In 2023, every SaaS company raced to slap "AI-powered" on their landing pages. Fast-forward to 2025, and a new buzzword has taken over the legal tech scene: Agentic AI. It's the phrase dominating pitch decks, product demos, and strategy meetings. Unlike its prompt-based predecessors, agentic AI brings something more ambitious: systems that reason, plan, and act independently, with minimal or no human oversight. The question on everyone’s mind is no longer whether AI can help lawyers, but whether it might soon replace them entirely. Are we standing at the dawn of a new legal order, or are we chasing yet another overhyped dream destined to fizzle out?

Understanding Agentic AI

Agentic AI signals a bold leap in artificial intelligence. These autonomous systems don’t simply follow instructions typed into a prompt. They operate around the clock, constantly scanning for opportunities to act on their own. Imagine receiving a draft agreement from a counterparty. Before you even open the email, your AI agent has already reviewed the document, flagged key risks, checked it against your company’s playbook, proposed redlines based on precedent, and sent the updated version back to your counterparty. Agentic AI promises to perform these tasks with minimal human involvement, stepping in the moment a trigger event (in this case, a new incoming agreement) appears. Think of it as your tireless legal co-pilot: one that never forgets, never sleeps, and never needs a follow-up nudge. Sounds easy, right?

The Promise and the Fear

Now that agentic AI is officially a selling point, platforms claim their agents can draft, and review complex legal arguments, anticipate judicial outcomes, perform legal research, conduct regulatory risk analysis, and even simulate negotiation strategies. While this triggers excitement for efficiency and scale, it also provokes deep unease. If AI can independently tackle research, drafting, and risk mitigation, what remains sacred for human practitioners?

The Complexity Barrier

Despite flashy demos, real legal work is messy. It’s not simply about identifying clauses or checking boxes. Lawyers interpret context, navigate uncertainties, weigh trade-offs, and often make judgment calls where there is no perfect answer. Some ambiguity, after all, is intentional. Sometimes, the best legal advice is to do less, not more.

Even the most sophisticated AI lacks this understanding of nuance. It cannot distinguish between a minor oversight in a marketing memo and a fatal flaw in a billion-dollar SPA. For AI, both mistakes are just misplaced words in a document. For lawyers, one is an inconvenience, the other a career-defining disaster.

The Human-AI Partnership Model

The most impactful legal AI systems aren’t built to replace lawyers. They’re designed to work alongside them, seamlessly integrating into the tools and workflows that legal professionals already rely on. Sonar Legal’s Microsoft Word integration exemplifies this approach, by embedding advanced AI capabilities directly into the drafting environment where lawyers do their best work. Instead of asking teams to learn new platforms or adapt to unfamiliar interfaces, Sonar meets them where they are.

Agentic AI may be the headline, but autonomy isn't always the goal. In many real-world scenarios, collaboration outperforms automation. The gains from integrating AI (even without full autonomy) are already remarkable. Tasks that used to take junior associates hours, like redlining incoming contracts, now take just minutes. Sonar Legal, for instance, reduces document review time by an average of 28 minutes and flags up to six times more drafting issues than traditional manual methods.

This isn’t about replacing judgment, it’s about amplifying it. Sonar Legal acts as a force multiplier, stepping in to assist when speed, consistency, and accuracy matter most, while keeping lawyers firmly in control. It’s AI that empowers, not overrides.

Looking Ahead

The legal profession has survived previous technological disruptions—from typewriters to computers to the internet. Each transformation initially sparked fears of obsolescence, yet ultimately created new opportunities and improved client service. Agentic AI represents another evolution, not an extinction event.