How agentic drafting checks its own authorities
A drafting agent that doesn't verify its own citations is just a faster way to make a dangerous mistake. Here's what "showing its work" really requires.
"Agentic" has become a marketing word, so it's worth being concrete. An agent, for drafting, means the system does the multi-step work a junior associate would (plan, research, draft, check) instead of returning one shot of text. The value isn't speed. It's the check step.
The steps have to be visible
A black box that emits a finished brief is not trustworthy no matter how good the brief is, because you can't see what it relied on. The whole point of an agentic flow is that each step (the plan, the authorities pulled, the draft, the self-check) is inspectable. You can click a step and see what it did.
Self-check is not optional
Before a draft reaches you, the agent verifies its own citations against their sources and flags the weak ones. This is the step that separates a drafting tool a lawyer can use from one that just generates confident text faster.
You still hold the pen
Nothing is final without an explicit human accept. The agent does the drudgery and shows its work; the judgment (and the signature) stays with the attorney. That's the only division of labor that's safe.