KEN PRIORE
The operating model · kenpriore.ai
In-house legal · the agreement work · 1 of 4 · June 2026

The agreement work, rewired

Not all of in-house legal is about agreements, but much of it is, and this is for the lawyers who work on them. Technology is changing how that work gets done. It brings assistance, a hand with judgment, room to work at volume, a new way of seeing the work, and a reach into far more information than any one lawyer holds. It will change how we lawyer. Who answers for the result stays the same.

  1. 01 · The workThe agreement work, rewiredYou are here
  2. 02 · KnowledgeWhat the work runs onEight kinds of knowledge, three places
  3. 03 · MemoryWhat the work remembersWhere memory sits, how it gets in, three levels
  4. 04 · JudgmentWhat the work decidesSeven steps of a call, and the record of one
01
The work

What the agreement work is

The lawyers who work on agreements, the legal persona inside any company, do many things, and two of them at once. They work the agreements themselves, and they pull in everything around an agreement to judge the risk.

The contract engine

A company runs on its agreements: the master service agreements, statements of work, NDAs, sales agreements, and vendor contracts. They are the scaffolding its relationships and obligations get built on.

The risk assessment

Everything around the agreement gets pulled in to make a call: what is in the document, what is going on inside the company, and what is happening in the world outside it. Judgment needs all three.

Departments of different sizes run this with more or less ceremony, but the shape is the same. A request comes in. The agreement gets reviewed, drafted, and negotiated. It gets approved and signed. One day it gets renewed, changed, or ended. Today the legal persona is in every one of those steps, and that is changing fast: the standard NDA already runs with less and less of a lawyer in it. The question is which steps go next, what decision gets made inside each one, and how the technology moves through the process.

02
The one idea

The agreement work comes in three kinds

The agreement work comes in three kinds, and each asks for a different kind of oversight. Some of it runs on a playbook. Some of it turns on judgment. Some of it needs a lawyer's hands on it. Which kind it is decides where the lawyer stands.

The familiar human in the loop is, for us, the lawyer in the loop, and it splits into three. Over the loop, the lawyer lays out the playbook and sets the rules once; the work runs, and the lawyer sees it only when an exception gets kicked out. On the loop, the tools run the process, and the calls still come back to the legal persona to decide and to orchestrate. In the loop, the lawyer's hands are on the work, because it is riskier, more novel, or too nuanced to repeat. That is the traditional seat, and most of us sit there today. The technology moves the line between the three.

Routine

Watch from over the loop

The routine, high-volume work that runs on a playbook. You lay out the rules once and see the work only when an exception gets kicked out.
LawyerWrites the playbook, checks a sample, and watches the dashboard. You were not there for each one, and you can still answer for all of them, because you wrote the standard and you audit the results.
AgentDoes the work and kicks anything odd up to a person.
Logging and routing a new request, the conflicts check on a new counterparty, the routine markup on a standard order form, filing the signed copy, and watching the renewal dates.
Judgment

Sit on the loop

Hub and spoke. The tools run the process and the assistance comes to you, and the calls that turn on who is across the table and how much risk the company will take still come back to you to decide and orchestrate.
LawyerWeighs the options, makes the call, and writes down the reasoning.
AgentDrafts the options and flags where the other side is pushing.
How hard to push on the liability cap, whether to bend on indemnification, spotting the one buried clause that shifts real risk, and the give-and-take that lands the deal.
Accountable

Stay in the loop

The traditional seat, and where most of the work sits today. Your hands are on it because it is riskier, more novel, or too nuanced to repeat, and you own and sign each one.
LawyerMakes the call, signs, and answers for it. This cannot be handed to the agent.
AgentGets the package ready and checks it is complete. It never approves or signs.
Signing the contract that binds the company for years, approving the discount that sets a precedent, cutting off a vendor for breach, the board minutes, and the sign-off a regulator will read.
03
Step by step

How the agreement work runs, step by step

Below is a contract's whole path, left to right, each block coloured by which kind of work it is. Flip How it runs and watch the routine steps move to the machine while the accountable ones stay put. Change company size to see how much a department that size has switched on. Click any block for the step.

How it runs
Company size (same model at every size, more of it switched on)

The thirteen steps are an interactive walk-through, and it needs JavaScript. The sections above and below carry the same argument without it.

A contract's path · click a block to open it
Routine · over the loop Self-serve · routine the business runs without legal Judgment · on the loop Accountable · in the loop A lawyer · start to finish, no agent
The step you picked

Nothing open yet

Click any block in the row above and this panel fills in: how the step runs today, how it changes with AI, the limit that keeps it safe, and who answers for the call.

04
The duty

Why a lawyer never fully leaves

A company lawyer carries duties that a tool cannot take on, and those duties keep a lawyer close to the work wherever the stakes are highest, however good the AI gets. A tool can follow every instruction it is given and still owe the company nothing, because a duty needs someone who can be held to it.

The duty to answer

A company lawyer owes the company loyalty, care, disclosure, and confidentiality, and can be held to each of them. An agent does the work without carrying the duty, and it cannot vouch for its own part in it. So the calls where the duty bites stay with a person who answers for them, and that person shows they carried it with the record of the work.

The bar rises with the tool

Once you have a tool that reliably catches a problem, ignoring what it finds is worse than never having looked. Being able to catch it creates a duty to act on it. So when the system raises a flag, you resolve it, and you do not leave it sitting there as a record that you knew.

Technology is changing how lawyers do their work. It has become good at the routine review, and the question now is what it knows, what it remembers, and how that turns into better judgment.