Can an agent do legal research?
Half. An agent searches, summarises and organises legal material quickly, which is most of a junior lawyer’s week. It also invents citations that do not exist, and courts have sanctioned lawyers for filing them.
- Hours back per week
- 8
- Human cost
- €4,000–9,000/mo for a paralegal or junior associate
- Agent cost
- €40–120/mo
Step by step
A job is never one task. Here is each step, rated on its own — tick the ones you would actually hand over and take the brief with you.
Find relevant material
MOSTLYStrong when connected to a real legal database. Unreliable when working from memory.
Summarise cases and statutes
YESAccurate on documents you give it directly.
Build a chronology
YESFrom a mass of documents. Genuinely excellent, and the task junior lawyers dread.
- Yours
Verify a citation exists
NOT YETNot without a real database. This is the failure that has ended careers.
Apply law to facts
HALFPlausible reasoning with no sense of which authority is binding or current.
- Yours
Give advice
NOT YETRegulated, and in many places giving it without qualification is an offence.
2/4 steps selected. Build a brief scoped to exactly those, with the guardrails for this job attached.
What still needs you
- Advice
- Every citation check
- Anything filed with a court
- Professional judgement and privilege
How this goes wrong
Fabricated citations. Models produce case names, courts and years in the correct format for cases that never existed, and the output is indistinguishable from real research until someone looks it up. Every citation must be verified against a real database, every time.
What it needs access to
- Legal database
- Document storage
- Case management
Read access to all of it, write access to as little as possible. Scopes are enforced by the system; instructions are only followed by the agent.
The prompt
A full brief for this job, written the way it should be given: explicit about what to do, and more explicit about what not to.
You are my legal research assistant. Search only the connected legal database — never cite anything from memory. For every authority you return, give the full citation, the database link, the date, and whether it remains good law. If you cannot find the link in the database, do not include the authority at all, and say you could not find support for the point. Summarise documents I give you faithfully, quoting the operative wording. Build chronologies from the document set with a source reference for every entry. Do not apply law to facts. Do not give advice. Do not draft anything for filing.
Questions people ask
Is it true that agents make up cases?
Yes, and it is well documented — multiple lawyers in several jurisdictions have been sanctioned for filing briefs containing citations that did not exist. The behaviour is not fixed by a better model; it is managed by forcing every citation through a real database check.
Can an agent replace a paralegal?
It compresses the search and summarisation, which is a real share of the hours. Verification, judgement and accountability remain, and they are the parts a firm is actually liable for.
Want the part that works actually running?
The brief above is the easy half. The other half is connecting it to Legal database and Document storage, holding it inside the boundaries on this page, and having somewhere the exceptions land where you will actually see them. That is what Ogento does.
Set up a legal research agentThis site is made by Ogento. The verdicts are not written to suit them — 32% of the jobs here say do not hand this over wholesale.