Legaltechh Hub – Nicola Shaver: “On August 22, Spellbook released a new product it is calling Spellbook Associate, that has been touted in press releases as “the first legal AI Agent”. The product, which the company says can plan, execute, check its work, and adapt to accomplish larger scope assignments like a colleague would, is focused on executing transactional tasks, similar to the company’s original AI Assistant tool. Spellbook Associate can use a single prompt to work through legal matters such as producing complete financing documents from a term sheet, reviewing hundreds of documents for risks and inconsistencies and revising employment packages, doing so significantly faster than a human associate. The product sounds compelling, especially if, like Spellbook’s other solution, it is primarily focused on mid-law. If that’s the case, then it may well be the first legal agentic solution squarely targeting that demographic. Also, as Spellbook founder Scott Stevenson says, their Associate product is able to execute across a range of tasks, revising and cross-referencing documents and undertaking work across multiple applications (including Microsoft Word), adjusting and replanning as it works. Some of the other implementations of agentic AI in the industry are focused in on single tasks.   But, to be clear: this is not the first legal AI agent. Spellbook Associate is the most recent legal AI agent to launch, marking the continuation of a trend we’ve been covering for over a year, namely the deployment of agentic AI to facilitate legal tasks. We have written about AI agents multiple times. See previous articles here and here. We highlighted legal AI agents as a hot area for the year in our forward look at legaltech in 2024, and in our recent 2024 mid-year check-in. ..”