Inside the ActionFile workflow
This article is the second in a series of Medium posts focusing on our advanced legal assistant Owen and it’s integrated intelligence layer ActionFile designed by associate practitioner Lee Power.
Last time we caught up I interviewed our end user (law firm client facing) legal assistant Owen on it’s architecture, capabilities and benefits to the legal sector.
Today we’re going to take a look at Lee’s ActionFile solution now an integral part of Owen’s architecture as well as the Owen Supervisor that orchestrates the work flow and coordinates it’s AI legal team reporting back to supervising solicitors and human legal teams.
We are currently at the advanced prototype stage of our build. The foundational technology is IBM’s Watsonx Orchestrate Standard Edition. The AI legal team including Owen is powered by Claude Sonnet 4.6.
We’re currently running test matters through our prototype and what we are testing is simple. We want to understand how our legal assistant translates raw accounts of incidents with the police, emotional, fraught and disjointed and received via online webform, email or by the phone and assesses their viability for either civil action or police complaint or any other of our four track legal route.
As a volunteer caseworker with an independent police monitoring group I founded due to my own experiences of policing and stop and search I understand what people go through and have listened and have helped put things right more often than not.
IBM called me a subject matter expert in 2025. Owen and Actionfile do the same. Just ask Lee Power. He worked for the police for twenty years and designed ActionFile to help improve legal outcomes for those facing injustice through detailed legal assessment of police encounters. So on that note, let’s take a look at the workflow and as always feedback is welcome.
The Owen Supervisor agent
I asked Owen to give me a brief overview of his role as a supervisor agent for the ActionFile legal team.
Question — What is your role in the workflow? tell us what you do.
Owen/Actionfile supervisor (edited )
My Role in the Owen / ActionFile Workflow
I am the Supervisor Agent for the Owen legal assistant and ActionFile workflow. Here’s what I do:
🔍 What I Am
I act as the AI legal supervisor overseeing a team of specialist AI agents, supporting human legal professionals at Futurebound LLP. I coordinate the flow of new legal enquiries through a structured, multi-stage workflow.
- I receive new legal enquiries from:
- The Owen Futurebound LLP legal assistant (a collaborator agent), or
- Directly from legal professionals (including test matters).
- I pass new enquiries to Triage, which allocates the matter to the correct legal track and begins the full workflow process.
- When a legal professional provides a Claim ID number, I can retrieve and provide updates on the status of a new enquiry or case.
- I supervise a team of specialist collaborator agents.
⚠️ What I Do NOT Do
- I do not provide legal advice
- I do not predict outcomes
- I produce reports and information for human legal professionals only
I am the central coordination point of the ActionFile workflow — receiving enquiries, routing them correctly, supervising the AI team, and keeping legal professionals informed. All outputs are designed to support, not replace, qualified human legal professionals.
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Thanks Owen! What we aren’t doing for the rest of this article is interviewing the ActionFile AI team, rather what we will do is highlight key areas at the beginning of an advanced workflow.
Today I’m testing with a disjointed voice to text transcript. Our AI legal team are currently assessing the matter for Triage and allocation. This is a fictional incident and only a snippet of the text provided to Owen and ActionFile.
“Source type: Disjointed voice-to-text transcript I went there MYSELF right to the police station, they knew I was coming, my solicitor arranged it. 11 February, Westford. I was going to answer some messages allegation from an old colleague. Please how is walking INTO the station an attempt to evade them???….”
Owen/ActionFile -”The triage is well underway — and it’s comprehensive. Here is the full output from Triage for your test matter:”
This initial assessment was carried out in just over 10 minutes.
“Urgency🔴 Urgent — volatile evidence identified”
Shows us this is something that needs immediate attention. The client is clearly distressed and not only that important evidence has been identified by ActionFile.
The summary goes on to identify key facts of the matter listing in terms of importance as well as providing a full chronology or timeline of events. What we also do at this stage is assess for potential breaches or police misconduct using our specialist breach matrix.
The ActionFile team have already noted that
⚠️ Year of incident not supplied — this is a material limitation across all tracks (see Uncertainty Register)
The Breach map summary report focuses on four legal tracks. Police complaints and professional standards, civil law, human rights and criminal law.
For each area of the summary our AI legal team assesses breaches based on a client’s raw account and applies them to each track if all tracks are active.
Each possible breach is given a confidence score and priority rating based on a traffic light system. Here’s an example from each track in the order as shown above.
P1 — Failure to apply individualised arrest-necessity — 62/100 🔴 High
C1- False imprisonment — unlawful restraint from point of arrest- 58/100 🔴 High
H3- Article 8 ECHR — dignity / handcuffing in public- 35/100 🟡 Medium
CR1- S.26 CJCA 2015 — corrupt/improper exercise of police powers- 009_Police_Reform_Act_2002_Fu…15/100 🟠 Low
The team go on to highlight important corrections that must be provided by a solicitor to the data subject or prospective client based on assumptions made surrounding “kidnapping” and ‘automatic payouts’.
Police can unfortunately traumatise us and a raw account received by someone in distress has been identified as needing a human “feet on the ground” moment of intervention at an early stage.
The team go on to identify priority evidence that is needed to strengthen the client’s case including items such as body worn video, medical and GP records, custody records, employment records, reception area CCTV and so on. At the end of our first stage summary the team while waiting on human approval (the human gate ) state.
“This is a strong triage output for your test matter. The workflow has correctly identified four live legal tracks, flagged urgent limitation risks, corrected the subject’s two key legal mischaracterisations, and preserved all processing restrictions. Ready for your review and Human Gate 1 decision whenever you are. 🟢”
The next stage of our workflow consists of an overview of the case including evidence preservation assessments and if we request one a letter draft to the police as well as a cross-track assessment summary and other areas based on assessment of what we call the raw account from a potential law firm client. What we receive next from ActionFile consists of “the complete post-approval consolidated record”
This summarises the potential case for the human legal team providing an evidence preservation schedule, email and letter schedule, key structural issues of the cross-track legal analysis as well as evidence volitality that requires immediate action.
Again this is prioritised by our team with a colour coded traffic light system. We finish with a limitation alert summary and priority action sequence for an instructing solicitor. After all, it’s called ActionFile for a reason.
We are going to leave it here for today as I understand this is another long read, however this is just the beginning of the workflow. And every time Owen/ ActionFile tells legal professionals this
“The IEPR and Cross-Track Analysis are finalised and held. The workflow now pauses at the evidence-gathering stage pending the instructing solicitor completing Steps 1–7 above. Prompt 4 (Assessment) and Human Gate 2 will be triggered once the evidence is in hand.
The test matter has processed successfully through the full pre-Gate workflow. 🟢 All four legal tracks are live, the IEPR is ready to transmit upon solicitor instruction, and the system is standing by for Prompt 4 once evidence is received.”
Our legal team is standing by and waiting for your approval and instruction. What happens next is something truly special and a vital enhancement of legal capabilities. We’ll see you next time. Look out for information on our pilot program this week.
If you want to see our legal assistant in action at the prototype stage you can do so up until the 30th of November. After all “we create tools that make us smarter.” so let’s create.
