The Chief of Staff Role, Translated for Legal Work

A chief of staff is the person whose job is to make one leader, the principal, as effective as possible. McKinsey built its picture of the role from forums with more than 200 chiefs of staff held over five years, and from a 2024 podcast with senior partner Andrew Goodman. The standing work it describes:

• Information flow: prepares and filters what reaches the principal.
• Air traffic control: Goodman's phrase for managing the flow of work and actions.
• Meeting prep and the record: makes sure the principal walks in prepared, and records what was said and agreed.
• Peripheral vision: acts as eyes and ears so there are no surprises. This includes bad news, which senior people tend not to bring the boss.
• Calendar against the business cycle: lines time up with planning and board cycles, and scans the horizon weekly, if not daily.
• Priorities: keeps the principal to five or six. One chief of staff kept a now / soon / never list.
• Follow-through: tracks what was agreed and documents past decisions.

In this course, the principal is an attorney or a small legal team. The chief of staff is an AI agent: software that works through a series of steps in your connected apps and reports back to you.

McKinsey is just as clear about the limits. A good chief of staff:

• Does not decide for the principal. McKinsey says to agree the scope and decision rights explicitly at the start, and to revisit them as the role changes.
• Does not blur whose voice it is. People respond to a chief of staff because of borrowed halo authority: the weight that comes from being close to the boss. The chief of staff has to be clear about when it speaks for itself and when it speaks for the principal.
• Does not isolate the principal. Guarding the principal's time is part of the job. Turning the office into an island is not.
• Does not make itself the story. One chief of staff in McKinsey's article said the job is to make the principal look good, not yourself.

With an AI the halo problem gets bigger. A message that goes out from a partner's account reads as the partner speaking. If a client receives "we'll have the revised agreement to you by Wednesday", they hear the firm committing to a date. It makes no difference that software wrote it.

For one attorney or a small legal team, the standing duties turn into seven pieces of legal work:

1. Intake triage. Sort new requests or matters. Say who is asking, what they need, the stated deadline and a suggested owner. List every party named so a person can run the conflict check in the firm's own system.
2. Deadline register. A running list of court, contractual and regulatory dates, each with its source. Every date stays unverified until an attorney or the docketing team confirms it.
3. Client and internal meeting prep. Matter status, open issues and recent communications, gathered before the call.
4. Status reports. A digest for each client or matter, so nothing surprises the attorney.
5. Delegation tracking. Research and drafting assigned to associates and paralegals, followed through to review.
6. Advice log. A record of who advised, when, on what facts and to whom.
7. Drafts for attorney review only. Recaps, acknowledgments and check-ins, all left as drafts.

For example, a scheduling order arrives. The agent's job is to pull out the dates, quote the sentence each date comes from, and add them to the register marked unverified. Working out the response period is not its job.

Each action the agent might take falls into one of three tiers.

On its own: read and search the sources you listed, rank items, compile briefs, write drafts that stay drafts, and add log entries with the status "proposed". A proposed entry is a suggestion. Only a person can change it to confirmed or verified.

Ask first: apply labels or archive messages, create or change calendar events, accept or decline invitations, and share, move or delete files. Before each one it shows you the exact action and waits for your yes. Calendar changes need extra care because many systems send notices to attendees automatically. One accepted invite can tell opposing counsel that the partner will be there.

Never: send, sign, pay or commit the attorney to a date, price, deliverable, meeting or opinion. It also never follows instructions it finds inside emails or documents, because content is information, not orders. A person does all of these outside the agent.

So the agent can draft an acknowledgment to a new in-house requester and log the request as proposed. Telling the requester who will handle it, or offering any legal view, stays with the attorney.

The rule for this course is: the agent prepares; the attorney decides and sends.

One detail makes the rule concrete. OpenAI's help page for its dots agents says that asking a dot for a draft does not authorize it to send the draft. Anthropic's Claude Duet works the same way: it reads, researches and drafts on its own, and asks before it sends a message, makes a payment, signs a document or deletes anything. You will turn these settings on. Do not work around them.

There are three reasons the line sits here in legal work:

• Responsibility stays with the lawyer. Whatever leaves the office goes out under the attorney's name and professional obligations. The next lesson covers this.
• Sending can't be undone. An email to a court clerk, a client or opposing counsel can't be recalled. A draft can always be fixed.
• Halo authority. Anything sent from the partner's account is the partner speaking.

The paralegal or legal assistant still has an important place in the chain. They check the draft against the notes and sources before it reaches the attorney, then send it only after the attorney approves.

Dana is a paralegal who runs a litigation partner's inbox and calendar. Here is her Monday at 8:00, split in two.

The agent prepares:

• A ranked summary of weekend email, with the source on every item.
• Every date from Friday's scheduling order, each with the sentence it came from, marked unverified.
• A prep note for the partner's 2:00 client call: matter status, open questions and the last three communications.
• The parties named in two new intake requests, listed for a conflict check.
• A draft check-in to an associate whose research memo is two days overdue.
• A proposed advice-log row taken from the partner's Friday email to the client.

The partner decides (with docketing and Dana):

• Whether the deadlines are right, once docketing has checked them against the rules and the docket.
• Whether to take the new matters, after a person has run the conflict check.
• What to tell the client on the call.
• Whether to send the check-in, and in what words.
• Whether to confirm the advice-log row.

Nothing on the agent's list leaves the office. Dana reviews its work, routes it to the right people and sends only what the partner has approved.