The default is to use an AI assistant the obvious way: open one and ask it for things. Research this. Draft that. Check the other thing. One conversation, one all-purpose helper, endlessly flexible.
It works, in the sense that output shows up. But it fails in a way that took me a while to put a name to, and once you see it you can’t use a general assistant the same way again:
A generalist with no defined scope has no defined handoffs, and if there are no handoffs, there are no checks.
Everything happens in one conversation, done by one participant, reviewed by nobody. Whoever drafted the argument also decided whether the authority supported it. Whoever wrote the brief also decided it was finished. Anywhere else in professional life you’d call that a control failure on sight. We only miss it here because it’s happening inside a chat window instead of across desks.
Nobody in your office does everything
Think about how work actually moves through a firm that functions, and notice that almost none of the structure is about who’s capable of what.
A research and writing attorney builds the argument. A citation checker verifies the authority, and it’s a different person on purpose, because whoever built the argument is the worst possible person to test it. A filing clerk owns the caption, spacing, signature block, certificates, and local rules, and keeps their hands off the argument. A billing person owns time entries. An intake coordinator owns conflicts and engagement. A calendar keeper owns dates.
Each of those jobs is defined at least as much by what it may not do as by what it does. The filing clerk doesn’t rewrite an argument they think is weak. The citation checker doesn’t wave the brief through because the writer is senior. The limits are the point. That’s where the reliability comes from.
So that’s how the AI in this practice is set up: twelve specialists, each with a written brief. Not one assistant asked to be twelve things.
What goes in a brief
An agent brief is a document — plain text, versioned, readable by anybody — that defines one specialist. Ours have five parts, and the middle three do most of the work.
1. Identity and domain. Two or three sentences. “Legal research and writing specialist. Drafts and analyzes pleadings, motions, briefs, discovery, demand letters, and research memoranda. Use whenever the work product involves legal analysis or formal legal prose.” Concrete enough that you can route work by it.
2. What this specialist owns. The actual scope, spelled out item by item. Not “handles legal writing” but the specific documents and the specific decisions.
3. What this specialist must NOT do — and where that work goes instead. This is the most important section in the brief, and it should be the longest. Every exclusion names where the work goes: “Do not do final court-rule formatting — margins, caption layout, signature block, certificates of compliance. That goes to the formatting clerk. Do not verify citations; that goes to the citation specialist, and it is mandatory, not optional.”
Why does every exclusion need a destination? Because an exclusion without one is just a need nobody’s meeting, and a need nobody’s meeting gets met by whoever’s holding the file. “Don’t do X” gets you a specialist that does X anyway the minute X is obviously required. “Don’t do X, hand it to Y” gets you a handoff.
4. Standing rules. The non-negotiables for that job. For the writing specialist, it can’t produce a citation from memory: either it pulled the authority and read it in this session, or the cite goes in as a marked placeholder. For the formatting clerk, it copies the firm’s actual template file and fills it in instead of rebuilding a caption from scratch. Every one of these rules is there because something went wrong once.
5. Output contract. What “done” looks like, and what comes with it. The writing specialist hands over a manifest of every authority it relied on and where each one was pulled from, and that’s what makes the next specialist’s job possible.
The chain is the control
This matters more than any single brief. Work moves through the specialists in a fixed order, and the order is where the checks live.
research & drafting → substantive argument
↓
citation verification → every authority retrieved and read
↓ (MANDATORY GATE — nothing passes unverified)
court-rule formatting → caption, spacing, certificates, template
↓
the lawyer → reads it, signs it, files itBecause the citation gate is a stage and not a practice, you can’t skip it without noticing you skipped it. That’s the whole difference between a control and a good intention. Good intentions fail on the day the brief is due, which is the one day they were supposed to work.
And look at the end of every chain: a lawyer reads it and signs it. That’s no courtesy step, and you can’t hand it off. The specialists produce a draft. A lawyer files.
Isn’t this just a long prompt?
Fair question. Couldn’t you get the same thing by writing one long prompt that says “draft this, then check the citations carefully, then format it”?
You’ll get something like it. It’ll work most of the time, and you won’t see the times it doesn’t. Here’s why the briefs beat it.
The checker doesn’t see the pitch. When the citation specialist runs, it never sees the drafter’s reasoning about why this case is perfect. It sees the document and the sources. That’s the whole reason a second reader catches things. A reviewer who’s read your argument will follow it and agree with it. Give the checker the claim and the source, and keep the advocacy out of the room.
In one long conversation, instructions fight each other. Briefs don’t. Deep into a single conversation, “verify every citation against the source” is one instruction out of two hundred, fighting everything else in the context for attention, and it fades as the conversation grows. A specialist whose whole brief is verification doesn’t have that problem. There’s nothing else in its instructions for it to lose to.
You can fix a brief. When something goes wrong, you edit the specialist’s brief, and every future run picks up the fix. A prompt you typed once is a lesson you learned once. This is where it compounds: our briefs have piled up a standing rule for nearly every failure this practice has had, and none of those failures can come back in the same form.
You’re still the supervisor
None of this hands off responsibility. Saying “the specialist did it” carries zero professional-responsibility content.
Minnesota Rule of Professional Conduct 5.3 — “Responsibilities Regarding Nonlawyer Assistants” — requires a lawyer with direct supervisory authority to “make reasonable efforts to ensure that the person’s conduct is compatible with the professional obligations of the lawyer,” and makes the lawyer responsible for conduct that would violate the rules if a lawyer engaged in it, where the lawyer ordered or ratified it.
The ABA’s Formal Opinion 512, issued July 29, 2024, takes on generative AI directly and runs it through the same old duties: competence under Rule 1.1, confidentiality under Rule 1.6, communication, and reasonable fees under Rule 1.5.
However the doctrine eventually sorts out how supervision rules apply to software, what you have to do today isn’t in doubt, and I’d argue the specialist setup makes it easier to do, not harder. A written brief laying out scope and limits is a far better answer to “what reasonable efforts did you make” than a description of how you usually phrase your requests. It’s written down, anybody can audit it, and it’s the same document every time.
What I’ve learned running it
Start with three, not twelve. Drafting, verification, formatting. That chain alone gets you most of the benefit, because it has the one gate that matters. Add a specialist when you catch yourself explaining the same job over and over.
Let the brief set the reporting line. Our org chart is generated by reading each specialist’s own brief. The formatting clerk sits under the writing specialist because the clerk’s brief says so, not because some second list says so. One source of truth. A second list is a list that drifts.
Write the limits from real failures. It’s tempting to write aspirational briefs describing the ideal specialist. The good ones are scar tissue. Every standing rule in ours is there because something specific went wrong: a document rebuilt from scratch instead of from the template, a rule cited from memory that had been renumbered, a placeholder that shipped in the wrong color. Aspirations don’t stop a repeat. Specific prohibitions do.
Spell out the context. A specialist launched as a fresh session can’t see the conversation that sent it. “As discussed above” means nothing to it. Every fact, every source, every constraint has to be in the handoff. That’s annoying exactly once. After that it’s a habit that makes the work better, because having to say what a specialist needs drags out the assumptions you were carrying around without noticing.
Don’t let a specialist grow. The pressure never lets up: the drafting specialist is right there, and it could probably handle the formatting too. Every time you let it, you delete a handoff, and the handoff was the control. If a job really is too narrow, rewrite the brief on purpose. Don’t let it creep because it was convenient in the middle of a deadline.
Sources
- Minn. R. Prof. Conduct 5.3 (Responsibilities Regarding Nonlawyer Assistants)
- ABA Standing Committee on Ethics and Professional Responsibility, Formal Opinion 512 (July 29, 2024)
Rules quoted were verified against the Revisor of Statutes. General commentary on practice management; not legal advice and not ethics advice. Formal Opinion 512 is advisory and not binding in any jurisdiction.