When a lawyer files a motion in court, three identities are present and three different authorities verify them. The bar association vouches for the lawyer. The engagement letter vouches for the client relationship. The court itself is the venue, with rules of admissibility every filing has to meet. Each authority handles one piece. None of them tries to verify everything alone.
Now imagine if every motion required the lawyer to write a personal letter to the judge: "Here is who I am, here is who I represent, here is what I am asking to do, here are five references who can vouch for me." The legal system would grind to a halt. The reason it works is that there is shared infrastructure underneath the individual transactions, and the infrastructure makes each piece of the trust composable.
The agent economy is approximately where the legal system would be without bar associations, standardized engagement letters, or shared rules of admissibility. Every cross-organization agent interaction requires bilateral negotiation between the two organizations involved, custom integration, ad-hoc identity bridging, and audit trails that nobody else can read. This works in pilots. It fails at scale.
