An AI employee for law firms that works from your files and waits for approval

Supervision is the whole design problem

Model Rule 5.3 makes lawyers responsible for reasonable measures to ensure that nonlawyer assistance is compatible with their professional obligations. ABA Formal Opinion 512 applies the same supervisory duties to generative AI tools. The practical reading for a small firm: you can delegate preparation, but not judgment, and you need to be able to see what was done, by what, and from which source.

That gives four tests for any "AI employee" product before you let it near client work:

1. Does it work from your record? Output should come from the matter's own documents, with sources you can open, not from general training data.
2. Does anything change without a person approving it? Drafts, file changes, calendar entries and emails should wait for a human unless you deliberately allow otherwise.
3. Can you undo it? Every change should be logged with what it replaced.
4. Can it destroy anything? The safest assistant has no delete button at all.

What Draftiro's AI Employee does (limited pilot)

• Tasks you assign. Ask for a draft, a summary of a matter's documents or a list of key dates. Work is prepared from the firm's own files and lands in an approvals list as "ready for review".
• File organization. It can propose renaming a file's display name, moving files between folders, creating folders, tagging, and re-filing documents from an intake matter to the right matter. You see the plan and approve it.
• Deadlines. For a deadline task, the date is computed by the server, not guessed by the model, and it is left as a "DEADLINE (verify)" item for an attorney to check against the governing rule and any order before it is approved.
• Calendar. After an attorney approves, it can add, change or cancel calendar entries on a connected Outlook calendar.
• Email. It drafts emails for you to send yourself. It does not send email on its own.

Guardrails that are built in, not promised

• File changes wait for your approval, unless your firm turns on auto-approve for specific kinds of change. Email can never be auto-approved.
• It has no delete action. It cannot permanently delete your files.
• Every change is logged with its before-state and can be undone.
• It respects matter access: if a member is screened from a matter, work done for that member cannot draw on that matter's files. See ethical walls.
• Its time is not billable: the AI Employee never creates billable hours for itself.

Firms interested in the pilot can write to support@draftiro.com.

Good first tasks to delegate

1. Intake filing. New documents land in one intake matter; the AI Employee proposes where each belongs and you approve the moves.
2. A matter brief. Summary, key issues and open questions from the documents already in the matter, each point traceable to its source.
3. Date extraction. A chronology of dates and events with the document each came from, which you then check before anything is calendared.
4. First drafts of routine letters from the matter's facts, for your edit.

Avoid delegating anything that is advice to a client, a strategic choice, or a filing decision. Those are the lawyer's work under every version of the rules, and no approval screen changes that. For drafting from the record, see answers from your case files; for the ethics background, read Formal Opinion 512, explained.

Questions to ask any vendor

• Which actions can happen without a person approving them, and can each be switched off?
• Is there a log of every change, with the before-state, that you can export or undo?
• Can the system delete, share or send anything on its own?
• Does it respect the same matter permissions as the people in the firm?
• Does the vendor use your matter content to train models? Draftiro does not use your matter content to train AI models.