Sakana Marlin for Paralegals

Sakana Marlin is an autonomous research agent from Sakana AI in Tokyo. A paralegal submits a research topic in plain language, Marlin runs on its own for up to roughly eight hours, and it returns a finished strategic report: an executive summary, strategic options, primary-source citations, and presentation slides. It is not a chatbot and not a conversational assistant.

For paralegals, that shape fits a specific slice of the job — the deep research and diligence work that takes real time to assemble. Litigation background research, regulatory surveys, and due-diligence data-room research all map onto what Marlin does.

This page covers where Marlin helps a paralegal, an honest caveat about its multi-hour runtime, and the supervision and verification duties that apply to everything it produces. Under ABA Model Rule 5.3, a supervising attorney remains responsible for the work.

Where Marlin helps a paralegal

The paralegal tasks that suit Marlin are the research-heavy ones. Gathering the background on a litigation matter, surveying how a regulatory regime applies across jurisdictions, and pulling together due-diligence research for a data room are all large, well-scoped research jobs — exactly what an autonomous agent with a long runtime is built for.

In each case, Marlin does the assembly-and-synthesis stage and returns an organized report. The paralegal then reviews it, checks it, and hands it up for attorney review.

• Litigation background research on parties, issues, or history.
• Regulatory surveys across one or more jurisdictions.
• Due-diligence data-room research within a transaction.

The runtime caveat

Here is the honest limitation for day-to-day paralegal work: a Marlin run can take up to about eight hours. That makes it a poor fit for the quick tasks that fill much of a paralegal's day — a fast fact-check, a short summary, a quick question before a filing deadline.

Plan around the runtime. Marlin is for the big research task you can queue and collect later, not the thing you need in the next ten minutes. For quick work, a chat model is the better tool.

How to scope a request

Because a run is long, the quality of the prompt matters even more than usual. Before submitting, confirm with the supervising attorney what is being asked, the jurisdiction and time frame, and the form of output that will be useful. A well-scoped request avoids spending hours on the wrong question.

Where possible, frame the research so it does not require confidential client facts. Many background and regulatory questions can be posed generically.

Confidentiality and privilege

Paralegals handle sensitive material constantly, so confidentiality is front and center. ABA Model Rule 1.6 protects client information, and the duty extends to how a firm's nonlawyer staff use third-party tools. Do not put client-identifying facts, litigation specifics, or data-room documents into Marlin without confirming it is permitted.

Check with the supervising attorney and the firm's policy before disclosing any confidential detail. Review the vendor's data-handling terms, and prefer generic framing so that privileged material stays inside the firm.

Supervision and mandatory review

Under ABA Model Rule 5.3, a supervising attorney is responsible for work a paralegal produces with the help of a tool like Marlin. That responsibility does not transfer to the tool. Every Marlin report must be reviewed by the supervising attorney, and every citation and material claim must be verified against the primary source.

This matters because Marlin can produce confident output that is wrong, including citations that do not exist. Courts have sanctioned lawyers for filing AI-hallucinated cases, as in Mata v. Avianca. Marlin is not a lawyer and gives no legal advice; a paralegal should treat its output as an unverified research draft to be checked and escalated, never as a finished answer.