Hermes Agent Legal Assistant for Document and Matter Ops

What should a legal team use the assistant for?

Operational work with a natural review step: summarising documents, structuring intake, tracking dates, and assembling background research.

The assistant is not a lawyer and should never be presented to a client as one. Anything that reads as advice needs a qualified human behind it.

• Summarise long agreements, policies, and correspondence.
• Convert intake conversations into a consistent matter note.
• Track dates and produce a reminder digest for the team.
• Compile background material for a question a lawyer will answer.

How are long documents handled?

The assistant reads common document formats, including PDFs and office files, and can summarise them. Scanned documents that are images need text recognition before they are useful.

• Prefer text-layer PDFs; scanned pages need recognition first.
• Summarise once and reuse the summary instead of resending a long file.
• Ask for structured output so the summary is comparable across matters.
• Verify anything that will be quoted, because summarisation loses nuance.

• Read the model selection guide

How do you handle confidential material?

By treating the deployment as part of the matter file: restricted access, controlled channels, and a clear rule about what may never be pasted in.

• Limit who can talk to the assistant on each channel.
• Keep sessions isolated per user so transcripts are not shared by default.
• Decide whether material may leave your infrastructure at all.
• Keep a record of the deployment configuration and access list.

• Read the security and privacy guide

How do deadline reminders work?

As scheduled runs that assemble and deliver a digest. The schedule is the mechanism, so the reliability question is whether the run happened, not whether the assistant remembered.

• Deliver reminders into a channel someone actually reads.
• Keep the digest short enough that it is read rather than skimmed.
• Review the schedule whenever the source of dates changes.
• Treat the digest as a backstop, never as the only date control.

• Read the automation and cron guide

What does governance look like in practice?

A short written rule set covering allowed inputs, required review, channel access, and who can change the configuration, reviewed like any other process change.

Most legal deployments fail on the boundary question rather than the technology: nobody wrote down what the assistant may be given and what must be checked, so nobody can answer either question later.