Agentic AI for legal work that holds up under scrutiny
Intake, review, discovery, and matter management run by autonomous agents — bounded by ethical walls, privilege protection, and a supervising attorney on every substantive output.
- Privilege-safe, in your perimeter
- Citations validated, not invented
- Conflict & ethical-wall enforcement
- Attorney sign-off on what matters
Legal work is high-stakes, high-volume, and unforgiving of error
The economics push toward automation; the ethics rules push back. Both are right.
A modern matter buries lawyers in reviewable work — privilege logs, deposition summaries, due-diligence checklists, discovery responses, and contract redlines that follow the same patterns over and over. It is exactly the kind of volume agents are built for, and exactly the kind of work where a single missed conflict, a leaked privileged document, or an invented citation can end in sanctions, malpractice exposure, or a bar complaint.
Generic AI tools ignore that asymmetry. They summarize confidently, cite cases that do not exist, and route your client's privileged material through someone else's cloud. Automatic.co builds agents the opposite way: grounded in your own systems, bounded by ethical walls, and wired so a supervising attorney owns every substantive decision — with a record of how the agent got there.
Use cases built for the practice of law
Each agent is scoped to a workflow, grounded in your data, and gated to the matter's risk.
Client intake & conflict checks
Triage new-matter requests, run conflict searches across your systems, and draft engagement letters — flagging anything that needs a partner before the clock starts.
Document review & e-discovery
First-pass relevance and privilege review across large productions, with a defensible log of every call and confidence score, surfacing close questions for human eyes.
Legal research, grounded
Draft memos and case summaries from a retrieval layer over your DMS and a licensed citation source — every authority validated before it reaches the page.
Contract analysis & redlining
Extract obligations, compare against your clause playbook, and propose redlines on NDAs, MSAs, and diligence sets at portfolio scale.
Matter & deadline management
Keep dockets, deadlines, and matter status current across practice-management systems, with proactive nudges before a date slips.
Regulatory & compliance research
Monitor rule changes, map them to affected matters and clients, and draft client alerts your attorneys review and send.
Compliance is the architecture, not a disclaimer
The same controls a bar examiner would ask about, built in from the first call.
Wall off
Ethical walls and matter-level access are enforced at the data layer, so an agent only ever sees what the assigned team is cleared to see.
Ground
Drafts come only from your DMS and licensed sources — no free-floating model recall, no invented authority.
Verify
Every citation is checked against the reporter and every quote against its source before it lands in a document.
Sign off
Substantive output routes to a supervising attorney; risk-scored gates decide what can move and what must wait for a human.
Your client's secrets never leave your control
Privilege is binary — it survives or it's waived. So privileged material is the last thing that should pass through a third party's training pipeline. Every legal engagement we run deploys inside your perimeter: your VPC, your hardware, or a fully air-gapped enclave for the most sensitive matters.
Agents act through a governed action layer where every document retrieved, every draft produced, and every system written to is logged with the matter, the user, and the model behind it. When a partner asks how a conclusion was reached, the lineage is already there — not reconstructed after the fact.
- On-prem, VPC, or air-gapped deployment
- Ethical walls enforced at the data layer
- Full decision & retrieval lineage per matter
A consumer chatbot vs. a legal-grade agent
Why the tool your associates paste prompts into is the wrong tool for client work.
| A consumer chatbot | An Automatic.co legal agent | |
|---|---|---|
| Citations | Plausible, sometimes invented | Validated against the reporter or flagged |
| Privilege | Routed through a public cloud | Stays inside your perimeter |
| Conflicts | No awareness | Checked against your systems before work starts |
| Oversight | Whatever the user remembers to do | Risk-scored gates and attorney sign-off |
| Defensibility | No record | Full lineage per matter and document |
Frequently asked questions
How do you protect attorney-client privilege and work product?
Agents run inside your perimeter — your VPC or on-prem — so privileged material never trains a public model or leaves your control. Ethical walls are enforced at the data layer, every retrieval is logged, and outputs carry a source trail so a supervising attorney can confirm what the agent saw.
Won't the model hallucinate case law?
That's the failure mode that gets lawyers sanctioned, so we engineer against it directly. Agents draft only from a retrieval layer grounded in your DMS and a licensed citation source, every cite is validated against the reporter before it lands in a document, and an unverifiable citation is flagged, not silently emitted.
Is an AI agent doing legal work the unauthorized practice of law?
No — the agent is a tool, not the lawyer. Every workflow is built around a supervising attorney who reviews and signs off on substantive output. We map approval gates to the matter's risk so routine intake moves fast while dispositive filings always require human sign-off.
Can agents read our existing matter and document systems?
Yes. We integrate with iManage, NetDocuments, Relativity, Clio, and the practice-management and billing systems you already run, rather than asking you to migrate. Agents act through a governed action layer with full lineage on every read and write.
Pick one workflow your associates dread. We'll make it defensible.
A working session to map a high-volume legal task — intake, review, or research — and the controls that let an agent run it safely.