Legal Matter Intake
An agent that receives inbound matters, extracts key facts, classifies matter type, and proposes a routing, leaving the assignment decision to a human.
Workflow
- 1 Inbound matter received via email or portal
- 2 Agent extracts parties, deadlines, and matter type
- 3 Agent scores complexity and conflicts risk
- 4 Agent proposes a team and priority
- 5 Human confirms or reroutes the matter
Governance design
- ✓Authority limited to proposing, never assigning, matters.
- ✓Hard limit: never auto-close or auto-decline a matter.
- ✓Conflicts check is a mandatory escalation trigger.
- ✓Every extraction logged against the source document.
Escalation paths
- ↗Unknown matter type → senior intake lawyer.
- ↗Possible conflict detected → conflicts team, action paused.
- ↗Deadline within 48 hours → immediate human review.
Ownership model
Head of Operations, with the intake team lead as deputy.
Lessons learned
- Keeping the assignment decision human kept liability clear while still removing most of the manual triage effort.
- The conflicts escalation was the single most important control. It converted a quiet risk into an explicit hand-off.
Legal Matter Triage Agent
A mid-size firm built an agent to triage inbound matters and assign them to teams, hoping to clear a chronic intake backlog.
Initial workflow
The agent read inbound emails, decided the matter type, and assigned the matter directly to a team, including setting the deadline, with no human in the path.
Risks identified
- !Assignment and deadline-setting were fully delegated with no bounded authority.
- !No conflicts check before assignment.
- !No record of why a matter was classified as it was.
- !No owner could explain or suspend the system.
HAL assessment
Ownership, Authority, and Evidence were Absent or Partial. The agent was taking consequential action (assignment, deadlines) at an Execution level of authority without the matching controls.
Improvements made
- ✓Named an accountable owner (Head of Operations) with a tested kill-switch.
- ✓Reduced authority from "assign" to "propose". A human confirms.
- ✓Added a mandatory conflicts-check escalation that pauses the matter.
- ✓Logged every classification against its source document.
- ✓Set a quarterly review of accuracy and authority.
| Domain | Before | After | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ownership | Absent | Tested | Strengthened |
| Authority | Absent | Implemented | Strengthened |
| Limits | Absent | Implemented | Strengthened |
| Escalation | Absent | Implemented | Strengthened |
| Evidence | Absent | Implemented | Strengthened |
| Monitoring | Partial | Implemented | Strengthened |
| Review | Absent | Implemented | Strengthened |
| Liability | Absent | Implemented | Strengthened |
Deployment recommendation
Approved for deployment as a recommendation system. The conflicts escalation and the move from "assign" to "propose" were the decisive changes.