lawve-agentic-delegation-audit-ignacio-adrian-lerer

Lawve Agentic Delegation Audit

Use this skill to help lawyers evaluate whether an AI agent workflow is safe enough to use in legal or business operations.

Core idea:

When AI only answers, the user evaluates an output.
When AI acts, the user delegates authority.
Delegated authority needs controls, logs, revocation, and accountability.

Use When

• A client wants to use an AI agent for legal, compliance, business, or administrative work.
• A product, law firm, or legal ops team is connecting an agent to email, files, CRM, court portals, payments, messaging, calendars, databases, browser tools, or code execution.
• A lawyer needs to explain the risks of agentic AI in practical governance terms.
• A workflow may send, file, delete, approve, purchase, publish, sign, deploy, or change access.
• A system claims to be "autonomous", "agentic", "assistant with tools", "AI employee", "legal copilot", or "workflow agent".

Do Not Use For

• Pure doctrinal legal research with no agentic action.
• Final legal opinions without jurisdiction-specific legal review.
• Technical implementation of an agent runtime.
• Approving production use of an agent without evidence, logs, and controls.

Intake

Collect only what is necessary:

• What task does the agent perform?
• Who is the human principal?
• Who deploys or operates the agent?
• What systems, accounts, files, channels, or tools can it access?
• What actions can it take without step-by-step approval?
• Which actions are irreversible, external, financial, legal, confidential, or reputation-sensitive?
• What logs exist and who can read them?
• How can the user pause, revoke, appeal, or correct the agent?
• What data can influence the agent, including emails, webpages, chats, files, tickets, and prompts?

Audit Steps

1. Classify the autonomy level

   • answer_only: produces information only.
   • draft_only: drafts but does not send or change records.
   • approval_gated_actor: acts only after explicit approval.
   • policy_bounded_actor: acts within predefined limits.
   • long_running_actor: continues across time, sessions, or triggers.

2. Map delegated authority

   • Name the principal.
   • Name the deployer/operator.
   • List what authority the agent has.
   • Separate read, draft, internal write, external write, financial, legal-sensitive, and privileged actions.

3. Check observability

   • Can the user see what the agent did?
   • Are tool calls and external actions logged?
   • Are logs understandable by a non-developer?
   • Are source data and model inference separated?

4. Check control and revocation

   • Can the user pause the agent?
   • Can permissions be narrowed?
   • Can access be revoked quickly?
   • Are irreversible actions previewed before execution?

5. Check accountability

   • Who is responsible if harm occurs?
   • Is responsibility split across vendor, deployer, user, professional, and client?
   • Is there a human review point before legal reliance or external action?

6. Check attack surface

   • Can untrusted content influence the agent?
   • Does the agent process emails, webpages, chats, documents, tickets, or social posts as instructions?
   • Are external content and system instructions separated?
   • Are prompt injection, data exfiltration, and tool misuse considered?

7. Apply legal uncertainty gate

   • Use PASS, ESCALATE, or BLOCK for downstream legal/business reliance.
   • Do not hide material uncertainty in disclaimer text.

Output

Use this compact format:

## Agentic Delegation Audit

### Verdict
PASS | NEEDS CONTROLS | BLOCK

### Why
[2-5 sentences]

### Delegated Authority
- Principal:
- Deployer/operator:
- Autonomy level:
- Systems/tools:
- Highest-risk action:

### Control Checklist
- Permission scope: adequate | weak | missing
- Human approval before external/legal/financial action: yes | partial | no
- User-readable logs: yes | partial | no
- Revocation/pause: yes | partial | no
- Prompt-injection/data-boundary controls: yes | partial | no
- Accountability owner: clear | partial | unclear

### Required Controls
- [control 1]
- [control 2]
- [control 3]

### Legal Reliance Gate
PASS | ESCALATE | BLOCK

### Next Step
[smallest practical next step]

Decision Rules

• PASS: agent is draft-only or tightly approval-gated, logs are clear, permissions are scoped, and no material legal/client risk remains unmanaged.
• NEEDS CONTROLS: agent may be useful, but missing controls prevent safe operational reliance.
• BLOCK: agent can perform external, legal, financial, confidential, destructive, or privileged actions without adequate approval, logging, revocation, or accountability.