12
and delegate subtasks (to itself
or team members) to keep
everything on schedule.
Experiments also show that
individual consultants augmented
with AI can dramatically boost
productivity. A controlled trial
at Boston Consulting Group
found that consultants using
generative AI completed 12% more
tasks and 25% faster than those
without, expanding what a single
knowledge worker can handle
in a day. Taken together, these
developments hint at a future "AI
project coordinator" that takes
on planning and grunt work,
calling in human experts only for
their domain-specific insight or
creative problem-solving (https://
www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.
aspx?num=64700).
Legal Services: The legal
profession has already begun
its journey with AI, moving
from a mere research assistant
to something akin to a junior
attorney. Earlier this year,
legal tech company Spellbook
launched an AI agent called
"Associate," billed as the first
full-fledged autonomous
legal agent (https://www.
artificiallawyer.com/2024/08/22/
spellbook-launches-associate-
first-full-fledged-legal-ai-agent/).
Spellbook's Associate can be
given a goal (e.g., draft a financing
agreement from a term sheet), and
it will break the project into steps,
execute them across multiple
documents, self-correct, and adapt
as needed. It works much like a
junior lawyer, completing a first
pass on documents or diligence without constant supervision. Other legal
AI platforms (e.g., Thomson Reuters' CoCounsel and Harvey AI) traditionally
operate primarily in assist mode, helping attorneys with research,
drafting, and summarizing. However, the trajectory is toward a delegate
mode, where lawyers increasingly delegate routine work to AI. Tasks like
scanning thousands of documents for risks, pulling relevant case law, or
checking contract consistency can be offloaded to agents that only escalate
to humans for ambiguous or high-risk decisions. Law firms report that by
delegating low-level tasks to AI, attorneys can focus more on strategy and
other high-value activities.
This shift toward AI delegation raises a fundamental challenge for the
profession: how to maintain rigorous quality control and ethical standards
when the traditional human review process is increasingly automated.
These examples demonstrate that AI delegation is emerging wherever AI
systems have the confidence to handle part of a process and hand off the
remaining tasks.
AI, FROM COLLABORATOR TO COLLEAGUE
Microsoft suggests that the future will see the rise of the "frontier firm":
organizations rebuilt around fleets of autonomous agents, where every
employee is an "agent boss." In Microsoft's 2025 Work Trend Index, frontier
firms are defined by organization-wide AI deployment, high maturity
scores, and aggressive agent integration road maps. They progress through
three phases: assistant, digital colleague, whole delegation, culminating
in AI as the operational core (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/worklab/
MORE ONLINE
Read more about AI for
legal technologists.
https://epubs.
iltanet.org/i/1533864-
spring25
รณ
PEER TO PEER
PRACTICAL
AI FOR LEGAL
TECHNOLOGISTS
REAL-WORLD APPLICATIONS AND INSIGHTS
ILTA'S QUARTERLY MAGAZINE
PEER TO PEER MAGAZINE / SPRING 2025 / ISSUE 1 / VOLUME 41
