The next team should be able to use what the company has learned.
The reasons for a contract exception, a product approval or a settlement may matter again. Legal agents can help keep that record and notice when a change calls it into question. The work is useful only if someone who can respond learns of the change in time.
01 / Decision
Record who decides, the reasons for the decision and who must carry it out.
A company keeps changing after legal advice is delivered. A product acquires a new use, a contract is amended or an assumption proves wrong. The advice may remain sound within its original scope while becoming unsuitable for the decision now being made. The person making that decision needs to see what the earlier advice did and did not cover.
Consider a hypothetical product approval limited to two markets. The decision record should explain the restriction, the evidence supporting it and who can authorise expansion. An agent assigned to watch for changes needs access to the relevant sales plans and instructions for notifying that person of a proposed change. The approval then has conditions the company can check as its plans develop.
A relevant legal or business change.
Current law, facts and commitments.
Options, objections and uncertainty.
Who decides, what and why.
Who acts, on what conditions.
What happened in practice.
What to retain and when to reconsider.
The loop is incomplete until the responsible person can respond and the organisation can establish what happened.
02 / Memory
Keep enough of the reasoning to recognise when a decision needs to change.
In the product example, suppose one reviewer doubts that the company can keep distributors from selling outside those markets. Keep that objection and how it was addressed alongside the approval, with appropriate access and retention rules. Approval alone does not show that the reviewer was wrong. A later proposal to use a new distributor may make the objection relevant again.
Record which facts, law and commitments the decision relied on, so a change in one can prompt a review. Treat a link inferred by a model as a hypothesis until it has been checked. Earlier advice also needs to be read on its own terms, including its date, scope and assumptions.
03 / Operation
Specify the job, the sources the agent may use and when it must ask a person to decide.
State which changes the agent watches for and what it may miss. In the same example, a reviewer may dismiss an alert about a rule affecting a different product, recording why it does not apply. A proposal to enter a third market should reach the person authorised to approve it, with the original restriction and the proposed change together. Forwarding every alert would consume the attention needed for that decision.
Before a review, the agent can assemble current sources, retrieve earlier advice, identify missing facts and prepare questions for research. For a decision with serious consequences, have a separate reviewer examine the evidence and assumptions. This may require fresh research. Asking the producing model to check itself, or merely switching models, does not show that the work has been checked independently.
Once a person has decided, the agent can send the authorised instruction to the team that must act, check specified conditions and record whether the work was done. If a decision is due and the person responsible is absent or does not respond, specify who else may decide. A delivery receipt does not tell the company whether anyone acted in time.
04 / Control
The organisation should be able to replace a model or provider without losing its knowledge or controls.
The company needs to keep its sources, permissions, instructions, tests, review rules and record of actions when it changes a model or supplier. These determine what an agent can read, do and pass on. They must remain available for inspection and amendment, and in a form the company can use elsewhere.
01 / Sources
Legal propositions should lead back to the relevant authorities; statements about the business should lead back to the underlying documents or system entries. An entry can itself be mistaken. Preserve its date and origin, distinguish it from an inference and restrict access to those entitled to see it. Decision histories, source references and test results should remain accessible independently of the model that helped produce them.
02 / Runtime
Models and the software operating them may run locally, on infrastructure the organisation controls or through an approved external service. Assess the whole arrangement: model processing, connected tools, storage, logs, support access, backups, keys and network routes. A locally hosted model may still send information through an external component. For every such transfer, establish what leaves, why, who may access it and how long it is kept.
03 / Authority
Specify what an agent may read, produce, communicate and change. For each permission, name who grants and reviews it, its limits and when it expires. State who reviews the work and when it must stop or be referred to someone else. A better test result may support a request for wider permission; it does not grant that permission. People retain professional responsibility and the authority to commit the organisation, wherever the software runs.
05 / Board
The board should be able to see whether the system helps people make better decisions, where it can fail and who must put mistakes right. Six questions help establish that:
Conclusion
In the product example, someone authorised to decide must review the proposed expansion before sales begin in a third market. That person needs the earlier restriction, the reasons for it and any objection that remains unanswered. The test is whether the company can use what it learned in time to change what it does.