Crosby announced the policy in a blog post on 9 November. The next day, Artificial Lawyer, a news site covering legal technology, published answers from Crosby’s chief executive, Ryan Daniels, and the company’s team to its interview questions.

Daniels compared the policy to lawyers’ liability insurance, which protects clients from their lawyers’ mistakes, and said agents needed equivalent cover. Crosby believes it is the first law firm to obtain liability insurance for its agents’ work. Artificial Lawyer did not verify the claim but published it as Crosby’s own answer.

Client messages go to an agent first

Every new client message goes first to an AI agent, a program that uses a language model and carries out work steps on its own, Crosby said. The agent handles defined tasks from start to finish, drawing on information stored for each client. It passes other tasks, with their documents, to lawyers and tells the client how the matter will proceed. The agent runs in a sandbox, an isolated environment where it can see only that client’s data.

The policy took effect at the start of November. Crosby said it then removed lawyer review from so-called paralegal tasks, which do not legally require a lawyer. Its blog put these at about a fifth of the work its lawyers previously did. Examples given in the interview include negotiation summaries, searches for past deal information and routing matters to the right people for approval. Humans typically spend about 180 hours a day on review, and the agents save 36 of those hours, Crosby said.

In its interview answer, Crosby said the policy covers both legal tasks carried out under a lawyer’s supervision and the agents’ independent paralegal work. In its own commentary, however, Artificial Lawyer said a lawyer still supervises the final outputs, although Crosby’s blog said lawyer review had been removed from paralegal tasks.

Accuracy figure is the company’s own measurement

Crosby said its agents reached 94 per cent accuracy before their first deployment. The metric shows how often an agent either completed a task correctly itself or correctly escalated it to a lawyer. It therefore does not measure task success alone, as an AI-generated summary by Vaquill News suggests. Crosby tests new features on its own data sets and with evaluation methods that go through the agent’s work steps.

Testudo issued the policy. Artificial Lawyer’s interview names Lloyd’s of London as the risk carrier. Crosby’s blog says Testudo is backed by Lloyd’s. Testudo reviewed Crosby’s contracts and operating guidelines. It also analysed the company’s systems, models, governance practices and logs of human reviews. Daniels wrote that the firm had to show insurers that its agents were safer than humans at certain tasks.

Daniels said Crosby now has as many agents as lawyers reviewing contracts each day, and expects the ratio to reach 15 agents per lawyer by the end of the year.