Composing your own agentic workflow: what the canvas gives a legal team
A workflow you compose yourself gives a legal team three things a bought one cannot: its own stages, a mandate it can read, and records it owns. It asks for something back, which is the discipline to keep the thing maintained.
Legal AI: build, buy, or configure?, published here in July 2026, works out which path fits a use case. This piece picks up after that decision, because that is where the benefit actually sits. When I compose a workflow for a legal team, the first thing we draw is the team’s own day rather than the automation: where matters arrive, who reads first, where the file waits and for whom. A bought product arrives with someone else’s answers to those questions already baked in; a composed agentic workflow carries yours, and that’s the first return. Nothing about the team has to bend to fit the tool.
The second return is control you can actually see. On the canvas, every tool the agent holds, every source it may read, every place it may write is a drawn connection that a lawyer can point at, question and remove. Simon Willison named the combination that makes an agent dangerous: access to private data, exposure to content nobody in your organisation wrote, and a way to send something out. Meta’s Agents Rule of Two says an agent session should hold at most two of the three. Drawn as a workflow rather than asserted in a security questionnaire, that cap becomes a picture the general counsel can read without help. Security review turns from a questionnaire into a mandate you set yourself.
For an in-house team the return shows up in three places. Hours, because routine intake and first-pass review run themselves as far as the gate where a person signs. Custody, because the run history stays inside your own perimeter, a record you can put in front of a regulator or the board without asking anyone’s permission first. And speed of change, because a stage gets redrawn in a day rather than in a vendor’s release cycle. A law firm adds a fourth: each practice group gets a workflow shaped to its own review depth, and the same records let partners price the work rather than defend the hours.
None of it is free. A composed workflow is owned, and owning it means maintaining it, so every model, prompt or connector change passes a release gate, and the workflow definition joins the assets you would take with you on exit. That is the honest test of this road, and the teams that gain most from owning the canvas are the ones prepared to own the upkeep as well. I have watched enough enthusiasm run out at the maintenance stage to think that conversation is worth having before the pilot rather than after it.
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