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Roughly half of what reaches a Legal desk is not a review request, it is a question that has been asked before. “Can I sign this?”, “do we need a DPA?”, “what is our standard payment term?”, “can I share this deck under our NDA?”. Those questions are answerable from documented positions, which makes them the highest-return thing a Legal team can hand to an agent. It is also the setup that needs the tightest guardrails.
Prerequisites: a private Legal workspace with a channel and an agent, plus the contract review playbook, which is where the reusable positions come from.

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What good looks like

1

Write down the positions you already hold

You have them. They are in past redlines, in emails, and in a lawyer’s head. Getting them into text is the whole project.Start with the ten you answer most:One topic per document, with an explicit title. A single “Legal FAQ” page with forty headings retrieves worse than ten focused pages.
Learn more in structuring knowledge for AI
2

Scope the folder to the channel

Point the Legal knowledge folder at the Legal channel. Two reasons: the agent stops pulling an IT runbook into a contract question, and you avoid the reverse, where a Legal position leaks into an answer in a public IT channel.
3

Be blunt in the custom prompt

This is the one desk where the boundary belongs in the custom prompt rather than in an attached rule, because it is a global guardrail rather than a conditional behavior.

You answer questions about this company's documented legal positions. Quote the relevant position and name the document it came from. You do not give legal advice, interpret a contract clause, assess whether something is enforceable, or state a position that is not written down. If the question is not covered by a position document, or it concerns a dispute, a regulator, or a specific counterparty's language, create a ticket for the Legal team and say that you have done so.

Everything conditional, “route privacy questions to the DPO”, “tag security questionnaire requests”, belongs in an attached rule instead. The custom prompt is for environment and global limits.
Learn more in writing agent rules
4

Run it in testing mode for a week

Turn the agent on in testing mode and read every response before anyone outside Legal sees one. You are looking for one specific failure: a confident answer that is not in a document.Read at least twenty conversations. This is not a formality on a Legal desk, it is the acceptance test.
Learn more about testing and deploying agents
5

Treat the gaps as the roadmap

The knowledge gaps report tells you which questions people ask that your positions do not cover, ranked by how often they come up. That is a better prioritized list of documents to write than anything a planning session produces.Work the top two each week and the desk gets measurably quieter within a month.
Learn more in closing knowledge gaps
6

Feed the answers back from review work

The last step of the contract review checklist is recording the negotiated position. That is where the next round of position documents comes from, which is what stops this desk from being a one-time knowledge-writing exercise.

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Where teams get this wrong

“Try to be careful” is not a boundary. Name the things the agent will not do.
Retrieval works on documents. Split them.
A wrong legal answer costs more than a wrong IT answer, and it is the one place a week of review is obviously worth it.
If it is not written down, the agent cannot quote it, and neither can anyone covering a holiday.

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Next

Writing agent rules

Prompt versus rules, and why it matters.

Close knowledge gaps

Turn unanswered questions into documents.
Last modified on September 17, 2026