The next phase of AI adoption in legal teams could move beyond generating answers to executing defined legal workflows, with agentic AI potentially taking on high-volume and process-driven tasks while lawyers focus on judgement, strategy and accountability, according to Ridima Bhargava, General Counsel at Snabbit.
“The greatest opportunity for agentic AI lies in helping legal teams become more scalable and business focused,” Bhargava said, adding that early adoption is likely in areas such as contract triage, compliance tracking, due diligence and routine legal research.
Unlike conventional AI tools that typically respond to individual prompts, agentic AI can be assigned an objective and use multiple tools and information sources to determine and execute a sequence of tasks, with the ability to flag matters requiring human intervention.
According to Bhargava, an AI agent could gather relevant information, assess it against an approved legal playbook, follow up for missing inputs and identify exceptions requiring a lawyer’s attention.
“This can reduce the time spent coordinating routine matters and allow lawyers to focus on more strategic advice, negotiations and managing enterprise risk,” she said.
The shift could also change the operating model of in-house legal teams, with defined and repeatable workflows increasingly being handled through AI-enabled systems, while lawyers retain responsibility for decisions involving interpretation, judgement and material legal exposure.
However, Bhargava said governance would be central to any such transition. Matters involving regulatory interpretation, privileged information, external communications or significant legal exposure would need to remain under human supervision.
“Clear approval frameworks, secure data access and reliable audit trails will be essential to maintaining accountability and trust,” she said.
The adoption of agentic AI could therefore involve more than deploying another legal technology tool. Legal teams may need to define which workflows can be delegated, establish approval thresholds and build controls around data access and escalation.
Bhargava said the value of the technology would ultimately depend on how thoughtfully it is deployed.
“Used thoughtfully, agentic AI can help legal teams respond faster, work more consistently and identify risks earlier,” she said, adding that its role should be to support better legal decision-making while allowing lawyers to apply their experience and judgement where it matters most.
[Opinion expressed are personal]
