An open standard for handing off a user, and their context, mid-task
DeepJudge has published the Agent Handoff Protocol, with Harvey and Thomson Reuters behind it. Moving a user between AI products without losing what they were doing is the thing incumbents normally refuse to make easy.
DeepJudge has introduced the Agent Handoff Protocol, an open standard for moving users and their accumulated context between AI products. Harvey and Thomson Reuters are supporting it.
Read what is actually being conceded. Context — what the user has told the system, what it has assembled about the matter, where they are in a workflow — is the strongest retention mechanism a software product has ever had. It is switching cost that the customer builds themselves, for free, and it grows every day they stay.
Handing that over on request is the opposite of how incumbents behave. Which is why the sponsors matter more than the specification: two established legal-technology businesses with real installed bases are the ones backing a standard that makes leaving easier.
The likely reading is that they expect a multi-product world regardless, and would rather be one of several tools a firm uses than be the tool a firm eventually rips out. In professional services that is probably correct — a law firm will not run one vendor for everything, and the vendor that refuses to interoperate becomes the one that gets replaced wholesale.
The open question is enforcement of the boundary. A protocol that transfers user context between products is also a protocol for moving privileged material across a vendor line, and legal work is exactly where that gets scrutinised. The specification's handling of consent and scope is the part worth reading closely.
It arrives alongside the other integration standard consolidating this month — MCP's SDKs passing a billion cumulative downloads. Tooling standardises; the models do not.
SourceTrail — AI Agents in 2026: Protocol Updates, Enterprise Tools, and Autonomous Payments → · InfoQ — MCP Goes Stateless, and Developers Ask Whether That Just Makes it an API Again →