How AI Agents Are Changing Legal Work

The integration of agentic AI and systems thinking into legal practice offers a path to move beyond traditional, scarcity-based operational models. Jason Barnwell, Chief Legal Officer at Agiloft, highlights that while many lawyers view AI as an incremental tool for drafting, its true potential lies in its ability to function as a platform for building new, scalable systems. This transition requires a metacognitive shift, where professionals decompile their internal heuristics into explicit, machine-executable protocols. By adopting these "declared protocols," firms can create synthetic training scenarios that accelerate professional development, bypassing the slow, risk-averse apprenticeship methods of the past. Ultimately, moving from a "better pen" mindset to an architectural approach allows legal teams to leverage machine intelligence for greater speed, control, and value delivery, fundamentally redefining the role of the lawyer in a data-informed environment.