Evaluate information related to legal matters in public or personal records
Most of the output can be produced by software today.
An agent can find, read and summarise the sources this work depends on, and it can cover far more of them than a person would ever open. What it does not do is decide which sources deserve trust, or what the findings mean for your situation.
| How automatable | Mostly automatable |
|---|---|
| Kind of work | Research and retrieval work |
| Jobs that do it | 8 occupations |
| Tool categories that apply | Web, data and docs, Generalist agents |
| O*NET activity | Getting Information (4.A.1.a.1) |
What this looks like on the job
Not our paraphrase. These are real task statements recorded against this activity, spread across the 8 occupations that perform it.
- Read through contracts, regulations, and procedural guidelines to ensure comprehension and compliance.
- Identify compliance issues that require follow-up or investigation.
- Search for and examine public and other legal records to write opinions or establish ownership.
- Review dockets of pending litigation to ensure adequate progress.
- Review and evaluate data on documents, such as claim applications, birth or death certificates, or physician or employer records.
- Evaluate information from documents, such as claim applications, birth or death certificates, or physician or employer records.
- Gather and analyze research data, such as statutes, decisions, and legal articles, codes, and documents.
- Examine documentation such as mortgages, liens, judgments, easements, plat books, maps, contracts, and agreements to verify factors such as properties' legal descriptions, ownership, or restrictions.
- Research and analyze laws, regulations, policies, and precedent decisions to prepare for hearings and to determine conclusions.
- Arbitrate disputes between parties and assist in the real estate closing process, such as by reviewing title searches.
- Examine individual titles to determine if restrictions, such as delinquent taxes, will affect titles and limit property use.
- Verify accuracy and completeness of land-related documents accepted for registration, preparing rejection notices when documents are not acceptable.
- Summarize pertinent legal or insurance details, or sections of statutes or case law from reference books for use in examinations or as proofs or ready reference.
What we would actually use
One recommendation rather than a shortlist, because a shortlist is just your problem handed back. This is what we would buy for research and retrieval work, and what it costs.
Research is the one shape of work that needs no integration at all, so a single $20 assistant with browsing is the whole stack. Add a crawler only once you are pulling hundreds of pages on a schedule rather than reading a few.
Chosen for the cheapest thing that does the job, not the best funded. Nothing on this site is sponsored, and the full landscape is there when you want to disagree with us.
The rest of the category
Context, not alternatives to weigh up. We name the layer rather than promise a named product does your specific task.
Generalist agents
Matched from the kind of work, not from vendor marketing. Check any of them can reach the system your records actually live in — that connection, not the model, is where these projects stall.
How people actually do it
No workflow names this activity yet, but these automate the same kind of work, with the prompts to paste and what to keep for yourself.
Who does this work
8 occupations in the O*NET database perform this activity. Each one has a full breakdown of its other tasks.
Work that goes with it
O*NET groups these under “Consult legal materials or public records”. In practice they tend to be done by the same person, in the same sitting.
| Activity | Jobs |
|---|---|
| Research relevant legal materials to aid decision making | 7 |
Method. The activity, its taxonomy placement and the occupations that perform it come straight from the public-domain O*NET 30.3 database. The automatability band is ours: we map each of O*NET’s 41 generalized work activities to how much of its output current software can produce, assuming a person still reviews and owns the result. It is a coarse three-way judgment on purpose. A precise-looking percentage here would be invented.