Legal
Knowing that a source changed, on the week it changed
A worker watches the public pages you nominate, quotes what changed, and dates it. What the change means for you is a question for your adviser.
What the worker does
An AI worker in Polaris monitors policy updates by re-reading the public sources you nominate on a schedule using web search, comparing them to what it recorded last time, and reporting each change with the text quoted and the date it was observed. It delivers the change report as a comment on a task. Interpreting the change and deciding what to do about it is a human judgment.
- Connections
- web search · Docs
- Cadence
- Whatever schedule you set
- Every change
- Quoted, sourced and dated
The expensive failure is not misreading a change. It is missing one for eight months.
Platform terms, supplier policies, published guidance from a body you deal with, a partner's acceptable-use page: these change quietly, and the first anyone notices is when something you were doing stopped being allowed.
Nobody has the job of re-reading twelve web pages every month. It is the definition of work that is important and never urgent, so it never happens.
A worker with web search can genuinely do this. It reads, it diffs against what it saw before, and it reports what moved. It stays honest by quoting: the change report contains the actual text and the URL, so the person reading it is looking at the source rather than at a paraphrase.
What goes in the watch list and what comes back
| Source type | Example of what you would nominate | What a report contains |
|---|---|---|
| Platform terms | The terms page of a service you build on | The changed clause, quoted, with old and new text |
| Supplier policy | A supplier's published data or security policy | What changed and the date the page was observed |
| Published guidance | Guidance from a body relevant to your sector | The passage, quoted, with the source URL |
| Competitor public commitments | A competitor's published SLA or pricing terms | The delta, with a note that this is a public page only |
| Your own published pages | Your privacy policy or terms as they are actually live | Drift between what you intended and what is published |
Rules that keep a monitoring worker useful rather than noisy
Quote, never summarize
A summary of a legal change is a paraphrase of something whose exact words matter. The report carries the text.
Report no-change explicitly
A run that found nothing should say so with the date. Silence is indistinguishable from a broken job.
Separate the material from the cosmetic
Ask for formatting and navigation changes to be listed separately from changes to substance, or the report becomes unreadable within two months.
Keep the watch list in a versioned doc
The list of what you watch is itself a thing that gets stale. Put it in a doc with a review date and an owner.
Questions people ask
+How does it know what changed if it cannot store the whole page?
It records what it observed in a doc in your workspace on each run, and compares against that record on the next. The history is yours, versioned, and readable, so you can see exactly what the worker believed the page said in March.
+Can it monitor sources behind a login?
Only where a connection in the fixed catalog reaches them. Web search covers the public web. A supplier portal that requires a password is out of scope, and the honest answer is to keep that one on a human's calendar.
+How often should it run?
Monthly is enough for most sources and cheap, since you pay by delivered human-equivalent hour rather than per check. Put anything genuinely fast-moving on a weekly schedule and accept that most weeks the report will say nothing changed.
+Who should the report go to?
A named person, as an assigned task, not a channel. A monitoring report posted to a channel with nobody's name on it is read by nobody, which is the same outcome as not running it.
Related
Legal operations work an AI worker can carry
Tracking, chasing, assembling and watching. Everything a legal team spends time on that is not actually practicing law.
Compliance checklists with evidence attached and gaps named
A checklist where every line is ticked and nothing is evidenced is not a control. It is a document that will fail an audit slowly.
Watching the open web for uses of your mark
A worker sweeps public sources on a schedule, captures dated evidence of each use it finds, and hands you a file. Whether to act is a legal decision.
Policy documents that stay current and show their changes
A policy nobody has updated in three years is worse than no policy. A worker keeps the drafts moving and the versions visible. A qualified adviser signs them off.
Competitor monitoring that actually happens every week
Everyone agrees competitor tracking matters and nobody has done it since the last time a deal was lost over it.
Web search in Polaris
Nothing to authorize, nothing to store, and every query a worker runs appears in the activity feed while it works.
Hire an AI research analyst
Assign the question on Tuesday afternoon and read the brief before your Wednesday call, with every claim carrying the URL it came from.
How long an agent session can run, and what happens when it ends
Every agent runtime has bounds. The useful thing a vendor can do is tell you what they are.