers important questions for a company, and also drives revenue for the law firm, (if an external set-up). So, a win-win.
And as noted, a few weeks ago Damien Charlotin wrote a piece for AL about ‘Humans for AI’, which is related to this approach. It was a theoretical exploration of the idea that agents may need lawyers, i.e. because agents can hit a brick wall, or make mistakes by themselves, they need a channel that allows them to find lawyers who can help. By combining agents and lawyers you then get a better total result.
Just goes to show, truth is stranger than fiction!
More about August here.
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Legal Innovators UK – Nov 4 and 5 / Legal Innovators New York – Nov 17 and 18
Cosmonauts have now opened Express Registration for Legal Innovators UK and New York. This means that if you are at a law firm or at an inhouse legal team you can now zoom directly to your tickets – which are complimentary as long as you qualify.
For London – Nov 4 and 5, at the Minster Building, see here:
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