Agents, Assistants and Attorneys: A Responsibility Glossary

How do autonomous assistants differ from accountable attorneys?

An agent is a software system that can pursue a task through actions; an attorney's professional role involves duties, authority and accountability that software autonomy does not establish. Evaluate the actual workflow: who chooses the objective, checks the work, may act for another person and answers for the result.

Four terms that should not be collapsed

For this guide, an assistant produces or transforms information in response to requests. An agent can also select and perform steps using tools. A reviewer checks work against a defined standard. An attorney occupies a legally regulated professional role. These are working definitions for comparing systems; vendors may use the words differently.

• Autonomy describes how a system proceeds between instructions.
• Authority describes whether an action is permitted on someone's behalf.
• Competence concerns the ability to perform the relevant work adequately.
• Accountability identifies who must explain, correct or answer for the outcome.

What a professional-responsibility source establishes

ABA Formal Opinion 512 applies existing lawyer duties to generative-AI use, including competence, confidentiality, communication, supervision and reasonable fees. It does not turn a tool into the lawyer. [S1]

That distinction changes procurement questions. Instead of asking only whether a model can draft an answer, ask who verifies the source, whether the provider has accepted a professional engagement, which jurisdiction governs and what happens when the answer is wrong.

• A polished explanation is evidence of fluent output, not evidence of an engagement.
• A license to use software is not the same document as a legal-services engagement.
• A successful tool call establishes execution, not substantive correctness.

Synthetic example: reviewing a renewal clause

A fictional agent extracts an automatic-renewal clause and calculates the interval between two stated dates. A human reviewer checks the extraction against the source document. Counsel then considers the governing law, other contract language and the client's objectives. An authorized business officer decides whether to accept the proposed amendment.

The same person might fill more than one human role, but the record should still identify the decisions separately. If the agent silently changes the notice recipient, that is a new factual and operational issue, even if its original date calculation was correct.

• Agent output: clause text, document location and arithmetic.
• Review evidence: comparison to the source version.
• Professional question: legal effect in the actual circumstances.
• Business decision: whether the proposed terms meet the company's needs.
• Execution evidence: the actual approved document and resulting communication.

A short test for product descriptions

Read every claim as a question about observable behavior. If a site says autonomous, identify the available tools and stopping conditions. If it says reviewed, identify the reviewer, scope and artifact version. If it says attorney, verify the relevant person's identity and professional status through the appropriate official regulator.

The vocabulary is useful only when it makes responsibility easier to locate. A comparison record should be allowed to say not disclosed or not verified instead of filling a blank with an assumption.

• What can run without a fresh instruction?
• Which actions remain subject to human authority?
• What source material can the reviewer inspect?
• How are errors corrected and affected people informed?

Scope and limitations

A terminology and evaluation guide. It does not determine unauthorized-practice questions or the legal status of a particular service.

Working definitions are editorial choices. Legal status, professional duties and permitted services require jurisdiction-specific evaluation.

Sources

1. ABA Formal Opinion 512: Generative Artificial Intelligence Tools (2024) — ABA model-rule ethics analysis; lawyer responsibilities remain relevant when generative AI is used. Checked 2026-11-05

Explore further

Agentic Attorney is the central project at https://agenticattorney.com/. Use this glossary when reading its current descriptions of legal technology, workflows and human review; this educational page makes no licensing claim for a software agent. Explore Agentic Attorney.