Implementation guide · AI Answering & Agents
A prospective client reaches the firm during a stressful family transition and may mention urgent dates, opposing parties, safety concerns, or sensitive facts. Intake must prepare a responsible legal review without creating advice, representation, or an attorney-client relationship. This guide isolates how custom ai agents should behave at that moment rather than treating the entire operation as one automation project. Perform one business-specific job through approved tools and records, with least-privilege access, evaluation cases, and a human owner for exceptions. For this family-law firm, the job must use the practice or firm's approved language, records, ownership, and professional boundaries.
Return to the governed library parentA prospective client reaches the firm during a stressful family transition and may mention urgent dates, opposing parties, safety concerns, or sensitive facts. Intake must prepare a responsible legal review without creating advice, representation, or an attorney-client relationship. This guide isolates how custom ai agents should behave at that moment rather than treating the entire operation as one automation project.
Perform one business-specific job through approved tools and records, with least-privilege access, evaluation cases, and a human owner for exceptions. For this family-law firm, the job must use the practice or firm's approved language, records, ownership, and professional boundaries. Lawyers and authorized firm staff retain conflict decisions, legal judgment, advice, deadlines, matter fit, representation, scope, and acceptance. The configured system may collect approved intake context and coordinate a consultation but cannot make a legal decision.
Run one de-identified or synthetic prospective-matter inquiry through the configured path and verify that the agent completes representative normal cases, refuses prohibited cases, recovers from tool failure, records its actions, and alerts the owner. Record the expected state, actual state, exception owner, and corrective action before release. Do not release or continue the automated path when the inquiry requires legal advice, conflict judgment, emergency direction, matter acceptance, or handling outside the firm's approved intake scope, or when tool access is broader than the job, evaluation cannot determine success, or consequential actions lack human approval and recovery. Preserve the record and route the case to the named human owner.
Trace one recent prospective matter through conflict preparation, consultation routing, human review, and a recorded next step. For Custom AI Agent, also inspect evaluation results, tool-call logs, permission denials, failures, owner approvals, saved outputs, and version history. This is an implementation control, not a performance claim. Validate it with the business's own recent records, approved policies, synthetic or de-identified test cases, and named human reviewers before release.
Implementation control sheet
Perform one business-specific job through approved tools and records, with least-privilege access, evaluation cases, and a human owner for exceptions. For this family-law firm, the job must use the practice or firm's approved language, records, ownership, and professional boundaries.
| Control | Release requirement |
|---|---|
| Required operating inputs |
|
| Release acceptance test | Run one de-identified or synthetic prospective-matter inquiry through the configured path and verify that the agent completes representative normal cases, refuses prohibited cases, recovers from tool failure, records its actions, and alerts the owner. Record the expected state, actual state, exception owner, and corrective action before release. |
| Stop condition | Do not release or continue the automated path when the inquiry requires legal advice, conflict judgment, emergency direction, matter acceptance, or handling outside the firm's approved intake scope, or when tool access is broader than the job, evaluation cannot determine success, or consequential actions lack human approval and recovery. Preserve the record and route the case to the named human owner. |
| Human boundary | Lawyers and authorized firm staff retain conflict decisions, legal judgment, advice, deadlines, matter fit, representation, scope, and acceptance. The configured system may collect approved intake context and coordinate a consultation but cannot make a legal decision. |
Approved matter categories, jurisdiction, urgent-date, safety, and conflict-preparation rules The intake record and authorized person who decides consultation routing and exceptions Job specification, allowed tools, data scope, permissions, prohibited actions, and completion record Evaluation cases, reviewer, escalation, observability, incident response, versioning, and disable control
Lawyers and authorized firm staff retain conflict decisions, legal judgment, advice, deadlines, matter fit, representation, scope, and acceptance. The configured system may collect approved intake context and coordinate a consultation but cannot make a legal decision.
Run one de-identified or synthetic prospective-matter inquiry through the configured path and verify that the agent completes representative normal cases, refuses prohibited cases, recovers from tool failure, records its actions, and alerts the owner. Record the expected state, actual state, exception owner, and corrective action before release. This is an implementation control, not a performance claim. Validate it with the business's own recent records, approved policies, synthetic or de-identified test cases, and named human reviewers before release.