About nine months ago, we noticed that our agents could outperform our lawyers on certain tasks. Agents are faster, cheaper and sometimes smarter. For these cases, we have an obligation to our clients to remove lawyer review, and let the agents work for them directly1.
The only trustworthy way to do this is to guarantee quality. This is why our clients opt to work with us, as an insured, registered law firm, over using a software tool.
To that end, Crosby has secured a $5 million insurance policy covering the work of our agents. We believe this is the first time a law firm has obtained liability coverage for its agents, and it is an important step in building the agentic law firm.
Attorneys have malpractice insurance. If they make a mistake, their clients are covered. We needed an equivalent backstop for AI.
When the policy took effect at the start of November, we removed lawyer oversight from any task that doesn’t legally require their involvement — what we call “paralegal tasks.” This is about 20% of the work our lawyers used to do. Now they have more time to be great lawyers: to think, advise clients, and make hard judgment calls.
We worked with Testudo, which is backed by Lloyd’s of London, to obtain the coverage. Testudo conducted a technical analysis of our systems, models, governance controls and logs of human review steps. It also reviewed internal company contracts and policies. We needed to show insurers that agents are safer than humans for certain tasks.
On any given day, we have an equal number of agents and attorneys reviewing contracts. By the end of this year, we expect that ratio to be 15-to-1.
Crosby is early to this. But a year from now, we believe that every serious law firm will carry insurance for its attorneys and its agents. Regulations will change so that agents can handle more substantive legal work without lawyer oversight. We welcome that future.
