Professional workbook · Law Practice · 3 lessons
Leave with a case from your law firm or company legal department specified in the Agent Architect Kit: the agent reads, tracks, prepares, and summarizes; the lawyer decides, signs, and files. Confidentiality as a fixed constraint, deadlines always referred to a person.
Lessons
Leave with the list of ten processes and one of them mapped across six links, with the line between preparing and signing written down.
Leave with your agent’s permissions matrix decided, confidentiality as a constraint, deadlines always referred to a human, and sealed cases out of reach.
Leave with the agent specification assembled in the kit, based on the legal practice preset, and rehearsed in an AI chat.
Before you begin
The six links, the long-horizon prompt, the chain, the context inventory, the quality checklist, and the permissions matrix are explained in the course AI Work Architect. Here, they are applied to a law firm and in-house legal teams. The exercise in lesson 3 uses the Agent Architect Kit, with the legal preset.
Law Practice Workbook · Lesson 1
By the end of this lesson, you’ll be able to list the ten processes in your law practice or legal department that an agent can carry out, distinguish what to prepare from what to decide and sign in each one, and map one of them across six links.
At a law office, fear of AI has a name: hallucination. One invented case citation in a filing, and your career goes with it. The fear is justified, and it points to the solution: the agent doesn’t write legal arguments, cite cases from memory, or sign anything. It handles the work that currently takes up the intern’s and secretary’s time: reading publications, calculating deadlines, building the calendar, preparing filings and summaries, and following up on fees. Two hours a day per attorney. That’s where the redesign begins, with the attorney in the role they’ve always had: making decisions and signing.
↓ role to study
The rule in this workbook fits into three verbs on each side. The agent reads, counts, and prepares: reads the notice, counts the deadline in business days, prepares the filing, summary, standard contract draft, and fee collection. The attorney decides, drafts the argument, and signs: decides the strategy, drafts the argument, signs, and files. Between the two sides is a task that always stays with the agent: citing case law or legal scholarship from memory. If a text needs a citation, the agent marks "citation to verify" and the attorney checks the source.
Here’s the test: could a first-year intern do this without the attorney reviewing every line? If so, it’s preparation, and the agent can do it, with the attorney reviewing the result. If the attorney would review every sentence, it’s legal analysis, and the attorney owns it from the first draft. This isn’t a technology limitation; it’s the same line that already separates the intern’s role from the partner’s.
Dr. Ribeiro, at a firm with three attorneys and 180 cases, listed what the intern and secretary do each day: read 40 publications, calculate 15 deadlines, enter everything in the calendar, prepare 6 filings and 3 extension requests, and follow up on 4 overdue fees. All of that is preparation. The two answers and the appeal due this week involve legal arguments, and the intern has never handled them beyond formatting.
Before
The intern reads publications at 7 a.m., counts deadlines using the wall calendar, records them in a spreadsheet, and messages each attorney. It takes two hours, and once a month a deadline is counted without the local holiday.
After
At 6 a.m., the agent reads publications, identifies the case and responsible attorney in the system, calculates the deadline using the court calendar, and adds it to each attorney’s calendar with a five-line summary of the publication and a suggested next step. At 8 a.m., each attorney opens their list. The intern reviews and prepares the filings.
The ten critical processes that nearly every law office or legal department has: deadline management from the publications; intake of a client or new matter (what came in, from whom, with which documents); standard contracts (draft from the template, with the variables filled in); case monitoring and periodic reports to the client or department; legal fee collection; document management (name, file, find); research prep (organize the materials the attorney will read, never draw conclusions for them); hearing calendar and follow-up actions; minutes and records of a meeting; and recurring responses ("what's the status of my case?").
In every case, the agent prepares, and the attorney decides and signs. Choose the first process using the base course criteria and one extra rule from this workbook: start with something that has a clear rule and recoverable consequences. Deadline control has a clear rule (the court calendar), and any error is caught during the 8 a.m. review. Drafting a brief that makes legal arguments isn’t included in any version.
Camila, legal coordinator at a company with 400 employees, has another process at the top of her list: standard contracts. The departments submit sixty requests a month, almost all using the same service agreement template, with different names, amounts, and deadlines. Two attorneys spend the week filling out drafts. This is process three, and the agent that fills in the template variables and flags anything outside the standard terms is preparation from start to finish.
Test yourself
A department asks Camila for a contract “like the one with supplier X, but with an exclusivity clause.” What part of this can the agent do?
Applying the base course map to the law practice’s most common process. Input: at 6 a.m., the publications service delivers the notices of the day; the office system has the list of cases with an assigned person. Rule-based decisions: Is it a notice with a deadline? Count business days and record it. Is it an order with no deadline? Just record it. Is it due in fewer than three business days? Mark it urgent. Judgment call: what action or legal argument should be used? The attorney handles it.
Action: record the deadline in the responsible attorney's calendar and prepare a simple filing draft (submission, acknowledgment, extension request) using the firm's template. Verification: the case number exists in the system, the responsible attorney is correct, and the date is in business days with the court holiday taken into account. Exception: case not in the system, uncertain deadline count (suspension, recess, doubled deadline), notice that requires a legal argument. Result: at 8 a.m., each attorney knows what is due in the next five business days, with a summary and draft to review and sign.
In Dr. Ribeiro’s first round, the agent counted a deadline without the municipal holiday because the attached court calendar was for the state court, while the holiday applied to the county. The check “date in business days, accounting for holidays” didn’t catch it because the source was incomplete. New rule in the inventory: court calendar by county, owned by the secretary, updated every month. The error didn’t happen again, and he discovered it had been happening more often than he knew.
In a company’s legal department, the process changes its name but keeps its structure. Input: contract request from the department, with the variables form (parties, subject, amount, term, venue). Rule-based decisions: does the request fit one of the approved templates? Are all the variables complete? Is the amount within the department's approval limit? Judgment: a clause outside the template, an amount above the approval limit, a counterparty in a dispute with the company. The attorney handles it.
Action: fill in the draft from the template and list anything that deviates from the standard. Verification: every completed field comes from the form, no model clause was changed, and the value matches the request. Exception: request with no matching template, new counterparty, requested clause that doesn't exist. Result: the attorney reviews a completed draft with nonstandard points flagged, instead of filling it out from scratch. They still sign it, and the department never receives a draft that they haven't reviewed.
Camila thought the benefit would be time, and it was: filling it out went from a week to one day a month. But the legal department noticed a different benefit: with the agent marking "clause changed from the template" on every draft, three old contracts surfaced where a department had changed the template on its own. No one had noticed before. Now it’s a check that runs every time.
The legal agent never has the final say. It does the first read, the calculation, and the draft; the attorney has the final say, and the attorney signs too.
Practice now 0/4 done
In about 12 minutes, list the ten processes at your law firm or legal department, choose one with a clear rule and recoverable consequences, and map it in six links, including the line between preparing and signing.
It’s your own paper or spreadsheet, with no client names or real case numbers: you write work processes, not cases. Nothing changes in the system. If a process seems to end with the agent drafting something argumentative, mark it in the margin: that’s a sign that the line is in the wrong place.
You’ve just drawn the line in a real case between what an agent prepares and what only the lawyer decides and signs. This map goes into the kit in lesson 3, and the matrix will say “approve: not allowed.”
Summary
Law Practice Workbook · Lesson 2
By the end of this lesson, you’ll be able to decide on a legal agent’s permissions matrix, with attorney-client privilege as a fixed constraint, procedural deadlines always escalated to a human, sealed cases out of reach, and one attorney accountable for each line.
In legal practice, three things don’t come “with approval”: attorney-client confidentiality, which is the lawyer’s duty, not the tool’s; deadlines, which can’t be recovered once missed; and responsibility, which the OAB assigns to the person who signs, never the person who prepared the work. An agent that fails to respect all three is a risk no malpractice insurance covers. The good news is the same as in the previous lesson: the agent needs nothing beyond what the intern already sees to do 80% of the work. This lesson draws the boundary around that territory.
↓ role to study
An attorney’s duty of confidentiality covers everything the client entrusted to them and everything in the case file. For the agent, that becomes a written restriction in the prompt, on the first line: “no information about a case or client leaves the firm’s system in a message, summary, or draft sent outside it.” In practice, the legal agent works only inside the system: it reads publications, records them in the system, and prepares drafts that stay in the system. Nothing goes to the client, opposing counsel, or an external service without going through the attorney.
This determines where the agent runs. A generic AI chat, even with a project folder, is a service outside the firm: it’s for learning with fictional cases and for templates without case data, and nothing else. For real use, the agent runs in the firm’s management system or in a contracted service with a confidentiality agreement the attorney has read. It’s not the tool; it’s where the data passes through.
Dr. Ribeiro started testing deadline control in an AI chat with real publications, “just to see if it calculates correctly.” He stopped on the second day: publications include the parties’ names and case number. He redid the test with made-up publications, the same structure, and substituted names. The calculation logic tested the same way, and no client names left the firm.
In the core course, an exception goes to a person. In legal practice, deadlines are exceptions by definition: once missed, they can’t be recovered, and the consequences fall on the attorney. That’s why this workbook’s rule is stricter than the general one: any calculation that isn’t trivial calls for the attorney, and even the straightforward one is reviewed by the attorney in the 8 a.m. list. A straightforward count is a simple business-day count using the county's court calendar. Anything beyond that—suspensions, court recess, doubled deadlines, repeated notices, publication in two gazettes—goes to the attorney, and the agent records no date.
There’s also a time limit: a deadline due in less than one business day doesn’t go on the 8 a.m. list; it alerts the attorney immediately through whatever channel they agreed on. This is the only situation where the legal agent interrupts someone. Everything else waits for review.
Camila, in the in-house legal department, deals with fewer procedural deadlines and more contract deadlines: automatic renewal, advance notice of termination, warranty expiration. She applied the same rule: the agent lists what expires in the next 30 days and marks in red anything expiring in less than 5; anything with an ambiguous calculation clause (“calendar days from notification,” with no notification date recorded) doesn’t get a date—it gets a question for the attorney.
Before
The intern counted every deadline, including uncertain ones, and recorded the date they thought was right. The attorney reviewed it if there was time. Once every six months, a double deadline was counted as a regular one.
After
The agent records only straightforward calculations and returns uncertain ones as questions, with the reason: “double deadline? Co-defendants with different attorneys.” The attorney answers in a minute, and the answer becomes a rule for next time.
Three categories are off-limits to the agent, with no “with approval.” Cases under attorney-client privilege: the agent knows they exist and have deadlines, but doesn't read their contents; the attorney handles them alone. Personal documents belonging to the parties (identity documents, proof of payment, attached reports): the agent works with case numbers, parties, and dates, not the document. And the attorney-client communication: emails, messages, and meeting notes stay out because they are at the core of attorney-client privilege.
What goes in: publications, a list of cases with the responsible attorney, court calendar, simple pleading templates, contract templates, variable forms, and a fee schedule. Notice that a first-year intern can see all of this too. The agent’s boundary is the intern’s boundary, in writing.
At Dr. Ribeiro’s office, twelve of the 180 cases are family law cases under seal. The rule was set: the system marks them “sealed,” and when the agent reads a publication, it only records “case under seal; attorney to calculate deadline” in the calendar, with no summary. Dra. Castro, who handles family law, thought she’d lose the benefit; she discovered the deadline alert was what she needed most.
Test yourself
A client emails the lawyer a proof of payment to add to the case file. Can the agent read that email to prepare the filing?
The seven actions from the base course in the deadlines and follow-up agent: read publications, case list, calendar, and templates, allowed; write deadline on the calendar and draft in the system, allowed; edit deadline already recorded by an attorney, with the secretary's approval, and never without a record; send, it can't; nothing leaves the system through the agent; buy, it can't; delete, it can't; approve (sign, file, submit a motion), it can't. This is the tightest matrix of the three workbooks, and the one that fits.
Every line has a lawyer responsible for it, identified by name and OAB number, because the responsibility is theirs. And every action is logged: publication read, deadline calculated using which calendar, draft prepared with which model. The footer the partner asked to have written: “the agent does not sign, file, send, or read sealed cases.” That sentence turned a two-hour meeting into a twenty-minute one.
In Camila’s legal department, the matrix has a different line: “send draft to department: with approval,” because the department is internal. Even so, no draft goes out until the attorney clicks. The legal director wanted to go further and add this to the footer: “every draft sent by the agent bears the name of the attorney who reviewed it.” It became the most-read line in the entire document.
The legal agent’s fence is the first-year intern’s fence, written down. What the intern cannot see or sign, the agent cannot either.
Practice now 0/4 done
In about 12 minutes, fill out the permissions matrix for the process chosen in lesson 1 (seven actions, response, responsible attorney), the list of what’s out of scope, and the one-sentence footer.
It’s your own paper or spreadsheet, with no case numbers or client names: you write rules, not cases. No system is configured, and no permissions are granted. Keep the matrix with you to take to the partner or legal director. If a line seems too restrictive, leave it that way: loosening it is a decision for after months of clean records.
You’ve just written the governance for a legal agent, with an intern’s guardrails and responsibility where it belongs. This sheet becomes block 7 of the kit in the next lesson, and the footer goes at the top of the specification.
Summary
Law Practice Workbook · Lesson 3
By the end of this lesson, you’ll be able to build your law practice’s agent specification in the Agent Architect Kit, using the law practice preset, and test it in an AI chat with a fictional case.
You have the case with the line between preparing and signing (lesson 1) and the matrix with the footer (lesson 2). What’s missing is the page the partner can read in eight minutes and the person who manages the firm’s system can build. The kit’s legal practice preset already has a three-lawyer firm and 180 cases filled in across the seven blocks, with this workbook’s rules built in: confidentiality, deadlines referred to a person, sealed cases off-limits, nothing signed or filed. Your job is to replace what’s specific to your firm and rehearse it.
↓ role to study
The legal practice preset in the kit is a firm with three attorneys and 180 civil and labor cases, focused on deadline tracking and preparing the day’s next steps. The rules in this workbook are already written: no filing, signing, or submitting; no drafting documents that require legal analysis, summaries only; confidentiality on the first line; no date for uncertain deadline calculations; sealed cases get an alert only; “send: not allowed”; “approve: not allowed,” with the note that signing and filing are the attorney’s responsibility.
What changes from one office to another is predictable: areas of practice and courts (the court calendar varies by county), the publication service, simple pleading templates, who the secretary is, and which attorneys are responsible for what. In an in-house legal department, the entire process shifts to standard contracts or contractual deadlines, but the matrix stays almost the same, with “send internally: with approval” as the only difference.
Dr. Ribeiro loaded the preset and changed six things: the practice areas (adding family law, marked confidential), the two court districts with their own calendars, the publication service the firm uses, the firm’s templates, the names of the three attorneys as responsible parties, and the set of fifteen Monday service notices, with made-up case numbers and parties. Camila switched the process to standard contracts and kept block 7 of the preset, changing one line.
In the kit, the “load example by area” selector has a legal practice option. When you load it, the “area” field is set to legal practice, which adds three checks to the core course’s general ones: if confidentiality or privileged information isn’t mentioned anywhere, a gap is flagged; if the word deadline doesn’t appear under stop, escalate, or exceptions, another gap is flagged; and if any action or objective includes file, sign, or submit without an accompanying negation, a third gap is flagged.
This looks like a screen full of fields, but it works like the day’s agenda clipped to a board: each field is an item you fill in once, and after that the kit builds the page on its own. You only change what’s specific to your firm. If you accidentally delete the confidentiality constraint, the gap appears below the specification before you submit it.
Camila, while adapting the preset for standard contracts, deleted the deadline rule because “contracts don’t have service of process.” The kit flagged: “procedural deadlines aren’t covered under stop, escalate, or exceptions.” She realized that contract deadlines (automatic renewal, advance notice) were the same thing under a different name, and wrote: “Ambiguous contract deadline calculation: don’t record a date; ask the attorney.” The gap that seemed inapplicable was the most important one.
At your office, the first process is usually
In legal practice, the tough cases in the test set are ones every office has dealt with: a notice with a local holiday in the middle of the deadline; a doubled deadline because co-defendants have different attorneys; publication in two gazettes on the same day; a repeated notice; a case under seal; a publication requiring an answer or appeal; an order with no deadline; a case that isn’t in the system; two cases for the same client on the same day; a judgment notice with a 15-business-day deadline that runs through the court recess.
Each case uses a fictional reference (made-up number and parties, real calendar date) and records what the attorney did at the time. The suite runs again after every change: when Dr. Ribeiro switched from the court calendar to the county calendar, two cases changed their outcomes, and he caught it before the agent did. It’s the suite the partner asks to see before approving, because it answers "what if the agent misses a deadline?" with cases, not promises.
Dr. Ribeiro’s test suite has fifteen cases, and number 11 is the one he shows to anyone who has doubts: a notice of judgment published on the Friday before the year-end recess. In the first round, the agent counted fifteen business days straight through. The new rule, "deadline that spans a recess or suspension: don't record it; ask," went into block 6 before any real notice. He says that this case alone paid for the workbook.
When you paste the specification into the chat with the kit’s rehearsal prompt, the chat acts as the coordinator and runs a fictional case. Three gaps often come up in legal practice. First: publication requires a legal argument, and the specification says “summary only,” but doesn’t say where the summary goes or who gets notified. Second: two lawyers are listed in the system for the case, and the specification doesn’t say whose deadline it is. Third: the notice appeared in two legal gazettes, and the coordinator doesn’t know which date counts.
Each one becomes a new line: "publication requiring legal analysis: summary on the responsible attorney’s calendar, marked 'legal analysis,' no draft." "Two responsible attorneys: deadline on both calendars, marked 'confirm responsible attorney.'" "Two court bulletins: don't record a date; ask the attorney." Run three cases: one common, one difficult, and the exception. When all three pass, the page is ready for the partner and the person who manages the system.
During Dr. Ribeiro’s rehearsal, the chat, acting as the coordinator, asked: “the notice is for a case under seal and is due in two business days; should I record the alert in the calendar or call the attorney now?” The specification said “sealed: alert only” and “less than one business day: call,” but didn’t say what to do when a case is both sealed and urgent. He added: “sealed with a short deadline: alert in the calendar and message the attorney, without details.” Ten minutes, one line, and a real case two months later.
How to adapt the legal practice preset
Practice now 0/4 done
In about 15 minutes, load the legal practice preset into the kit, adapt it to your firm or legal department, copy the rehearsal prompt, and run a fictional case in an AI chat to get the list of gaps.
The specification has no case number or client name: it has rules, system names, and criteria. The test case is fictional (case, parties, dates). No agent is built, no system is touched, and nothing is filed or sent. If the chat "files" or "signs" anything in the simulation, that is a finding about your matrix: note it and press.
Passo a passo (o prompt de ensaio vem pronto do kit): 1. Abra https://inematds.github.io/kit-arquiteto-agentes/ 2. "carregar exemplo por área" → advocacia. Confira que "área: advocacia" ficou marcada. 3. Adapte os sete blocos na ordem do passo 04 desta aula. Zero lacunas de advocacia na lista abaixo da especificação. 4. Em "Prompt de ensaio simulado", escreva o caso fictício, por exemplo: <Processo 0012345-67.2026 (fictício), Dr. R. responsável, intimação de sentença publicada segunda, 15 dias úteis, feriado municipal na quinta, publicação também saiu no diário eletrônico na terça; processo comum, não é segredo> 5. "copiar prompt com a especificação" → cole numa conversa nova do seu chat de IA. 6. Leia a narração: o coordenador deve parar pelo menos uma vez (dois diários → perguntar qual data conta). Anote os itens de "o que faltou".
You’ve just produced a specification for an agent for your firm, with an intern’s guardrails and responsibility where it belongs, and rehearsed it before building anything. This page is what separates “let’s use AI” from a project the partner will sign off on.
Summary