Not ready
A required boundary, owner, or stop condition is missing.
One-workflow-first evaluation
Legal AI workflow readiness assessment
Assess whether one workflow is bounded, testable, and reviewable before selecting a platform or connecting an AI agent to firm systems.
01
Workflow boundary
- What event starts the workflow?
- What output ends it?
- Which exceptions require a lawyer?
- Who owns the current process?
Ready when: The start, end, owner, and exceptions can be described without relying on a product feature list.
02
Data boundary
- What information enters each step?
- Which categories are prohibited?
- Which systems, providers, connectors, logs, and backups receive it?
- What access, retention, and deletion tests are required?
Ready when: Allowed and prohibited inputs are explicit and the proposed deployment can be checked against firm and client requirements.
03
Authority boundary
- What may automation prepare, extract, classify, compare, or route?
- What may it never approve or communicate independently?
- Which lawyer reviews the result?
- What triggers escalation?
Ready when: Consequential decisions and final legal judgment remain assigned to named human roles.
04
Evidence boundary
- Which sources may the workflow use?
- Must each finding link to a source passage?
- How are missing or conflicting sources handled?
- What record remains after review?
Ready when: A reviewer can determine why an output was produced and what evidence supports it.
05
Acceptance test
- What is the manual baseline?
- How much lawyer verification and correction is required?
- Which misses, false positives, or unsupported statements are material?
- What failure and rollback behaviour is required?
Ready when: Thresholds are written before testing and a failed result cannot silently pass.
06
Adoption and operation
- Does the workflow fit existing working tools?
- Who maintains rules, playbooks, and approved sources?
- How are changes and incidents tested and recorded?
- When is the workflow reviewed or retired?
Ready when: An owner, maintenance process, review date, and stop condition exist.
Record a bounded result
Ready for a bounded test
Prerequisites exist, but no production use is implied.
Retain after testing
The workflow met agreed criteria within the tested scope.
Expand selectively
Only the parts supported by evidence move forward.
An assessment is not approval to process client data or deploy a system. Those decisions remain with the firm and require deployment-specific evidence.
Use this assessment in context
Read the one-workflow-first method, review deployment-specific controls, or discuss an abstract business workflow without submitting client information.