For fee-earners, supervisors and COLPs · ~4 min read
The reading and the judgement are different jobs
Preparing a medical summary is really two tasks. The first is mechanical: read every page, find every date, provider and finding, and organise them. The second is professional: decide what matters to causation and quantum, what is reliable, and what should be disclosed. Automation is transformative at the first and has no business making the second. A well-run workflow keeps them apart.
What a review gate is
A review gate is a simple rule: nothing produced automatically is treated as final until a fee-earner has reviewed and approved it. The draft is exactly that — a draft. It is not sent, not disclosed and not relied on until a qualified person has checked it against the source. In practice a good gate has three properties:
- Everything is cited. Each fact points to the page it came from, so review is a matter of checking, not re-reading the whole file.
- Draft status is visible. The document is clearly marked as an unapproved draft until someone signs it off, so it cannot be mistaken for a finished product.
- Approval is a deliberate act. Sign-off is a positive step by a named person, not the default state.
Why it matters
The risks of skipping the gate are exactly the risks the profession already manages: an inaccurate chronology, a missed entry, or disclosing something that should have been considered first. None of those are new, but automation makes it tempting to move faster than the review can keep up. The gate keeps the speed benefit while holding the standard: you save the hours of reading, and you still put your name to nothing you have not checked.
Making the checking fast
A review gate only works if reviewing is quick — otherwise it becomes the bottleneck and gets skipped. That is why citations matter so much: when every line links to its source page, a fee-earner can verify a chronology in a fraction of the time it took to build, spot-checking the entries that matter and jumping straight to the page behind any that look off.
How Med-Legal is built. Every output is a cited draft that must be approved by a fee-earner before use — the summary and bundle carry the sources on every line, and nothing is treated as final until you sign it off. The reading is done for you; the judgement stays with you.
General information for legal professionals, not legal advice.