Peer to Peer: ILTA's Quarterly Magazine
Issue link: https://epubs.iltanet.org/i/1542659
P E E R T O P E E R M A G A Z I N E · W I N T E R 2 0 2 5 43 PAUL WALKER is the Global Solutions Director at iManage. final review. Once approved by the lawyer, the contract is sent to the other party. Once the countersigned contract is returned, the AI agent updates the contract base, and then – bringing things full circle – starts monitoring that new contract. In this way, the AI agent can start chipping away at more and more of the pieces of a legal workflow while still keeping a human in the loop. That future is now nearer to reality than ever before. FROM PROMISE TO PRACTICE A useful parallel comes from the automotive world, of all places. Autonomous vehicles are often described in terms of levels of autonomy, ranging from basic driver assistance to full self-driving capability. At the lowest levels, the car supports the driver with alerts or minor corrections. As autonomy increases, the vehicle begins to handle more complex tasks – such as lane changes, adaptive cruising, and even navigating entire routes – while still requiring human oversight. At the highest levels, the system assumes nearly all responsibility, with humans stepping in only in rare circumstances. Agentic AI workflows in the legal space are evolving in a strikingly similar way, progressing over time toward ever-more advanced autonomous actions while still keeping humans in the loop. This human oversight will continue to play a critical role as a safeguard, ensuring quality and building confidence in these emerging systems. While the pace of progress may feel slower than early predictions suggested when the buzz around agentic AI first started reverberating in the legal sphere, the trajectory is unmistakable: legal AI agents are steadily moving from promise to practice, reshaping workflows in ways that will soon feel as natural and inevitable as other technological transformations the legal space has already experienced, embraced, and embedded in their operations. Human oversight will continue to play a critical role as a safeguard, ensuring quality and building confidence in these emerging systems.