When AI Stops Asking: What Autonomy Really Changes for Legal Governance

Most conversations about AI governance in legal work start in the same place: model risk, safeguards, compliance checklists. Those are important, but they miss where the real exposure sits.

The decisions that actually shape how an AI agent behaves are usually made long before any model gets involved. They're made in how work gets delegated. In what knowledge gets trusted without a second look. In the small workarounds a team has relied on for years because a human was always there to catch the exceptions.

None of that is written down anywhere, and for a long time it didn't need to be. A person doing the work could sense when something was off, pause, and ask a colleague. That instinct is part of what makes human-run processes forgiving.

Autonomous agents don't have that instinct. They don't pause to double check an assumption that was never documented. They just execute what's in front of them, gaps included. What used to be an implicit, human-corrected process becomes an explicit, automated one, and whatever was left unclear gets carried straight through into action.

That's the shift legal leaders need to think about now. Not whether the model itself is safe, but whether the governance underneath it can hold up once a system starts acting without someone standing by to catch what wasn't said.

This is the focus of our upcoming webinar with iManage, "When AI Stops Asking: Governing Legal Work in the Age of Autonomous Agents." Marie Potel-Saville, Co-Founder of FairPatterns, will join Reena SenGupta (RSGi), Ivy Grey, and Laura Wenzel (both of iManage) for a conversation on what controlled autonomy actually looks like in practice, and how legal organizations can redesign governance around it rather than bolting it on after the fact.

Who should attend: Corporate legal teams and law firms of all sizes, particularly those already moving toward AI-assisted or agent-driven workflows.

Details:

📅 September 17, 2026

🕙 10:00 AM CDT | 15:00 UTC | 5:00 PM CEST | 60 minutes

🔗 Register: https://event.on24.com/wcc/r/5445596/6CBA24337505099421339819EDB35E3C?utm_source=linkedin&utm_medium=social&utm_content=webinar

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