Do not ask the agent to be the lawyer
The safer contract workflow asks the agent to find, extract, summarize, and flag. It should not make final legal judgments or approve obligations without qualified review.
- Extraction should preserve exact parties, dates, amounts, and obligations.
- Missing fields should stay missing rather than being guessed.
- Risk labels should be treated as triage, not legal advice.
What to benchmark
Benchmark contract field extraction, invoice line items, purchase order data, and clause summaries. The agent should return structured output that can be validated before downstream use.
Launch safely
Start with document intake and triage. Keep human review for negotiation, signing, payment, renewal, and compliance decisions.
Low-risk places to start
use-case guidance can usually start with drafting, tagging, summarization, routing, and internal notes. These steps create value while keeping humans in control of final commitments, customer-visible replies, and system writes.
- Use the agent as a recommender before it becomes an actor.
- Keep raw inputs and outputs for review.
- Measure human repair time, not only model score.
Where not to automate first
Refunds, compensation, legal obligations, account permissions, compliance claims, and angry escalations should not be fully automated until the evidence is strong. Start with evaluation, then draft mode, then limited automation.
Pre-launch checklist
Before using this use case in production, run a small retest with real inputs, edge cases, and a plan for what happens when the agent fails.
- Is there a clear human-review rule?
- Are model version and evaluation date recorded?
- Which outputs are not allowed to be sent or written automatically?
- Is there a fallback path when the agent fails?
A practical next step
If you are evaluating this use case, start with ten real samples: three normal cases, three edge cases, two high-risk cases, and two cases with strict language or formatting requirements. Run two or three candidate agents and compare quality, repair time, and critical failures.