Sam is an Innovation Strategist at Affinity Consulting Group, where he helps law firms understand and implement...
Zack Glaser is the Lawyerist Legal Tech Advisor. He’s an attorney, technologist, and blogger.
Stephanie Everett leads the Lawyerist community and Lawyerist Lab. She is the co-author of Lawyerist’s new book...
| Published: | May 28, 2026 |
| Podcast: | Lawyerist Podcast |
| Category: | Legal Technology , Practice Management , Solo & Small Practices |
Claude is not just another AI tool lawyers can chat with. It may be a preview of where legal work is heading. In episode 619 of the Lawyerist Podcast, Zack Glaser talks with Sam Harden about Claude, Claude for legal, and the growing role of AI in law firm workflows.
Sam breaks down how Claude can work with documents, folders, PDFs, Word files, and connected legal tools in ways that go far beyond simple prompting. They discuss the difference between Claude Chat, Claude Cowork, connectors, and skills, and why those distinctions matter for lawyers trying to understand what AI can actually do.
They also explore why law firms should not rush into automation without first building better systems. From deposition summaries to document creation to legal research support, this episode explains how AI can become more useful when it is guided by strong processes, clear instructions, and thoughtful implementation.
Listen to our previous episodes on Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Legal Practice.
Have thoughts about today’s episode? Join the conversation on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and X!
If today’s podcast resonates with you and you haven’t read The Small Firm Roadmap Revisited yet, get the first chapter right now for free! Looking for help beyond the book? See if our coaching community is right for you.
Access more resources from Lawyerist at lawyerist.com.
Chapters / Timestamps:
00:00 – Introduction
00:34 – Why Claude for Legal Matters
01:28 – Live Crabs and Work from Home Chaos
07:04 – Setting Up the Conversation
07:29 – Meet Sam Harden
08:04 – What Lawyers Should Watch with Claude
10:14 – What Claude Actually Is
11:16 – How AI Moved Beyond Chat
12:07 – From Claude Code to Claude Cowork
13:22 – How Claude Works with Documents
15:20 – Why Claude Cowork Is a Big Shift
15:45 – Creating Documents and Presentations
16:52 – Claude Chat vs. Cowork vs. Code
18:12 – Legal Plugins and Connectors
19:30 – Reducing Context Switching with AI
20:49 – Connecting Claude to Legal Tools
22:24 – What Legal Connectors Can Do
24:47 – MCP, Tools, and Connector Limits
26:37 – What Claude Skills Are
28:44 – Why SOPs Come Before AI Skills
29:43 – Using Skills for Legal Documents
30:35 – AI Skills for Deposition Summaries
31:14 – Combining Connectors and Skills
32:15 – Teaching Claude Like a Team Member
33:11 – Choosing the Right Skill
34:00 – How Bad Instructions Create AI Risk
35:49 – Building Better Skills and Plugins
37:13 – What Comes Next for Claude for Legal
Special thanks to our sponsor Lawyerist.
Stephanie Everett:
Hi, I’m Stephanie.
Zack Glaser:
And I’m Zack and this is The Lawyerist Podcast, just one of the many educational products from our team of experts, innovators, and law firm strategists. If you want to learn more about what we do, just check us out at lawyers.com and make sure you subscribe to this podcast.
Stephanie Everett:
Today, Zack is talking with our very own Sam Harden about all things happening with Claude and Claude for legal and everything you might need to know about that for your practice.
Zack Glaser:
This was a fun one. It was not fun to edit. So I’m sure there are going to be bonus portions of this on the YouTube channel. Speaking of one of our educational products, you can find us on the YouTube. But yeah, this was not a joy to edit because you got to take out such amazing stuff from Sam. I always enjoy talking to Sam about this stuff and he quite literally is working tirelessly to stay ahead of the game or at least on top of all of this Claude, Claude for legal, Claude cowork. And if you don’t know what any of those things are, stick around because that’s what we’re talking about.
Stephanie Everett:
I love it. I can’t wait.
Zack Glaser:
So Stephanie, you and I both work from home and have worked from home for a while and our families kind of still live in the houses around here. I was telling you that I have an on- air sign behind me that is really just a novelty. I haven’t been able to hook it up yet, but I want to hook it up outside of my office so my wife can tell when I’m recording because she really, really, really tries to be thoughtful about noise in the house. But sometimes things happen and you had something like that happen recently.
Stephanie Everett:
Yeah. Well, I was going to say, I’m glad she tries to be thoughtful because I think my family is not. They might be the opposite. They just
Zack Glaser:
Want to be on.
Stephanie Everett:
Yeah, they’re just living their best life. So I have worked, like you said, I worked from home I think 10 years now, but it’s new. It’s just in this last year that my husband’s now also working from home. So I used to have the luxury of everyone left in the morning and I was by myself all day and it just was like a normal workday. And now my husband’s here. And so yesterday I’m in the middle of doing our Next Level Leader online virtual webinar platform. I mean, it’s a very interactive class. There’s a lot happening.
Zack Glaser:
And this is live, right?
Stephanie Everett:
This is live. So 50 people on a live call with me and my husband gets home and first he’s yelling for our 15-year-old at the top of his lungs because he wants help. He had just gotten back from the farmer’s market. That might be important to understand what’s about to happen. So he’s trying to get help bringing stuff in and yelling. Well, I had let her go to the Waffle House with her friends. So I was trying to text him like, “Stop. She’s not here. Stop yelling for her.” But he doesn’t see those texts. And so then apparently he had purchased some live crabs at the farmer’s market and then decided, I know we’re from Maryland, so it’s a thing in our family. We love picking crabs, eating crabs. And I guess he was at the farmer’s market and was like, “It’s the start of crab season.
I’m going to let me buy a few crabs for dinner tonight.” But he then proceeded to drop them on the floor of the kitchen. So now there’s live crabs happening and lots of yelling. I’m not really sure. There was just an enormous amount of … Now I’m DMing another team member who’s on the call too. We basically have a stage manager for these classes that can just help run all the tech. And I’m like, “Do you hear the commotion in my house right now? Because my husband just dropped live crabs all over the kitchen.” And she was like, “What?” I’m sure she was like, “I had to read that message twice. What are you talking about?
Zack Glaser:
” Oh my God. Oh man. I’ve got so many questions, so many thoughts, so many things. I do want to keep in mind Jason can cook. So this isn’t somebody that’s just like, “I’m going to make some crab.” He knows what he’s doing. And so I assume that the crabs were like that dinner was good. It was worth
Stephanie Everett:
It. In all fairness, he’s been to culinary school. So yes, he is …
Zack Glaser:
I kind
Stephanie Everett:
Of
Zack Glaser:
Short him by saying he can cook.
Stephanie Everett:
No, he would tell you, he’s not master chef or anything, right? But he does his way around a kitchen. So I guess sadly they were okay. I mean, he said so too. One of them- For
Zack Glaser:
Ground crabs, for floor crabs, they were okay.
Stephanie Everett:
Yeah. We got to go up to Maryland this summer and get our fill of real good crabs. So these were- I think it’s
Zack Glaser:
Important to say you’re just outside of Atlanta.
Stephanie Everett:
I mean, they were fine.
Zack Glaser:
They
Stephanie Everett:
Weren’t
Zack Glaser:
The- The Bordeaux farmer’s market. Where is it you’re at in … Yeah.
Stephanie Everett:
Northeast Corbina Farmers
Zack Glaser:
Market.
Stephanie Everett:
For people who know though, this was the DeKalb’s Farmers Market, which is this crazy farmer’s market where you can go … It’s an international farmer’s market. It’s kind of cool. And you can go in there and buy stuff you can’t buy anywhere else. I mean, crabs.
Zack Glaser:
I can’t get those just somewhere random in Memphis. I got to have a guy.
Stephanie Everett:
Right. I’m sure he just saw them and thought, “Oh, that’ll be fun. School’s almost out. We’re celebrating.” I can make
Zack Glaser:
Some noise in the house.
Stephanie Everett:
Yeah. But I think I might need one of those. I was going to say, maybe I need the on- air thing, the light you have, but then I don’t know that anybody would pay attention or look at it and alter their behaviors.
Zack Glaser:
That’s the other side is, does anybody care? What I want to know is, and in comments or emails or whatever, I want to know what’s the toilet flushing in the background story for everybody else? Do we all remember that during COVID with the judge? Oh my God.
Stephanie Everett:
And
Zack Glaser:
What’s your crabs on the ground somebody’s yelling story from working from home?
Stephanie Everett:
I just have to say, yes, please send those in and you guys, I still laugh like gut laugh every time I see that cat. “I’m not a cat, your honor.” Of course you’re not a cat. Oh, that poor guy.
Zack Glaser:
Yes, absolutely. Oh man. Yeah.
Stephanie Everett:
Fun times working from home. All right. Well, I want to hear this conversation with Sam because I know you guys got into a lot of great stuff on Claude, all things Claude.
Sam Harden:
Hi, I’m Sam. I am an innovation strategist here with Affinity Consulting.
Zack Glaser:
Sam, thanks for being with me. I feel like at some point we’re not going to have to do this, but I feel like I have to differentiate Sam Harden from Sam Glover, who was one of our founders here at Lawyers. But thanks for being with me. I guess you’re with Affinity Consulting, which means that you’re with Lawyerist. Yo help all the lawyerist people with your expertise. So thanks for being with me.
Sam Harden:
Yeah, happy to be here. I want
Zack Glaser:
To talk Claude. We actually quickly got this episode out as quickly as we could because, oh man, Claude for legal, I guess V2-ish, robust Claude for legal dropped this week, the week of recording, which is probably about two weeks before this actually goes out. And depending on who you ask, this is either the future of legal work or it’s just like, it’s just AI doing AI things. It’s AI announcements, doing AI announcements, things. What should law firms actually pay attention to in this? This is a lot of stuff coming at me.
Sam Harden:
It’s a lot. It’s a lot and it seems to be happening fast, as you know. And I think many things. I think it is an exciting time to be a lawyer who is invested in technology. I also think it’s kind of a … I hate to use the term dangerous, but it’s an iffy time as well, because there’s a lot of things out there. Claude launched this whole thing this week. I’m sure next week we’ll hold new announcements. I don’t know anything about new announcements, so don’t read that into what I’m saying, but just based on the pace of change.
Zack Glaser:
It’s a good bet though.
Sam Harden:
Oh yeah. If I gambled, I would … I don’t know how to even bet on that, but I think that lawyers should be paying attention to what is happening with Claude, because I think it is kind of like a roadmap to where things could be going. Claude launched the legal plugin this week, which is a set of connectors to a bunch of tools that lawyers are used to and then a bunch of skills and plugins that show lawyers how Claude can work inside a legal ecosystem. So those two things kind of combined.
Zack Glaser:
Okay. Let’s take a step back real quick because I realized that I jumped into talking to you like it’s just you and me sitting here. Let’s start with what is Claude Anthropic, the big AI company has a product called Claude. Can you give us a quick description of what that is?
Sam Harden:
So Claude is kind of one of the big three AI models, I would say. You have ChatGPT, you have Claude, and you have Google’s Gemini, right? And we’re all used to chatting with these AI models in a chat interface, kind of like texting with your friend is how it started out. You would send it a message in Words and it would send a message back to you, right?
Zack Glaser:
And it’d be really nice to me.
Sam Harden:
They added … Oh yeah. Yeah. Tell me good things about myself or write a limeric about pirates or whatever you wanted it to do. That’s a great
Zack Glaser:
Idea, Zack. Here we go. Yeah.
Sam Harden:
I’ve never heard a better idea in my life. The models have added capability over time. You saw the ability to have it generate images with ChatGPT especially upload files to it and ask questions about your files. This bit by bit the companies have added these different features and abilities to the models because the models are really good at a lot of things. Claude is kind of unique at this point because Claude was watching what computer developers were doing with systems like Claude Code and seeing that they were using it to write computer code directly onto the hard drives. I know this is kind of like an out there thing, but bear with me.
Zack Glaser:
Yeah, yeah. We got people that want to know this. Yeah.
Sam Harden:
Yeah. And the Claude people looked at it and I think they thought, well, if Claude can write computer programs onto a hard drive, what is preventing Claude from creating Word documents and saving them on a hard drive? What is preventing Claude from creating PDFs and just saving them? What is preventing Claude from doing everything? Because on a computer, everything is computer. It’s all computer files, all computer programs, and the models are really good at that.
Zack Glaser:
It’s not like this is a paper file and this is tablet or something like that. Yeah.
Sam Harden:
And so Claude took what the computer developers were doing and created a system called Claude Cowork instead of Claude Code. It’s Claude Cowork and you can go in there and ask Claude to create these five Word documents for me and Claude will go in and do it. It will create PDFs, it will read PDFs, it will write comments on Word documents. If Claude can write the code to do something, it will write the code to do it essentially. So you just have to ask it.
Zack Glaser:
Oh, okay. So it’s not actually, and I think this might be important, it’s not actually entering the Word document from the same door that we would go in. We would open up the Word document and type the stuff in. It’s coming in from a different entrance and saying, “Here’s the code that I wrote in order to create this document or in order to manipulate this document.” Exactly. It’s going through the computer’s entrance, VIP entrance. Okay.
Sam Harden:
Yeah. It’s coming in the side door. It’s able to just flip all the switches, turn all the knobs in a way that you or I as the human, we’re doing it when we click on the buttons on the word toolbar, Claude is doing it behind the scenes when it’s creating things or when it’s editing things.
Zack Glaser:
Okay. So the good folks over at Anthropic Building Claude recognized from what coders were doing, from what the software developers were doing that I mean, if we can write code, we can use that code to manipulate Microsoft Word, we can use that code to manipulate Adobe Acrobat, we can create PDFs, we can create all these files and we can let the user of Claude request us to do this. And so that’s Claude cowork. And just to kind of add a little bit here, it works in folders on your computer. Well, I guess that’s pretty important because Claude Cowork, at least right now, as far as I know, has to be on that local Claude app. It doesn’t come out of the cloud app. And so you can’t be on claud.ai, you have to be on the local app and then it can manipulate your computer with guardrails, but it can manipulate your computer in certain folders and folder structures.
Sam Harden:
Yeah. And this is a very new thing. I just want to make that clear. This is really, really recent within the last six months that we’ve seen this and it is very powerful. Claude can edit, delete, create things on your computer in a folder on your hard drive That’s something entirely new.
Zack Glaser:
One of the things that we as a team really kind of took to very quickly was that it could create PPTs and it could create PowerPoint presentations and slide decks really, really quickly and
Really nicely. I put together a lot of PowerPoint presentations even before I kind of honed in on how it should be done. I put it together a lot of them and they looked sharp, looked professional, looked good. Claude as a product and I want to kind of do this as well. So we’ve got Claude chat, which doesn’t manipulate stuff on your computer specifically, but it does have the ability to create Microsoft documents and things like that. It can. It works in HTTP a lot, which I want to be specific. That’s not a programming language, it’s a markup language. Otherwise, I’m going to lose my nerd creds, but it can- I
Sam Harden:
Think you meant HTML,
Zack Glaser:
You said HTTP. Oh man, already lost them right there live on the lawyers podcast. Yeah. So it’ll write an HTML and mark things up in order to display it to you to where it looks nice. So that’s Claude Chat and that’s kind of our normal back and forth chat. And then another product inside that app is Claude Cowork, which is what we’re talking about where it’ll manipulate these documents that already exist. It’ll manipulate things inside a specific folder structure. And then we’ve got Claude Code over here to the side that honestly us as lawyers don’t need to worry about too much, but it’s the same kind of general idea as some of the Claude cowork. And really, in my opinion, it’s giving us a little bit of future casting. If you look over in Claude cowork, it’s like, oh, this is stuff we didn’t think the computers were going to be able to do for people 12 months ago or whatever.
Okay. So that’s Claude broadly. And now what in the heck is this, what are you talking about with the legal plugin, connectors, the plugin, the tools, all of that stuff?
Sam Harden:
Yeah. So there’s different components, I would say. There are data connectors that allow Claude to go and get things from other places as well as send things to other places. You can think of it that way. So other programs that you may use. So if you use, let’s say Westlaw or you use NetDocuments or use iManage or something like that. So you’re storing data there, you’re interacting with data on that system. The connectors give Claude kind of a phone line in basically to your account with those systems. So imagine that you have something in one of those systems that you’ve been working on or you need it to do something. The connectors let Claude make a phone call and say, “Hey, I need to talk to this system, so I’m going to go and call it without you having to take what you’re doing in Claude and go over to that other program and redo what you’re doing.” That’s kind of the idea there is
Instead of context switching, the connectors let you just keep everything or most things in Claude and then have Claude work with that system for you and bring it back into the chat in some cases. So good example is there’s a court listener plugin now. If you’re familiar with court listener, it’s a service that mirrors federal court dockets and has a bunch of filings from Pacer and things like that. So you can search it for federal cases. Now you can do that from within Claude. Instead of going to court listener and going, “I need to remember the name of this case. I’m going to search for it. Let me read the docket.” You can connect your court listener account to Claude and say, “Hey, Claude, go and look at this case in court listener. Tell me what the latest entries are on the docket.” And Claude will go and do that.
You don’t have to do it yourself. Claude can go and read the documents that are in that case. It can pull in stuff. There’s so much now that it can do in some of these systems that it’s kind of like Claude has … I described it as a phone line, but it’s almost like a universal translator that it can go and
Stephanie Everett:
Just
Sam Harden:
Talk to this other system and bring back information for you.
Zack Glaser:
I think importantly, it can do that across multiple things. So the connectors, you laid out NetDocuments and iManage and CourtListener, but we can also do SharePoint and Outlook. I actually have a connector connecting into this platform that we are recording on and I can have MyClaude, I can say, “Hey, grab me the transcript from the Sam Harden and Zack Glaser thing.” I guess more importantly, I can say, “Go look at that transcript and get me this information.” Okay, these connectors allow Claude to broaden its area of information of where it can get us … Okay. So in Claude we’ve got connectors. Is that part of plugins?
Sam Harden:
They can be part of plugins. They kind of exist on their own at this point. So if you are in Claude and you have a Claude account and you have to have the desktop app to really see this well, there’s now a customized thing that shows connections and you can go in and turn on and turn off connectors. And if you go through there, there are a lot of connectors. There’s now a whole category that you can sort them by law. You can filter it and just select law to filter it and it shows you the ones that they’ve tagged as legal connectors. There’s a lot now.
Zack Glaser:
Yeah. I’m just pulling it up and the filter is legal and it’s court listener and Box and DocuSign, iManageWork and just Relativity, all the Everlaw, Harvey, Legal Zoom. All righ. So with that, these are the connectors and that means that I can have Claude essentially go into my application of that as me essentially and do a lot of the things that I can do in that platform. Is it all the things that I can do? Is it limited? That feels too awesome to be able to go, “Hey, go into…” Because I’ve been telling people to get the hell out of Box for years because it just hasn’t really worked with things. But if I can send my Claude into my client files in Box and say, “Hey,” because I know that my box is secure and I know that my local Claude is secure, I could send it into my client files and say, “What’s the client that … ” Or, “Give me a brief, a quick little update on what all the documents for John Smith is.
Sam Harden:
” Yeah, it depends on the connector and it will have different abilities, let’s say, with different connectors. Some have a couple of abilities, things like search, things like find inside that system. Some have writing capabilities. So you can actually go in and create things in that system, which is really interesting. A lot of them have CourtListener, which I keep going back to, has a ton of actions that you can take inside CourtListener. Now you’re not writing things to CourtListener because CourtListener is like a public data service, but they have equipped Claud with a bunch of different ways to extract and search and find data inside court listener. So you just have to kind of read, it’ll show you what you can do inside the connector screen. What can you do inside different connections? What can you do with it?
Zack Glaser:
I’ll tell you what you can do inside court listener because yeah, so as we were talking, I pulled up Claude and I pulled up the connectors. I sorted by legal and I went to court listener and just so people know it’s in the area called tools and in tools you see search, get endpoint schema, call endpoint, get in point item, get choices, get courts, get more results, extract citations, analyze citations, resume citation analysis, create search alert, delete search alert, subscribe to Docket Alert, unsubscribe from Docket Alert. And I said all those specifically because I want to compare it to let’s say NetDocuments. NetDocuments has search and fetch right now. Those are the two that it has. So you look at those and then one that we use is HubSpot. HubSpot has search CRM objects, get user details, get properties, search properties, get CRM objects. And we’re limited to what those things allow us to do.
And that’s when people say MCP, model context protocol, that’s what we’re talking about. So connectors are kind of Claude’s way of saying MCP and probably a better
Stephanie Everett:
English,
Zack Glaser:
Better normal human word than MCP. I’m in here and I’m looking at connectors and I’m in Claude, I’m in Claude cowork and I see skills as well. So connectors are how I can … I want to say interact with a third party platform that I have an account for or if it’s public, I don’t have an account for, but how I interact with a third party platform that I have an account for. And then in here we also have skills.
I think once we get past that connector idea, that’s the data that I can get to and how I can … Talk to me about skills here and I want to caveat all this with we’re not even in the Claude for legal conversation yet. This is just giving you the lay of the land of Claude cowork, which I think is important because I really think Claude cowork, as you’ve said a lot, is a bigger deal than these specific kind of sets of skills, but we need to lay this down before we really talk about Claude Legal. So what are the skills here?
Sam Harden:
So skills, if you’re unfamiliar with skills, I think about them as prompting 2.0 or maybe prompting 3.0, right? Do you remember when- Yeah. Yeah. When we saw those news articles about our children will not go to school anymore because they will become prompt engineers. Do you remember that? I mean, I’m exaggerating, but there was this whole news thing, this whole hot take circus on, well, we don’t need college anymore because we’re all going to become prompt engineers and- What’s the point? We’re just going to spend our time typing things into the AIs that we use and tell it, “You are a very experienced doctor or very experienced
Lawyer.” That never happened, but good, but the structure that we were told mattered in prompts kind of translated over to skills and skills are much more powerful. So imagine you could give an AI a job description and a manual for how you want it to do that job along with the assets that it needs to perform that task or set of tasks or set of different job related duties that you want it to perform. That’s a skill. You can think of it that way. So a skill is like a user manual or a set of standard operating procedures for-
Zack Glaser:
I was hoping you were going to say SOPs. Okay. Okay.
Sam Harden:
Yeah. So it’s SOPs, right? So one thing that I think people need to understand is if you don’t have good SOPs for how you do your work right now, it’s not the best idea to go into Claude and start creating a bunch of skills to do different things SOPs
Zack Glaser:
First
Sam Harden:
And then take those. I’m going to
Zack Glaser:
Take a moment here to say, we have a series of SOP videos that I’m going to get a link to that Sam has done in order to go deeper into this. And so we won’t have to go off onto that tangent of get your SOPs and order you SOB right now, but if you want to dig in further about how your SOPs are really allowing you to do the things that we’re talking about, we’ll put a link in the show notes for you to go to that YouTube series as well. So sorry, please continue, Sam.
Sam Harden:
Oh yeah. So they’re SOPs in essence. They are telling Claude, “When you write this kind of document, I need you to always use this template to structure it in this way, to put these things in a below a pointed list to end with this kind of conclusory paragraph and Claude will follow those instructions
Stephanie Everett:
When you
Sam Harden:
Tell it to use that skill. A good example is page line deposition summaries. This is what I always tell people because I’m used to having to do this. When I was an associate attorney, I did a lot of these. So you get a deposition and you go through the deposition and you write out, “Here’s what the witness said about X. Here is the page and here is the line where it’s found.” That’s its most basic form.
So you can give that structure to Claude and say, “Hey, Claude, when you look at a deposition and I ask you to do a deposition summary, this is how I want you to do it. ” And it will follow that. Now you can get more and more complex and say, “Claude, you need to know who the parties are. ” You can’t look at the deposition in isolation because that colors what the witness says and why what they say is important about different things. If it’s a med mal case versus a family law case versus an eviction case versus a federal tort claim case, those are all very different.
Zack Glaser:
Sam, can I use a connector to get the skill to know the information about my client?
Sam Harden:
You can.
Zack Glaser:
Okay. You can. You can see the wheels turning here. Anyway, sorry. I’m just going to keep interrupting you on this episode and just showing my joy of all of this. But yeah, keep going. Sorry.
Sam Harden:
So you can tell Claude, ask me when I tell you around this skill and you don’t have the context to know this stuff, ask me. Say, “Hey, before I do this, I need this information.” Or use your connector to X service and go and look for the case that this connects to and find that information because I don’t want to have to tell you, I just want you to go figure it out and then ask me if that’s right because Claude may find the wrong case. As lawyers, I’m not great at keeping stuff structured in different files and folders and things like that.
Stephanie Everett:
That’s
Sam Harden:
Kind of how skills work is you can give Claude an SOP document. I think of it as if you had a new person in your office who was really smart but needed direction and you wanted them to do a task, how would you tell them to do that task? What things would you give them to do that task so that they could do it well because they want to do it well, they want to do a good job, but you have to equip them with the directions to do it.
Zack Glaser:
And so this is something that the skill then as it relates to Claude, and I’m going to say skill like all caps because that’s how Claude delineates their skills. The skill then is saved and inside of Claude and I can call it, I can say use this skill, use the deposition skill and do this.
Sam Harden:
Yeah. You can say, go and find the skill. Claude also will think about what skills it needs. Whenever you ask it to do a task, it will say, “Do I have a skill for doing this? ” And go and look at its list of skills and find what it thinks is the right skill. That’s another reason why it’s important to figure out what skills you need before you go start writing skills because if you have 10 deposition summary skills, like deposition summary one, summary two, summary three, Claude is going to go, “I have no idea which one this person wants me to use, so I may just guess or I don’t have the right context to figure it out. So you have to think about what you want it to do. “
Zack Glaser:
Yeah. And to me, that’s one of those places because I think people are probably listening to this thing because I think every time that lawyers talk about AI, the word hallucinations comes into our head.What’s it going to hallucinate on? What’s it going to hallucinate on? To me that’s how, or that’s one of the ways that things hallucinate is that Claude doesn’t know that I’m an idiot and it doesn’t know that I have the ability to lie. And so if I ask it to do something, it thinks that it can. So if I say, “Go use the singular deposition skill,” it’s going to go in there and think that there’s only one deposition skill and it’s going to figure it out. It’s the best it can to make me happy. And it’s not going to come back and say, “Hey, I know you’re a moron.
So tell me which one of these to use.” In my experience with you, you’ve made a lot of mistakes, Zack. And so this feels like one of those. That to me is where AI really hallucinates is when it thinks I’m smarter than I am. Yeah. So we need to have some sort of structure to these skills. We need to have some sort of pre-ideas of what it is because yeah, I have found if I create these things on the fly, I wind up having to go back, delete, manipulate, make new ones. I can’t tell you how many times I made different skills related to branding, lawyerist branding or affinity branding or things like that just because I was doing something. But in a way, that’s really what we’re doing is we’re saying, “Here’s what I would prompt you to do. I’ve created a good prompt.
It’s a thorough prompt. It does all the things that prompts are supposed to do save that because, and we’re going to get meta here, there’s a skill creator skill
Inside of Claude. Okay. I don’t want to get too into the nitty gritty of the skills and the connectors, but you can package those in a way like you had kind of gotten to, into plugins. And I think you have likened plugins where skills are kind of a recipe of how to do something. You’ve likened plugins to a menu that one can choose from. And so we get these plugins that if let’s say I have a brand plugin, a marketing plugin, one of those plugins would be choosing a brand guidelines plugin. Another would be how do we create a PPT our way? Another one would be what is our voice and tone or things like that. Just the related skills in a menu of things that we would do. And again, if you want to know more about that, we have some SAM videos on skills and plugins and we’ve actually run out of time on this one.
I’m getting the cue from our producer, the wrap up or the cut queue. This one’s going a little bit long. So really this episode is turning into part one of Claude for legal with the lawyers, with Sam Hardin. We’ll have part two where we talk more about Claude for legal as its own plugin a little bit more. And then we also talk about how you need to think strategically about implementing Claude, implementing Claude for legal, implementing skills and things like that and how that strategic thinking can actually help you with your law firm, whether you’re using Claude or Copilot or ChatGPT or what have you. But Sam is going to be back with me next week for that episode. Once again, Sam, thanks for being with me. And I just want to remind everybody that they can find you on LinkedIn on Substack. We’ll put all the links of where to find you down below.
Thanks again.
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Lawyerist Podcast is a weekly show about lawyering and law practice hosted by Stephanie Everett and Zack Glaser. https://www.lawyerist.com