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Law firms

The first reading of a contract is always the same reading.

Before there is legal work there is reading work: understanding the parties, the deadlines, the amounts and the obligations, and marking what falls outside the normal. That is the work that repeats with every document that comes in.

The analysis is yours. The preparatory reading is what does not have to be.

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01

Context

Where the information lives today

In a firm the knowledge is in the templates and in the earlier matters. The draft templates exist and are the house standard. Anything new that comes in, a contract from a counterparty, has to be read top to bottom before anything else happens. And access to all of it has rules that are not negotiable.

  • The firm’s templates, which a draft has to respect
  • The documents that come in, still to be summarised and marked up
  • The earlier matters, which say how the firm already solved something similar
  • The rules about who can see what, which admit no exceptions
Navegar
02

Action

What starts happening on its own

You ask for a summary of a contract and you get the parties, the deadlines, the amounts and the obligations, with the atypical clauses marked for review. A first draft comes out of the firm’s template with the counterparty’s fields filled in, for the lawyer to review. What the agent gives back is always working material, never a final piece.

  • The structured summary of an incoming document, with the parties and the deadlines
  • The list of clauses outside the normal, marked for a human to read
  • The first draft from the house template, with the fields filled in
  • The answer to "have we handled something like this?", with the matters that answer it
Geometrizar
03

Who answers

Who answers when it gets something wrong

Here governance weighs as much as productivity, and it is the first thing a firm wants guaranteed. Nothing the agent writes is an opinion: it is always material for the lawyer to validate, and it is written that way in the rules. The credentials belong to the firm, what the agent read and wrote is recorded, and matters are separate contexts that do not cross.

  • What the agent writes is working material, never a final opinion
  • The credentials are the firm’s, and the record of what was done stays with the firm
  • Each matter is a context, and the separation is written into the agent’s rules
Atracar

Two shapes

What comes off the ladder takes one of two shapes. We have built both.

  • Agent in the channel

    A matter already has the people who work on it. The agent lives in that context, with access to what that matter holds and not to what the others hold.

  • Archive with an agent

    Earlier matters answer questions about the current one. An archive with an agent on top makes that search possible without depending on memory.

Where it starts

Start with one document type and with the access rules, before anything touches a matter.

See the three steps

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