We are moving on from the “chatbot that answers” to an agentic era: you give agents a mission, they go and search and cross-check, they come back with a deliverable, and the lawyer orchestrates, supervises and decides. It is a change of stance: from tool user to manager of agents.
Why agents change the game (when you manage them)
At uControlAi, we have seen AI agents go from proof of concept to useful tasks: analysing complex contracts, cross-checking several sources, delivering a usable summary. To the point of forgetting “basic functions” such as summarising, which are nonetheless vital day to day. The turning point also comes from small models: faster, far cheaper, with a lower footprint, and decisive in workflows and agents for gaining speed while keeping quality.
The lawyer becomes a “manager of agents”
Tomorrow (and already today), you give an agent a mission: “look at this point”, “compare these documents”, “prepare a note”, then you check. Not “do my whole file”: the agent stays closely supervised and managed.
The lawyer’s role comes close to that of a conductor: framing the task, giving the context, checking, iterating. The consequence for strategy: choose tools that lead towards agents (and not just a smarter “chat”), and accept a gradual build-up rather than the fantasy of a “perfect” product from day one.
In practice: method and use cases
Method. Break the task down, provide the corpus, spell out the deliverable, chain the agents in a workflow, and validate each milestone. The building blocks exist: RAG on your base, structured extraction, targeted generation, and agents that chain these blocks together.
Quick use cases to industrialise:
- multi-source analysis of a contract or file, with a summary of risks and points of attention;
- reliable summaries of voluminous documents, built into the litigation workflow;
- hybrid multi-model workflows (a small model for orchestration, an expert model for the legal work).
In short: the useful agent is not “autonomous”, it is steered. And the value comes from the combination: architecture (multi-model), orchestration (workflows) and supervision (the lawyer in charge).