Exploring Agentic AI Applications in Legal Practice

You receive a 150-page agreement with a request from the client: “Can you review this and tell me what we should push back on before tomorrow’s call?”The work that follows is rarely one task. You check the schedules, compare clauses against your playbook, identify deviations, research an unfamiliar legal issue, assess the risks, suggest revisions and prepare your negotiation notes.AI can already help with each of these tasks. But what if, instead of prompting AI at every step, you could give it the objective and have it coordinate the work from there?That is the shift from AI assistants to Agentic AI: from helping with individual tasks to coordinating the work needed to achieve an outcome.The distinction: An AI assistant performs the task a lawyer asks it to do, one prompt at a time. The lawyer decides what comes next and carries the context forward. An AI agent can take a lawyer-defined objective, coordinate the steps needed to achieve it, adapt as it finds new information, and bring the lawyer in at defined review points.Legal work is a process, not a promptThe legal profession has adopted artificial intelligence faster than many expected. Lawyers now use AI assistants to summarise judgments, draft clauses, explain legal principles, translate documents and prepare correspondence. These tools have already made individual tasks faster.But most legal matters are not a series of isolated tasks. They are connected processes, where the outcome of one step often determines what h