Primitive 02 of 06

Actions

Named, repeatable moves.

Within any practice area, actions repeat. A property dispute in one city and a property dispute in another are not the same case, but they are overwhelmingly the same sequence with different facts poured in. Senior lawyers experience this as expertise; it is really an action library stored in a human being, retrievable only by them and lost when they leave. Extract the library. Once actions have names, the lawyer's attention is finally free for the parts that are not routine.

Why it matters

"We use AI" is a meaningless sentence until actions have names. "Actions 1, 3 and 4 of our standard sequence run automatically, and a lawyer reviews before anything leaves the building" is an operating model. You cannot make the second statement until the first draft of the action library exists.

How to systematise it

01Pick your single most common matter type and write out its action sequence from open to close, in order, as if training a very literal new hire.
02Name each action with a verb a stranger would understand: 'draft the reply,' not 'do the thing.'
03Mark which actions are genuinely routine versus which require judgment - the routine ones are your automation candidates.
04Turn the sequence into a checklist that lives with the matter, not in a senior lawyer's memory.

What automation looks like, once this is systematised

A drafting agent runs the named, routine actions first - assembling a first draft, populating a standard clause set, generating a checklist item - and a lawyer reviews before it ships. The agent operates inside a sequence a human already defined, rather than improvising one.

Common failure modes

−The 'playbook' only exists as the tacit knowledge of one senior lawyer.
−Every matter is treated as unique even when 80% of the sequence repeats.
−AI gets pointed at the whole matter at once instead of one named action at a time, so nobody can tell what it actually did.

Self-check

?Could a new hire follow a written sequence for your most common matter type without asking anyone a question?
?Do you know, for your top matter type, exactly how many discrete actions it takes from open to close?
?If you removed your most experienced lawyer tomorrow, would the action sequence for that matter type survive?

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