The opportunity

Thomson Reuters Institute built a genuinely strong framework for legal department value. A new kind of tool can now carry the manual work of using it - working alongside a person, who provides the input and reviews every draft - so more legal departments actually put the framework to use.

You built something that works

The Thomson Reuters Institute's Value Alignment Toolkit gives general counsel a method for showing what their legal department is worth, beyond its cost. At the center of that method is the Four Spinning Plates model: the idea that every legal department is always balancing four kinds of value at once.

The toolkit's guides, worksheets, and 126-item Metrics Library exist to help a legal department pick metrics and tell a story that covers all four plates, rather than only the "efficient" one that most departments default to, and that keeps legal seen as a cost center instead of a strategic partner. It is a well-built, well-researched framework, and it already does its job: it gives a legal department the questions to ask and the language to answer them in.

Where it runs into friction

A good framework still has to be carried out by hand. A general counsel or legal ops lead who wants to use it has to read the guides, work through a 126-metric library to pick which ones to use, define how each metric will be measured, assign owners and targets, draft the resulting tables, and turn all of that into a board-ready slide or narrative. Every one of those steps is manual, and every one takes time from someone who is already busy running a legal department.

That manual load is simply the cost of doing the work by hand, and it means a framework this good gets used less often, and less fully, than it deserves.

What's new

A newer kind of tool, often called an AI "agent," can now take on some of that manual load. Think of it less like a program you run and more like a capable assistant: you work with it in plain conversation, it follows a set method, reads through documents you give it, and drafts the resulting work - a table, a set of definitions, a slide - for you to check and finish. It doesn't invent the method. It follows TRI's method, using the material TRI already published, and does the mechanical parts: assembling the library into a candidate metric set, filling in a table, drafting the first pass of a narrative.

Your role, start to finish

This tool works with a person, not instead of one - so it helps to be clear about what that person actually does. Your part has two halves. At the start, you provide the raw material: you hand over documents you already have, or you answer a few plain questions when you don't. At the end, you review what comes back: you check every draft, correct it, and decide what goes forward. The tool handles the assembly work in the middle, and it does that part interactively - asking you for what it's missing, the way a colleague would.

Think of it as a knowledgeable coworker who knows TRI's framework cold and guides you through using it - it does not use the framework for you. What it hands back is a first draft: the judgment about what's right stays with the general counsel, exactly as TRI's frameworks intend.

What that delivers in practice

When the mechanical work is handled first, the person reviewing it spends their time on judgment instead of assembly: is this the right metric, is this target realistic, does this story land with the board - rather than formatting a table or hunting through a 126-item library by hand. The time that frees up tends to show up as higher-quality output, a wider scope of what gets attempted, and less end-of-quarter scramble. Practically, it lowers the friction of using the framework at all, which is the main thing standing between a strong method and a legal department actually using it.

What I'm sharing, and what's on this site

Only the first skill, Design metrics, is actually built. That one finished skill is what I'm sharing with the Institute - a working example of what this idea looks like in practice, not a finished product or a seven-skill suite. The other six are sketched on paper to show where it could go.

The rest of this site walks through how that works. How it works explains the mechanics in plain terms. Cowork & skills explains what "Cowork," a "plugin," and a "skill" mean, with no assumed background. The skills lists the one built skill and the six sketched ones. Examples shows what a drafted output looks like. Why I built this explains where it came from and what I'm hoping happens with it. Download is where you can get the file and see what's inside.