Legal & General Counsel
AI Governance That Satisfies Legal Standards
General counsel and legal teams need more than access logs - they need a cryptographic record of who authorized each AI agent action, structured for discovery, regulatory inquiry, and attorney supervision obligations.
The governance gap
Common challenges for teams deploying AI agents in regulated environments.
No responsible principal behind agent actions
When regulators or opposing counsel ask "who authorized this?", the answer cannot be "the system." Legal standards require attribution to a specific human principal with documented authority at the time of the action - not a reconstructed narrative assembled after the fact.
AI work product that cannot survive discovery
Legal work product generated or touched by AI agents must be traceable: what the agent did, under whose direction, and what scope it was operating within. Without a structural evidence chain, privilege documentation and e-discovery responses become weeks of manual reconstruction.
Supervision obligations with no enforcement mechanism
Model Rules of Professional Conduct require supervision of non-attorney work product. An AI agent operating under ambient credentials with no per-action authorization record cannot satisfy that standard. Policy must be enforced at the action level, not documented after the fact.
Relevant IRONLAW rules
The governance rules that directly address your operational risk profile.
- Rightful Authority
Consequential action requires lawful, in-chain, current, attributable authority - not transport success alone.
- Accountability
Decisions and refusals must remain attributable and reviewable to the extent the environment allows.
- Operational Consent
Trust and prior consent do not replace fresh consent where policy requires it for hazardous or privileged acts.
- Intentional Human Impact
Human impact (including indirect, delayed, or omission harm) demands explicit objectives, active RoE, and safeguards matched to risk.
Governance in practice
An illustrative scenario showing how Bastion addresses real compliance requirements.
Challenge
An AM100 law firm evaluates AI agents to assist with contract review, due diligence triage, and matter management. Partner accountability requirements - and the professional responsibility rules governing attorney supervision of non-attorney work product - mean any agent-generate...
Outcome
Bastion's command layer would give supervising partners fine-grained control over which agents could act on which matters, with immutable records of every delegation and every output. IRONLAW's Rightful Authority and Least Authority rules map directly to ABA Model Rule 5.3 superv...
"The IRONLAW framing would make the governance conversation with our ethics counsel much simpler. They understand chain of command immediately."
Ready to discuss AI governance for your legal team?
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