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Building the Workflow

PLA 2872Activity 11·10 min read

Why it Matters

Nearly seven in ten legal professionals now use generative AI at work and the share using legal-specific tools doubled in a year, yet half of firms offer no training and four in ten have no policy. That gap between individual use and designed workflows is where a graduate who can map a process, decide which steps a machine should touch, build the tool for one of them, and prove that it works has a place that did not exist three years ago. This activity has you do all four for a Florida litigation task, ending with a subpoena verified against the rule and an evaluation that shows what your assistant gets right and wrong.

Current Context

The 2026 Legal Industry Report from 8am, published March 5, 2026, found that 69 percent of legal professionals personally use generative AI for work, up from 31 percent a year earlier, and that 42 percent use legal-specific AI tools, double the prior year, while 54 percent said their firm provides no training on responsible use, 43 percent said it has no formal AI policy, and only 9 percent reported a written policy that is actually enforced. As a LawSites summary put it, individual practitioners have adopted the tools far faster than their firms have governed them. The workflow you build in this activity, with its verification step and its evaluation log, is the part of adoption that the numbers say most firms have skipped.

Key Concepts

Task Decomposition

Breaking a legal process into its discrete steps, each with an input, an output, and the person or tool responsible. A subpoena is not one task but a dozen, and AI helps with some of them and none of the others.

Automate, Augment, or Human

The three-way sort for every task in a workflow: the machine can handle it with a check at the end, the machine assists but a person decides, or the task belongs to a person entirely. The sort is the core judgment in AI adoption and it changes as tools improve.

Custom Assistant

A saved configuration of a general AI tool, such as a project, a custom GPT, or a Gem, with standing instructions and uploaded reference documents so it performs one task the same way every time. It is the smallest unit of AI workflow a paralegal can build alone.

Rule-Based Verification

Checking an output against the governing rule element by element rather than reading it for plausibility. For a subpoena duces tecum that means Florida Rule of Civil Procedure 1.410: who may issue it, what it must command, how it is served, what fees are tendered, and what protections the witness has.

Evaluation Rubric

A fixed set of pass-or-fail checks applied to several runs of the same assistant on varied inputs. An assistant that passes on the example it was built with and fails on the next case is not a workflow, and the rubric is how you find out.

Adjacent Value and Compounding Knowledge

Two ideas from the Paralegal Parity framework: the extra work a paralegal absorbs around any automated task, and the way a paralegal gets better at a task over time in ways a tool does not. They are the economic case for hiring a person rather than buying another license.

Billing Honesty

The rule, stated in ABA Formal Opinion 512, that a client may be billed only for time actually spent. When an assistant cuts a two-hour draft to fifteen minutes, the fifteen minutes is what the client pays for, and the workflow should record it.

Resources

What to Do

In this activity you map a paralegal workflow, sort its tasks by what a machine should touch, build a custom assistant for one drafting step, use it to produce a subpoena duces tecum that you verify against Rule 1.410, and evaluate the assistant on three variations. You post the map, the sort, the assistant’s instructions, the subpoena, and the evaluation.

Part 1: Map the Workflow

Choose a practice area: civil litigation, real estate, corporate compliance, estate planning, family law, or immigration. Use the Workflow Generator to produce a map of ten to twelve major paralegal tasks from matter opening to closing, then verify the map against at least one outside source such as a practice guide, a bar association resource, or a firm’s own description of the role, and refine it with follow-up questions until it is realistic.

Part 2: Sort the Tasks

Pick five or six tasks that mix administrative, drafting, and client-facing work and run them through the Parity Analyzer. For each, decide whether it is an automation candidate, an augmentation opportunity, or human-essential, and note the adjacent value a paralegal captures around it and whether the task rewards compounding knowledge. Challenge your own sort; the analyzer is instructed to.

Part 3: Build the Assistant

Use the Assistant Builder to write standing instructions for a custom assistant that drafts Florida subpoenas duces tecum, then create the assistant in the tool of your choice (a project, a custom GPT, or a Gem), uploading the text of Rule 1.410 and the sample forms as reference documents. The instructions must tell the assistant what to ask for, what the subpoena must contain, how to structure document requests, and what to flag as missing or risky. Have the builder also produce a five-item evaluation rubric for Part 5.

Part 4: Draft and Verify the Subpoena

Give your assistant the case information below and have it draft the subpoena duces tecum. Then verify the draft element by element against Rule 1.410 and run it through the Compliance Checker. Correct every deficiency until the subpoena is ready for attorney review, and keep a list of what the assistant got wrong.

Case caption: Seaside Imports, LLC, a Florida limited liability company, Plaintiff, v. Coastal Logistics, Inc., a Florida corporation, Defendant. Circuit Court of the Seventh Judicial Circuit, in and for Volusia County, Florida. Case Number 2025-CA-004892, Division 37.

Plaintiff’s counsel: Rachel M. Thornton, Esq., Florida Bar No. 123456, Thornton & Associates, P.A., 401 South Ridgewood Avenue, Suite 300, Daytona Beach, FL 32114, (386) 555-0147, rthornton@thorntonlaw.com.

Defendant’s counsel: Marcus J. Webb, Esq., Florida Bar No. 789012, Webb Defense Group, 128 East International Speedway Boulevard, Daytona Beach, FL 32118, (386) 555-0283, mwebb@webbdefense.com.

Deposition: Witness Maria Elena Santos, Warehouse Operations Manager, Coastal Logistics, Inc., 450 Mason Avenue, Daytona Beach, FL 32117. Deposition on May 15, 2026 at 10:00 a.m. at Thornton & Associates, P.A., 401 South Ridgewood Avenue, Suite 300, Daytona Beach, FL 32114.

Background: Seaside Imports alleges that Coastal Logistics lost or mishandled a shipment of commercial goods valued at $127,000 that was stored at Coastal’s Daytona Beach warehouse between March 1 and March 31, 2025. Plaintiff seeks damages for breach of bailment contract and negligence. The deposition will address warehouse receiving procedures, inventory tracking, storage conditions, and chain of custody for the missing shipment.

Documents to request: All documents relating to the handling of Plaintiff’s shipment, including receiving logs, inventory records, storage location assignments, temperature and condition monitoring records, transfer or movement logs, shipping and delivery manifests, chain of custody documentation, incident or exception reports, and internal communications concerning the shipment or the Plaintiff.

Part 5: Run the Evaluation

Run your assistant three more times with variations: a different witness who is a records custodian at a third-party trucking company, a request that adds electronically stored information with a specified format, and the same case moved to county court. Score each run against your five-item rubric, record every failure, and revise the assistant’s instructions once in response. Note how long each draft took you to verify and correct.

Part 6: Post Your Deliverables

Create a single new discussion thread containing your workflow map, your task sort with reasoning, your assistant’s final instructions, the verified subpoena, and your evaluation results with the revision you made. Close with a paragraph on how you would bill a client for the subpoena given the time the assistant saved and what Opinion 512 says about it.

Include one AI chat link with a 1–2 sentence explanation of what the conversation shows and why you chose to share it.

Suggested AI Prompts

Use these prompts as a starting point, then adjust them to fit your goal. Strong prompting develops through trial, revision, and testing. It’s a foundational skill that grows into more advanced AI work such as context engineering and agent-based workflows.

Workflow Generator

Act as a legal operations consultant who documents law firm processes. I am a student researching paralegal work in a practice area I will name. Generate a workflow map of ten to twelve major paralegal tasks from matter opening to matter closing. For each task, describe what the paralegal does, what inputs they need, what outputs they produce, who they interact with, and roughly how often the task occurs. Make it realistic and specific to daily work rather than a job description. Where you are describing a procedure with a legal deadline or form, name the rule so I can verify it. After the map, ask me which areas need more detail. Confirm that you understand and ask me for the practice area.

A map you can check. Asking for the rule behind every deadline or form gives you a verification trail, and the follow-up loop lets you push the map from generic toward real.

Parity Analyzer

Act as a legal technology strategist who advises firms on AI adoption and staffing. I will share a workflow of paralegal tasks. For each task, help me decide whether it is an automation candidate, an augmentation opportunity, or human-essential; what adjacent value a paralegal would capture while doing it; whether it rewards compounding knowledge in ways a tool would not; and what edge cases would break an automated system that a person would handle. Be rigorous and challenge my assumptions about what is truly human-essential versus what I would like to believe is. Confirm that you understand and ask me to share the workflow.

An economic frame with built-in pushback. The Paralegal Parity questions turn “could AI do this” into “should a firm pay a person for this,” and the instruction to challenge your sort keeps wishful thinking out of the answer.

Assistant Builder

Act as an experienced legal technologist who designs custom AI assistants for law firms. Help me write standing instructions for an assistant that drafts subpoenas duces tecum for Florida circuit and county court depositions under Florida Rule of Civil Procedure 1.410, using the rule text and sample forms I will upload as reference documents. The instructions must tell the assistant what information to ask me for before drafting, every element the subpoena must contain under the rule, how to structure document requests so they are specific and defensible, what to flag as missing or risky, and to cite the rule provision for each required element so I can verify it. Then write a five-item evaluation rubric with pass-or-fail checks I can apply to every draft the assistant produces. Ask me clarifying questions before drafting the instructions.

Instructions and evaluation designed together. Writing the rubric alongside the instructions forces you to say what a correct subpoena is before you ask a machine for one, and the citation requirement makes every draft verifiable against the rule.

Compliance Checker

Act as a supervising attorney reviewing a subpoena duces tecum before it is served. I will paste a subpoena prepared for a Florida deposition and the text of Florida Rule of Civil Procedure 1.410. Audit the subpoena against the rule element by element: caption, identification of the witness, date, time, and place of appearance, the command language, the document requests, the notices the rule requires, service and fee provisions, and anything that could support a motion to quash. Quote the rule provision for each deficiency you find and tell me exactly what to correct before the subpoena is ready for service. Use only the rule text I provide.

A review confined to the rule you supply. Pasting the rule turns the check into a comparison the model does reliably, and the element-by-element structure mirrors how a supervising attorney actually reads a subpoena before it goes out.

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