By Paul Walker, Global Solutions Director, iManage.

Law firms have always delegated work to those with less experience, lower billing rates, and narrower scope: partners pass work to associates, associates pass it to trainees and paralegals. Agentic AI is the next form of that delegation, but it’s an open question whether firms have built the infrastructure to delegate safely to a non-human agent.

Most have not, and a law firm’s success with agentic AI will depend not so much on the sophistication of the technology it has purchased as the quality of the information infrastructure supporting it. To achieve trustworthy agentic AI capability, firms need a clearly staged roadmap, one that can safely guide them forward while avoiding any wrong turns or dead ends.

AI’s journey in the legal space has followed something of a ‘delegation gradient’. AI began in a browser tab, cut off from the firm’s knowledge and workflows. It then moved into everyday tools as an assistant, and is now starting to orchestrate multi-step tasks across firm systems. The next phase of the gradient involves delegated agents that complete whole jobs and seek approval at key moments, and eventually there will be integrated agents that act on triggers without being asked.…

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