Six weeks gets most paralegals there. They need about 18 hours of learning, two weeks of supervised review on live matter work, and a final exam and sign-off. The review habit is already in place. What they must learn is how an agent builds a draft, and which of its sources a lawyer can rely on.
What a paralegal supervises
In a law firm or in-house legal team, agents typically read documents, extract key terms, build chronologies, draft standard letters, prepare bundles and track deadlines. Paralegals are often the first person to see that work, and the last before a lawyer relies on it.
Their supervision is close reading. Did the agent extract the termination clause from the signed version of the contract or from a marked-up draft attached to an email? Did the chronology rest on the client's own account, which is declared, or on dated correspondence, which is signed by the sender? A paralegal who cannot answer those questions will pass errors to the lawyer in a format that looks finished.
How the six weeks split
- Week 1: Foundations, about four hours. Depth, the decision chain, provenance, ownership, data and trust.
- Weeks 1 to 4: Operator learning, about 14 hours. Human review, teaching the agent, keeping knowledge current, when something goes wrong.
- Weeks 4 to 6: Supervised review on live matters, with a supervising lawyer or senior paralegal checking each decision.
- Week 6: Exam and sign-off.
Choose matters for the supervised period that include at least one with a hard deadline, so the paralegal practises reading how the agent tracks dates.
What the agent does and what stays with legal staff
| Task | The agent | Stays with the paralegal or lawyer |
|---|---|---|
| Document review and extraction | Reads and extracts terms (depth 1 to 2) | Checking the extraction against the signed source |
| Chronologies | Drafts from correspondence and notes (depth 2) | Confirming disputed or client-stated facts |
| Standard letters | Drafts for a person to send (depth 2) | Sending anything to a court, regulator or other side |
| Deadlines | Reads and flags dates (depth 1 to 2) | Confirming every limitation or court deadline |
| Legal advice | Refused; outside the agent's scope | Lawyers only |
Agents in legal work rarely go beyond depth 2, because most outputs are sent under a lawyer's name. That keeps the paralegal at the centre of every draft.
Client material is confidential and often privileged. Paralegals should understand which sources the agent can reach and should report at once if it seems to draw on material from another matter.
An illustrative example
Take a mid-sized firm's property team with four paralegals and an agent that extracts lease terms and drafts report-on-title sections. Foundations in week one. Operator learning over three weeks at around five hours a week.
During supervised review, calibration on the same ten leases, using the method in calibration sessions for paralegals, shows two paralegals accepting a rent review date the agent took from a heads-of-terms email rather than the completed lease. The agent's draft cited its source, but neither paralegal opened it. The supervising partner adds a rule: every key date is checked against the signed document. The exam follows in week six.
Paralegals also see attempts to steer the agent through documents supplied by other parties. See training paralegals to spot prompt injection and pressure.
How paralegals compare with other roles
A week-by-week version for this role is in the training plan template for paralegals. Payments operations staff work at much higher volume; compare the payments operations timeline. IT administrators handle fewer, more technical decisions; see the IT administrator timeline. The full approach is in training teams for AI agents.
Questions people ask
Should lawyers take the same training?
Supervising lawyers need Foundations and enough of the review content to check a paralegal's decisions. Partners need at least the foundations, since they answer for the work.
Does the agent replace the paralegal's first-pass review?
It changes it. The paralegal reviews the agent's extraction against the source instead of extracting from scratch, which is faster but needs more discipline.
What happens if the agent misses a deadline?
The agent does not own deadlines; a person does. Treat a missed flag as an incident, check the record for why, and fix the agent's sources or brief.