Legal AI platform, August, is launching a new feature that allows AI agents working inside a company to request help from lawyers – which could drive more work to law firms. It’s a novel take on the use of legal agents and echoes a recent thought experiment by Damien Charlotin in Artificial Lawyer titled ‘Humans for AI’ – see here – about how agents will need to call upon human lawyers to fully function.

In this case, August – which offers a broad range of legal AI skills – explained that ‘companies now use agents for procurement, sales and other business work. Those agents regularly reach questions about what they can sign, share or approve. ‘August for Agents’ lets them put those questions to the company’s lawyers from inside the workflow’.

August notes that for some companies this may be ‘their chosen firm’, but equally AL would say that this could be the inhouse legal team, if it’s a company with one. Naturally, externalising such queries would work when those issues where either ones that an inhouse team could not answer, or where a company is at a stage where they don’t have an inhouse legal group yet.…

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