Extending Governance to Legal AI Agents

Summary

As legal AI agents begin executing more complex work, governance is evolving alongside them. The focus is expanding from governing individual users to governing what agents can access, what they can do, and where human judgment still matters.

This guide explores how legal teams can extend the governance foundations they have already built for AI assistants — including permissions, auditability, human oversight, and operational visibility — to support legal AI agents responsibly and at scale.

Topics include:

• What changes when AI moves from generating outputs to executing work
• Why governance shifts from the user level to the agent level
• Human-in-the-loop oversight and approval boundaries for AI agents
• Auditability and operational visibility for AI agents
• Practical considerations for governing legal AI agents at enterprise scale