Spend Control for Legal AI Agents
Legal teams run agents that review documents, research case law, and analyze contracts. The spend is real and recurring — per-page research charges, paywalled databases, and LLM inference over long documents add up quietly.
Where legal agents spend
Document review agents running LLM inference over thousands of pages per matter.
Research agents pulling case law and paywalled legal databases.
Contract analysis agents hitting summarization and clause-extraction APIs.
E-discovery pipelines with per-GB processing costs.
The failure modes that hurt legal most
A review agent re-processing a corpus after a prompt change doubles inference spend overnight.
Research agents buying access from unknown vendors — outside procurement and outside the matter budget.
No per-matter budget means one over-eager agent can blow a client's cost cap.
Which rules to start with
Per-matter or per-agent budget — a rolling ceiling for the whole review.
Merchant allowlist for approved legal databases and vendors.
Category rule: research, review, and e-discovery each capped separately.
Audit log so every charge maps to a matter and a client.
How to deploy it
Agents call sipi.bot before spending: amount, merchant, category → APPROVED, BLOCKED, or FLAGGED in ~5 ms. Every decision is logged with the rule that fired, so client billing and procurement have a defensible record.
The rules that matter most
| Rule | Why it matters in legal |
|---|---|
| Per-matter budget | Client cost caps are enforced, not hoped for |
| Merchant allowlist | Unknown research vendors get blocked |
| Category rule | Review vs research vs discovery budgets |
| Audit log | Every charge maps to a matter |
FAQ
Can sipi.bot enforce per-client budgets?
Yes. Rules can be scoped per agent, so a matter's agents share one daily or total ceiling while other matters are unaffected.
Is there a risk of blocking legitimate research?
Set an approval threshold instead of a hard block: transactions above the threshold are FLAGGED and held for a human. Legitimate research proceeds after review.
Does sipi.bot keep records useful for client billing?
The audit log records amount, merchant, category, the decision, and the rule that fired — exactly the shape of data procurement and billing need.
Related
Stop the next $12,400 night.
One API call (or MCP tool) in front of every agent transaction — APPROVED, BLOCKED, or FLAGGED, deterministic, ~5 ms, fully logged.
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