The best lawyers have spent years building their expertise and honing their craft. They know which positions to hold, when an exception is justified, and when changing circumstances call for a new approach.
Skills capture that expertise in instructions and supporting materials that guide how the Legora Agent approaches an assignment. They bring that institutional knowledge into more of the team’s work, helping lawyers apply best practices more consistently across projects.
With less time spent piecing together precedents or repeating routine steps, lawyers have more time to think through strategy, consider the questions that require their judgment, and advise their clients.
The ability to extend that expertise across a firm or in-house team makes the best lawyers even more valuable. As they encounter new problems, learn from experience, and respond to changing circumstances, they can capture what they know in Skills, make it available to colleagues, and update it as their expertise evolves.
Firms and in-house teams that make the most of their best lawyers’ expertise will have an advantage in serving their clients and businesses.
Make your best lawyers’ expertise available to everyone
Imagine an in-house lawyer at a technology company reviewing a customer agreement. Their team has captured its preferred liability positions and escalation rules in a Skill. The Agent uses that guidance to propose amendments and flag departures for review.
The lawyer has an established approach to work from, shaped by colleagues who understand the business and its negotiating priorities. Rather than piecing together precedents or repeating routine steps, they can spend more time considering whether the position fits this customer and these commercial terms.
A colleague can draw on that expertise without reconstructing the history of previous negotiations or asking the author to explain the same position again. The reviewing lawyer still decides how to handle the agreement, but they start with the reasoning and guidance the team has developed through experience.
Your best lawyers play a critical role in evolving Skills
Now suppose the same liability exception keeps appearing across customer agreements. The legal team repeatedly approves a departure from its standard position.
An experienced lawyer examines those decisions to understand whether they reflect isolated exceptions or a broader change in how customers buy the company’s services.
The lawyer finds that prospective customers are increasingly requesting short, narrowly scoped pilots before committing to ongoing service agreements. The standard liability position was developed for those longer engagements. After assessing how the pilots’ limited data access and restricted use affect the company’s exposure, the lawyer concludes that these pilots warrant their own liability position. The existing position should continue to apply to ongoing service agreements.
That decision requires more than knowing the standard terms. It requires understanding the reasoning behind them, identifying which facts change the answer, and knowing where the original position should still hold.
The lawyer revises the Skill to explain the pilot position and its limits. The instructions specify what to check about duration, permitted use, and data access, along with the departures that still require escalation. The legal team tests the revised guidance before using it on subsequent assignments.
On the next review, the Agent can use those instructions to assess the agreement and flag relevant issues. The reviewing lawyer has clearer criteria for deciding whether the pilot position applies and when to seek further advice.
The more colleagues who use a shared Skill, the more consequential the judgment behind it becomes. A lawyer who improves that guidance can influence work across the team, including agreements they never handle personally.
A system for sharing and maintaining expertise
Lawyers already share expertise through supervision and playbooks. Skills give teams a way to bring that guidance into an assignment, including work the author does not personally oversee.
That reach makes the quality of the guidance more important. An outdated instruction could affect many reviews. Teams need to check how the Agent applies their instructions and keep them current. One way to do this is to record when reviewers override a recommendation, examine the reasoning behind those decisions, and test revised instructions against previous agreements. The reviewing lawyer remains responsible for the advice.
Teams also need to decide how guidance is organized and shared. In Legora, admins can see and edit Skills across their organization, define a shared hierarchy of tags, and control which roles can share Skills with user groups or the whole organization.
Together, these capabilities give teams a way to organize and share their expertise. The people behind that guidance remain essential: they judge whether it is sound, where it applies, and when it needs to change. By capturing and evolving what those lawyers know, Skills make their expertise available to more colleagues and more of the work they do.
Watch the on-demand webinar to see Skills in use or book a demo.
