A funding letter is a small document with a long reach. It tells a financial institution to retitle an account, or a title company to record a deed, and a family relies on it being right. When a practice group adds an agent to that work, the first question from the managing partner and the general counsel's office is the same: if the letter is wrong, who answers for it?
The answer is the same as it was before the agent arrived. The agent changes who types the first draft. It does not change who is responsible for what leaves the building. Making that explicit, in writing, before the rollout is what lets a practice group extend the agent from one team to the whole department.
The agent drafts and flags
The agent reads the executed trust, the asset schedule from intake and the institution's requirements on file. It assembles the letter, fills the account titles and trustee names from the source documents, and marks every place where the sources disagree. A schedule might list an account under the settlor's individual name while the trust calls for the successor trustee's title. The agent does not resolve that. It writes the question beside the paragraph and moves on.
That is the whole of its authority. It has no signature block it can fill on its own, no send button, and no ability to mark a matter as funded. Those limits are settings in how the agent is built, not habits the staff are asked to remember.
The reviewer checks the draft against the sources
Every draft goes to a reviewer the group names: usually a senior paralegal or trust administrator who knows the file. Their job is narrow and specific. They compare each account title, each date and each trustee name against the executed documents, and they clear or answer each flag the agent raised.
The group should decide in advance what a reviewer is allowed to change. Correcting a transposed digit is theirs to do. Reading a flag as a drafting problem that needs a different approach is not: that goes up to the attorney. Writing this boundary down prevents the quiet drift where a busy reviewer starts making judgment calls nobody assigned to them.
The attorney signs
The signing attorney is the person whose name the family and the institution will associate with the letter. They read the reviewed draft, with the flags and the reviewer's resolutions visible, and decide whether it goes out. Their signature is not a formality layered over the agent's work. It is the point where legal judgment enters, and the group's professional responsibility rules attach to it.
A practice that treats the attorney as a final glance, rather than a real read, will find the arrangement fragile. The fix is organizational, not technical: give signing attorneys a queue they can actually work, and show them the flags first so attention goes where the risk is.
The records team keeps the trail
When a funding question surfaces later, perhaps a trustee asking why an account was never retitled, the group needs to reconstruct what happened. The records team holds that trail: the source documents the agent read, the draft it produced, the flags raised, who cleared each one, and who signed. Retention follows the group's existing schedule for client files, and an IT or security review will want to see where that trail lives and who can open it.
This is also what answers a malpractice carrier's questions and a client's. The question is never whether an agent was involved. It is whether a named professional reviewed the work and a named attorney approved it.
Who answers when it is wrong
If a letter goes out with a wrong account title, the attorney who signed answers to the client, and the group answers to its carrier, exactly as it would for a letter a paralegal drafted by hand. The agent is a tool in the process, not a party to it. What the trail adds is speed in diagnosis: the group can see whether the source documents conflicted, whether the agent flagged it, whether the flag was cleared correctly, and whether the reviewer's boundary was clear.
That diagnosis feeds back into the setup. If a certain kind of flag keeps being cleared wrongly, the group tightens the reviewer's instructions or changes how the agent phrases the question. If the agent missed a conflict it should have caught, the build is corrected and the correction applies to every matter after it.
Putting it on one page
The most useful artifact a practice group can produce before rollout is a single page that names the four roles, states what each may and may not do, and says where the trail is kept. Practice leaders sign it, the records team files it, and new associates and paralegals read it when they join the department.
The agent is the easy part to describe. The page is what makes the arrangement something a managing partner, a general counsel and an insurance carrier can all rely on, and it is the part a firm should write whether or not it ever buys an agent from anyone.