What Claude Means for Law Firms, Part 2: Using AI to Practice at the Top of Your License, with Sam Harden

Episode Notes

Transcript

Zack Glaser:

Hi, I’m Zack.

Bernadette Harris:

And I’m Bernadette. Welcome to The Lawyers Podcast, one of the ways that we help lawyers build healthier firms, better businesses, and sustainable lives. Today, Zack continues the conversation with Sam Harden about Claude for legal.

Zack Glaser:

And today’s episode is brought to you by Posh, virtual receptionist. And if you stick around, you’ll hear my conversation coming up with them next or whenever you’re ready because that’s … Bernadette, you and I were in the Lawyers Lab Slack channel, I guess this morning actually.

Bernadette Harris:

Yeah, we love hanging out there, right?

Zack Glaser:

Yeah. Yeah. And once again, Leticia, one of our strategists just hit us both with one that got us. We’re both like, oh, typing like mad to respond, to just give hat tip to it. But it was this concept of doing something when you’re quote unquote ready.

Bernadette Harris:

Ready.

Zack Glaser:

Yeah. Yeah. Big air quotes here when you’re ready. And she says, the thing that got me was this idea of waiting until you’re ready just being fear really, masquerading as doing things right or getting it correct or having everything together. There’s just fear masquerading is that.

Natalia Rodriguez ·:

Yeah.

Bernadette Harris:

And it really is. It is this charade that you are playing with yourself to say, “Oh, I’m just making sure that I dot all my I’s and cross all my T’s and you’re waiting for this perfect time and perfect time does not exist.”

Zack Glaser:

Yeah. And that got me thinking about the idea of what the word ready means to us when we say it. When we say, “I’m waiting until I’m ready.” Are you waiting until you’re ready to grow until you’re ready to jump into that adventure or are you waiting until you feel like you’re ready to defeat that adventure come hell or high water?

Bernadette Harris:

And those are two different things completely.

Zack Glaser:

Those are two very different things, very different things. That came to me the other day or was in a discussion with me the other day because right now is graduation season in the United States. My oldest niece is graduating from high school right now and she is ready to go to college. But to me, she’s tiny. She’s little. I saw a picture of her in kindergarten and was like, “That’s still my niece and there’s no way she could possibly be ready to take on all that, but she’s ready to grow.”

Bernadette Harris:

Yeah. And she’s going to surprise you, Zack. Oh my God. When she goes to college, when she comes home for the first break, you’re going to see that she’s definitely not that little girl in that kindergarten picture.

Zack Glaser:

Right. And that got me. I actually like this as the comparison because I have every confidence in her. She’s an amazing human being and she is extremely capable at everything she does, but I am still, I have this fear of her going to college. I don’t feel like she is ready necessarily, but that’s the bad ready. That’s the wrong ready.

Bernadette Harris:

Right. And that’s you, right? That is you. She probably feels completely different. Shopping at the bit. Yeah. She’s like, Uncle Zack, you’re tripping.

Zack Glaser:

I’ve been ready for four years, buddy. Get me out of here.

Bernadette Harris:

But yeah, I think that when we think about ready, especially with our law firm owners, a lot of times that fear just comes and is masquerading as preparedness and there is no perfect time. There is no perfect time. Yep.

Zack Glaser:

Yeah. So get out there. Just

Bernadette Harris:

Get it done. Get yourself ready to

Zack Glaser:

Grow. Yeah. Yeah. Well, have confidence in yourself.

Bernadette Harris:

And you know what? This ties very closely to the conversation that you and Sam had because there are a lot of people who just say they’re not ready for AI.

Zack Glaser:

Right? Yeah. I’m not ready for AI to be here. My business isn’t ready to start using AI. I’m not ready to come

Bernadette Harris:

Back. Where are they refusing to use AI?

Zack Glaser:

Yeah. And you can. That’s fine. You can. I’m not going to, but are you doing it because of fear? Are you saying that you’re not ready because of fear? I like that, Bernadette. I like that a lot.

Bernadette Harris:

Yeah. Well, let’s listen to your conversation with Sam.

Zack Glaser:

Hey all. It’s Zack, the legal tech advisor here at Lawyerist, and I am here with Natalia from Posh, a virtual receptionist company. And we are talking about how virtual receptionists and all the stuff that actually kind of goes around that, because we’re not just talking about just somebody answering the phones, can help you in your law office. Natalia, thanks for being with me.

Natalia Rodriguez ·:

Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me.

Zack Glaser:

So I know I said we’re not just talking about just answering your phones because Posh is bigger and broader than just pick up the phone and say, “Hi, Glaser Law Firm,” or whatever, but that is a significant portion of what the value is for something like Posh because lawyers don’t always answer their phones. I know I didn’t when I was practicing, but even at a bare minimum, we’re not open twenty four seven.

Natalia Rodriguez ·:

And that’s a lot of the reason why we’re here. So more often than not, the fact is that attorneys are spending their time getting billable hours to stay profitable for what they do, to keep in productive work, that sort of thing. And so just with that being said, they don’t have time to do everything that they need to do with court and arbitrations or if they’re in a meeting and be able to pick up every single incoming call coming at the same time. And so that’s kind of where we can hop in a little bit because we’re essentially acting as the on- demand team of virtual receptionists for them. So it doesn’t have to be a full turn on or turn off. It can kind of be a little bit customizable to say, “Hey, I’m hopping into court. I just want you guys to take these calls for an hour or two hours until I’m out and then I’ll take my calls over again.”

Zack Glaser:

Okay. So it is more, like you said, customizable. We can kind of bring it in or not because according to Cleo’s most recent legal trends report, 48% of law firms, nearly half of law firms are not answering their phones when potential clients are calling. But I think a lot of times people are like, “Well, I’ve trained my person in my office to talk in my way,” and they’re hesitant to release that control. Talk to me a little bit about that, about how much control lawyers have with Posh turning it on, turning it off, and having scripts and things like that.

Natalia Rodriguez ·:

Yeah, absolutely. So everything is set and is customized to the firm specifically. The main objective being that we should sound like we are the in- house receptionist. We’re answering with the firm’s name, we know what they practice, what they handle, what is qualified, what’s not. We’re able to qualify those callers that are coming in and then route to an intake once we say, “Hey, this fits into the case types, this is what we’re looking for, ” then we can route at that point. So everything as far as how the receptionist is going to handle what they’re going to say, what they’ve referenced, that’s all tailored from the attorney from the firm themselves. It’s going to be specific to what they’re looking for and how they need things handled.

Zack Glaser:

I think this is a basic concept, but that’s with the attorney’s phone. That’s their business phone number. It’s not some other phone number or something like that. I call Zack Glaser Law Firm and if I don’t have Posh turned on at that time, my in- house receptionist might pick up or I might pick up because I was a very small firm or if I have it turned on, I’m in court, I’m in arbitration, I’m in something like that, then the people calling, they don’t know the difference.

Natalia Rodriguez ·:

Correct, correct. And that is the main point that they’re unable to tell the difference. And a lot of those times with the callers that are calling in, that can be anything from another attorney, a judge versus just a new client, existing client that’s calling in. And even our own customer data from what we have shows that 75% of calls that the law firms we have are getting are typically from a new client or an existing client, meaning that at least three out of the four calls you’re getting, you probably want to connect with. And a lot of times if we’re not connecting with them, they’re moving on, especially if that’s a new client, nobody’s waiting anymore these days and leaving a voicemail per call back, they’ll just move on. So we’re trying to ensure that we capture that as soon as it comes in.

Zack Glaser:

I love that inherent in that three out of four is our client and we want to talk to them is that one out of four is like another attorney and we do not want to talk to them. I don’t care if we get that. But talk to me about the potential clients. We’re not just saying like, “Hi, this is Zack Lazer Law Firm. Can I take a message?” What is it that the posh virtual receptionists are able to do for me in my firm there?

Natalia Rodriguez ·:

Absolutely. So the scope of work will range dependent on what each attorney, what each firm is looking for, but we can do message taking, call transferring, escalating to a paralegal or to the attorney that’s actually with the firm. And even if that’s specific to case types, specific to who’s calling, what the inquiry is, but it allows us to book appointments for you, book consultations. We can complete full intakes and we also do the outbound calling portion as well. So we do the inbound and outbound.

Zack Glaser:

Okay. Okay. So there is a little bit of like actually going and actively helping me book consultations and things like that, not just, “Oh, well, you either book it right now while I’m on the call or hopefully you call back.”

Natalia Rodriguez ·:

Correct. Yeah. And there’s a litle bit with it that can tailor to pre-qualify so that we’re not just booking and every person that calls in. But if this meets your criteria, this is what you handle. Okay, now we can proceed with booking. And if not, refer them out or take a message and send it to a specific attorney, but it’s able to customize a bit. And on top of that, we’re trying to take the workload off the attorney. So we’re able to integrate with a lot of CRMs and we’ve got direct integrations with Clio too.

Zack Glaser:

I wanted to get to that too. Y’all integrate with a lot of CRMs, but you also, I think it’s Clio, my case, I mean, obviously things can happen through Zapier or Zapier or however you want to say it, but y’all have an app that goes on the attorney’s phone and that’s how easy to use this is the ability, like I could literally be walking into court and go, “Okay, we’re turning Posh on. “

Natalia Rodriguez ·:

Correct. Yes. This is very user-friendly, very on the go. We’ve got a mobile app and an online portal. Both have got the same features, the same capabilities, and you are able to turn call porting on right from the Posh app. So you’re able to see those notifications that are coming in, you’re able to turn us on, you’re able to set a status and say, “Hey, I’m going into court for three hours. Let anybody who calls in know that I’ll call in back in three hours.” It can get as specific as you’d like it to. And again, very, very much on the go friendly and we can do email and SMS and things like that, but the actual application itself is going to allow you to have direct communication with the receptionist.

Zack Glaser:

Gotcha, gotcha. Okay. So let’s say that somebody wants to try out Posh. How do they do this?

Natalia Rodriguez ·:

For us, we have a 14-day free trial going on right now for lawyers, for attorneys just to get a good idea of how the service works, how everything feels prior to proceeding with a full plan. And you’re able to go to our website, that’s posh.com/lawyerist, or you can call 833 GitPosh, but you’re able to find us on any of those applications, websites, and just submit an inquiry, give us a call. We’ll be able to take it over from there and get everything set up. It’s a fairly easy process.

Zack Glaser:

Wonderful. Wonderful. Yeah, you guys are in the business of making things easy to connect with. Well, Natalia, thank you very much. I appreciate your time here talking to us about Posh virtual receptionists. And if anybody didn’t get that link, again, it’s posh.com/lawyerist and we will put a link to that in the show notes. Thank you again, Natalia.

Natalia Rodriguez ·:

Thanks, Brian, everybody.

Zack Glaser:

Claude for legal, as far as I can tell, and please correct me, don’t treat me like AI treats me, is a plugin that I can bring into my Claude platform. Talk to me about that.

Sam Harden:

I don’t know if people watching this remember, but I think it was about two months ago, maybe two and a half months ago, the Claude people released their legal plugin and it made all of the blogs, people on LinkedIn wrote a million posts about it.

Zack Glaser:

They were all brilliant.

Sam Harden:

Yeah, they were all amazing. I

Zack Glaser:

Read

Sam Harden:

Everyone-

Zack Glaser:

Every single one of them.

Sam Harden:

You all did great on your LinkedIn post.

The legal plugin was pretty basic, honestly. It was things like, here’s how you can get Claude to triage a non-disclosure agreement. When you say, use your NDA triage skill, here’s how you do a contract redline, things like that. But it was very basic. It was very generic. And I thought it was really interesting that people sort of went up in arms about it, I’ll put it that way, because it was so basic when you went in and looked at it, but it showed Claude’s ability to do complex tasks repeatedly according to a set of strong instructions. One of the things that Anthropic was clear on was this is not an end stage product. This is not something that we are releasing to compete with things like Ironclad, with Harvey, with Westlaw. That’s not our goal here. Our goal is to show you what’s doable inside a system like Claude and you should modify this to your own needs and requirements.

That’s what they have done with this, let’s call it Legal Plugin 2.0, whereas the Legal Plugin 1.0 was pretty basic and had just a couple of workflows in it. They released this new version of the legal plugin, which is only on GitHub right now. If you’re unfamiliar with GitHub, buckle in.

Zack Glaser:

Yeah. Stop being unfamiliar with GitHub. If you’re unfamiliar with GitHub, stop.

Sam Harden:

Yeah. And I had to go and pull it up while we were talking. It’s got many, many, many more workflows in it across different practice areas.

Zack Glaser:

There are 13 in the original one, just for context real quick. Yeah.

Sam Harden:

Yeah. So now we have an entire section for commercial legal that has let’s count the skills one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12 skills just in commercial. And it’s got one for intellectual property. It’s got one for litigation. It’s got one for privacy law, one for regulatory law, one for employment law, one for- And we’re

Zack Glaser:

Talking section, not skill, one section of skills that probably has 15 to 20. Yeah. It has law students.

Sam Harden:

So it’s law student. It’s got one for doing legal clinics at a law school.

Zack Glaser:

That’s how

Sam Harden:

Detailed they got.

Zack Glaser:

Cold call prep. Man.

Sam Harden:

Right.

Zack Glaser:

IRAC greater. Socratic drill sergeant. Oh my goodness. And so for those of you that want to follow along at home, we’re on gub.com/anthropics/clawd-four-legal and you go to the read-me of that and you can see all these things. We’re going to drop that link obviously in the show notes. Okay. So we’ve got loads and loads of new skills that are prepackaged. This was created from … I mean, Anthropic created these things and just were like, “Here you go. ” Okay, this is the scariest shit part. Do you have to be a lawyer to download this?

Sam Harden:

No.

Zack Glaser:

Hell no. You do not. You do not.

Sam Harden:

They can go and get it off GitHub.

Zack Glaser:

No

Sam Harden:

Matter who you

Zack Glaser:

Are. Hand grenades, man. Okay. Let’s use a real scenario here. I’m a business owner and I’m savvy because I know a lot of business owners that are savvy as hell. I mean, that’s why they’re owning their business and they’re smart and they’re able to do things. They just don’t always have the time to do stuff. And so they come in and they’re like, “Okay, well, here’s a leave tracker, here’s a hire reviewer, here’s a NDA triager.” So I just open up Zack Glazer’s widgets, Space Lease, Sprockets, and I’m like, “I want to deal with my own NDAs. I don’t have to get an attorney to do this, or I don’t have to take this to my attorney that I pay crap tons of money to. ” Oh my God. Okay. Here’s

Sam Harden:

The scarier thing.

Zack Glaser:

The

Sam Harden:

Scarier thing- Scary more. You’re that business owner. You don’t practice law. You go and say, “You know what? I’m firing my lawyer. I’m getting Claud for legal because I’ve heard it’s the next best thing since sliced bread or-

Zack Glaser:

Because my lawyer’s

Sam Harden:

Using it. Refrigerated milk.” Right. Yeah. Lawyers are talking all about this thing. So I’m going to use it and I’m going to get into a commercial dispute with this other business owner who guess what went and did the exact same thing. I guarantee you since Tuesday, that has happened somewhere.That’s

Zack Glaser:

Happened

Sam Harden:

In the world.

Zack Glaser:

Yeah. I guarantee you. So this is like legal Zoom, but with a little dude that’s like, “Do it. Get that contract. Review it with that guy.” And two legal Zoom people going back and forth. I want to be very clear really quickly though that I have fundamentally from a structural standpoint, I don’t have a problem with Lingal Zoom. The idea of getting knowledge out into the world and I don’t have a problem with this, the idea of getting legal knowledge out in the world and getting people self-help, but we as lawyers need to understand that that is a … It’s not just a possibility. Like you said, that’s happened. That has already happened. Two people have gone back and forth doing a vendor agreement reviewer using both of them using Claude for legal already. Yeah.

Okay. We are 29 minutes into the recording of this. Hopefully it hasn’t taken that long for those of you who are listening. You can always listen to the Lawyers Podcast on 1.5 or two times speed, which is what I do while I ride the Peloton as I review these things. Okay. What does this mean for me as an attorney? Let me just kind of recap here. We’ve got Claude, which can do some stuff and do some stuff, which can really change the world. Inside of Claude, we have connectors, which can connect me to Harvey or various things. And inside of Claude, we have skills and Claude Anthropic has just released this cash of skills that are all law related and a lot of lawyers are looking up and going, “Oh my God. So what does this mean for us?” I mean, I guess first, is this even really geared towards lawyers or is this geared towards companies?

Sam Harden:

The more I think about it, the more I think it’s kind of in the middle, but it really is-

Zack Glaser:

Oh, thanks for hedging, Sam. Thanks for … It

Sam Harden:

Depends. It

Zack Glaser:

Depends.

Sam Harden:

Happy to do it. It depends. It really is. It’s marketed toward lawyers. It’s if you read, if you go to GitHub, follow the link, look at the plugins, they are geared toward the way that lawyers work, right?

Zack Glaser:

Yeah.

Sam Harden:

So the other thing is Anthropic is not expecting, and they don’t want you to, I don’t think, to go in and install this and just start using it as is.

Zack Glaser:

Just out of the box.

Sam Harden:

Right. It’s not intended to be an off the shelf, out of the box tool. My suspicion is that they want people to use this to see how powerful their product is and modify these things to your specific needs. The way that the litigation section of the new legal plugin does things is probably not going to be the way that you, lawyer A, or C are doing your job right now.

And just because the legal plugin says this is how you could do it, doesn’t mean that you need to change your practice to fit the legal plugin’s way of doing it. It means that you need to figure out what’s working well for you and look at the legal plugin and say, how could this be modified to work the way I need it to work in my practice because I have my special way of doing things. I have my expertise. I have my secret sauce and I don’t want to just go back to this vanilla baseline of how to do things. I want to do things my firm’s way, whatever I have developed as part of my experience. I think that’s the most important thing.

Zack Glaser:

Can I build off of what exists here? Because I look at this and I’m somebody that builds skills and bots and agents all effing day. I have huge caches of skills and bots to do things. I don’t want to build all this stuff. Can I go in and manipulate this? Can I change it? Let’s take, for instance, the demand drafting skill inside of the litigation area. And again, if you want to follow along at home on GitHub, you can go into these things, you can look literally at what they’re like, this is open source. You can look literally at what this thing says. How do I go and make that mine if I want to change something or make it better?

Sam Harden:

The easiest way is just tell Claude, “Hey, I want you to change this. Here’s how I want you to change it. Tell me what it does. Tell me how this is going to go. Claude, show me. Show me how this works. Okay, great. Thank you, Claude. Now here’s how I do things. Can you change this so that it fits the way that I do things instead of the way that this said it would do things?”

Zack Glaser:

Oh, okay. So let’s say this again, as an example, I pull up the demand draft skill or I say, “Hey, Claude, I want to draft a demand letter and here’s my connection to SharePoint where my client files are. Here’s where the discovery is. Go into this discovery, look at it, and I want you to draft a demand letter for me. ” And then it drafts it. And then I look at this and I say, “I’m in Tennessee. I always want you to draft this with a Tennessee jurisdiction. Can you change that portion of the skill?” And it’ll go and change that portion of the skill or update or now we’ve tweaked it.

Sam Harden:

Yeah. I mean, you can get really involved here. I’ll give that caveat where you can go down this path of going back and forth with Claude on how to do and redo and redo things and it takes a lot of time. By no means am I saying this is an hour long project and then you’re set for life. It’s kind of like teaching a person.

When you were an associate’s act, when I was an associate, I was given a task and then I’d bring the end product back that got redlined and torn up and written all over and then I would take that back and I’d do it again. But I had learned, don’t do that, don’t do that other thing and slowly it got better. Think of it kind of that way where when you’re teaching Claude how to create or edit these skills, you’re looking at the end product or you’re looking at the process and saying, “Here’s how I need it to happen.”

Zack Glaser:

Grabbing these things just out of the box, going and grabbing Club for Legal. Yeah, cool. Neat. Also, we need to understand that businesses are going to go do this and try to take some shortcuts because people do that. But if I go in here and I grab it out of the box and I start tweaking it, messing with it, making more, because this is a ton of skills, but it is absolutely not all the skills that you will need for your firm. And so going in and making more skills, I want to go to a different place here or show how big of a deal this is because talk to me about sharing skills because I can make a skill and now I know that I can do the thing the same way that I would do it over and over and over, but I can share these across my company as well.

Talk to me about that a little bit.

Sam Harden:

So Claude has a feature now where if you’re on a, I’ll call it an organization plan, there’s Claude Team and Claude Enterprise, which are similar in this way. They’re for commercial enterprises. They’re very different than the personal pro, Claude Max, personal, whatever they’re calling it. The names change all the time, but it’s the corporate Claude. Let’s call it Corporate Claude.

Zack Glaser:

Corporate Claude, yeah.

Sam Harden:

You can create a skill in your Corporate Claude account and you now have the ability to share it with other users of that Corporate Claude account. So if somebody in the organization comes up with a really nice skill of how to do a task that a lot of people do, right? Let’s say you’re in a litigation firm and you have a pageline deposition summary skill that’s really nice for, I don’t know, employment discrimination cases. That skill, whoever created that skill can go in and say, “I’m going to share this with the other attorneys who practice in this area or the paralegals who practice in this area.” And then you avoid this problem that I anticipate where if you have a bunch of people creating their own skills to do the same thing, you’re going to have instead of a bunch of silos, which is the problem a lot of law firms have, is you’re going to have silos within silos.

You’re going to quadruple, double, triple your silo problem.

Zack Glaser:

Oh God, okay. Yeah.

Sam Harden:

Yeah. So shared skills can be key here in my opinion. They can really, really be very useful.

Zack Glaser:

But again, I need to plan. I need to plan that. I need to have some strategy with this. That seems to me to be one of the bigger things here is like, okay, you need to understand what this is and it can be very, very cool and very, very helpful. And I think you and I have talked about this concept before. I know we’ve talked about it with Ben Shore many times of if you just use AI to enhance a shitty process, it’s just going to do that process faster. And thankfully you’re finding out that it’s broken faster, but we’re doing this on such a speed and such a scale now that we really need to be thoughtful about what we’re doing. So that brings me to this idea of kind of orchestrate this in your office. I feel like you have to get, yes, Claude is there, Claude for legal is there, these skills are there.

And honestly, these skills can exist inside of Copilot. They can exist inside of various things. Skills are really just markup language SOPs, but I have to elevate myself out of that. I have to abstract above that and really plan what is going on across my company. Can you talk to me a little bit about that? Because I know you’re doing some strategic work with firms that we work with to get them up and running or started or really going with Claude. Talk to me about some of the strategy there.

Sam Harden:

Yeah. So I think it’s really tempting to take a look at Claude and take a look at the giant just arsenal of skills that they have published and think, I just need to implement all of these skills and

Natalia Rodriguez ·:

Then

Sam Harden:

I’m set. And I don’t think it works like that because you’re going to get really vanilla results as we talked about. You can also have Claude create skills for you, but don’t start with that. I think people need to start with

Thinking through how they actually work day-to-day right now and kind of mapping things out, working through a visual representation even on a piece of printer paper with a pencil of the workflows that happen in their office. Because if they don’t do that, you’re going to end up with five versions of the same skill because you didn’t like the way one worked. You’re going to have different people in your office with similar skills. You’re going to have really disjointed processes. It’s really easy to get down the rabbit hole rabbit trail, whatever that term is, garden path off in the woods is the thing there. If you don’t start out with some sort of a plan, that’s what I think is the most important thing is having a plan before you go in and start just making a bunch of skills to do different things.

Zack Glaser:

Well, okay. So yes, I need to plan my SOPs. I need to plan how do I work and all that. And frankly, you and I have talked about using Claude or something like that in order to help you plan your SOPs. But again, we get really meta in some places, but it feels like I need to plan some things structurally as well because again, we’re talking about a lot of connectors. So going back to last episode, we’ve got skills, we’ve got connectors, we’ve got plugins, the connectors are the things that connect Claude from one thing to another. There probably I would imagine needs to be some planning of how to do that, how to connect our data, our information, our claude to various things. I’m

Sam Harden:

Going to jump metaphors here and imagine you have a house and you decide you want to put a bathroom and an addition on your house. You haven’t looked at where do the pipes in my house actually come from? Where do the electrical wires run in the walls or under the floor in the attic? And you start and your friend, the builder, Claude, you and Claude build a bunch of skills, the bathroom creation skill, the addition creation skill,

Natalia Rodriguez ·:

But you

Sam Harden:

Haven’t figured out how is Claude going to wire things up to electricity? How is Claude going to actually get water into the bathroom and where is the water going to go when it leaves the bathroom? That I think is kind of how to think about it where you have to figure out what data you can get and what data you can send to different places because otherwise you’re going to be hauling water around in buckets from your new edition. You’re going to be using Claude and then going and taking what Claude has done and putting it in another place and you’re just going to be adding another process that you don’t like. So that’s exactly what you said. You have to figure out where the data comes from and where it goes. You have to figure out those connections and how they interface together.

Zack Glaser:

If you’re listening to this on just audio, you can see this is one of those moments where my face was just like, my mind is kind of blown. This is a phenomenal metaphor I think for this because so many times we go into Claude and we either grab a new skill or we’ve created a skill or something and it creates this beautiful bathroom, this amazing renovated bathroom and it’s gorgeous on its own and it looks like total trash compared to the rest of the house. You’ve got this beautiful art deco bathroom and what is it they say? Is it deco that looks like it’s built by elves? Oh, I don’t know. Or is it-

Sam Harden:

Art Nuveo maybe?

Zack Glaser:

Yeah, nuvo is by elves and deco is by dwarves, but right? AI is going to tell me to cut this piece, but hopefully it doesn’t come out. So you’ve got this bathroom, it’s gorgeous on its own. You’ve got this thing that you create. It’s beautiful. It’s wonderful art deco and then the next room next to it. Again, beautiful, beautiful, but it’s art nouveau. And then you go into ’70s and it’s this perfect representation of this moment in time. But when you look at it, this whole house is just a patchwork of trash. And if you put that type of thing into your practice, you wind up giving people contracts or output that is this just like patchwork of trash. How do I as a lawyer go about practically starting to think about this though? Because I know you’ve thought about this a tremendous amount.

Sam Harden:

I think you have to have two levels of understanding in a weird way. You have to be able to see the entire process kind of from top down in my opinion

And see where does the process start and where does the process end and all the little pieces in between just from a top down perspective, like you’re looking down on, do you remember Sim City, you’re looking down on Sim City, you’re watching the little people walk around and then you also have to understand how things fit together in a way. So what needs to happen for step B that it gets from step A, what needs to happen in step D that it got from step B and C? So seeing those two things together and I would love to be able to say, go into Claude and just have at it, create all the skills you want because it’s all going to work out great. You’re going to have, like you mentioned, Zack, you’re going to have a big house with a bunch of different stuff in it with a 1980s style bathroom connected to an art deco living room with a, I don’t know, those are the two styles I know.

Zack Glaser:

Those are the styles.

Sam Harden:

Yeah. The kitchen that doesn’t look right. The far house kitchen. You have a board that goes nowhere.

Zack Glaser:

Yeah.

Sam Harden:

Yeah. So you have to be able to figure out those connections.

Zack Glaser:

Yeah. So I don’t do this for law firms as much, but I do this for a lot of our output. And I think in terms of being able to design modules, being able to design and I think this is it, what is the Zack Glaser way? What is the Zack Glaser system? I’m really quickly able to spin up website content for our website right now because I’ve decided what are the little modules of how we do it? What does a button look like? Obviously we have our colors and things like that, but what do these certain cards look like? And I think that’s not the way I think there are a lot of attorneys that think that way, but I think that’s not the way that a tremendous amount of attorneys think though, but it is kind of like, what is your system? What is your way?

And that is exciting to me. I don’t know if it is to other people out there, but that’s exciting to me, but it’s again, not something that we as lawyers do in creating that.

But okay, so this kind of gets me to that. I would be remiss if I didn’t ask you about Claw Firm stuff about the concept of … So again, the first thing we talked about here in the previous episode was Claud as a thing. And then we discussed what plugins were, what skills were, what connectors were. And then there’s a specific set of plugins that are Claud for legal and it’s robust. It’s huge. We’re going to have it. We’ll put the link again in the show notes. But the goal here in some ways is how much can I do with this? If I can connect this, if I’ve got these connectors and I’ve got these skills and I can make any skill that I want, am I just bound by my SOP imagination?

Sam Harden:

I mean, it’s really exciting to me too because I don’t think we’re just scratching the surface at this point. When I talk to law firms about this stuff, I always say all of this is very new. This has not existed. This is not something that existed when I was in law school a very long time ago. It’s not something that existed when I was practicing. And it’s exciting because it’s new and it is able to take a lot of the things that I think people think of as grunt work away. I think back to when I was practicing in litigation, how many times I copied and pasted things into forms because we had to have like, well, you got to have these five things and they’re all the same except for this one part. Stuff like that over and over and over. And in the back of my head, I was thinking, did I go to law school to do word processing and inform creation?

All that stuff I studied, all the stuff I wanted to do, is that really like the end goal here is to create a bunch of forms and then sign them or hand them off or send them up the chain as part of a process. And I think what we’re seeing is the ability of technology to really and truly take some of that stuff off our plate and let us focus in on what is the way that I want to do things when I interact with my clients? What is the way that I can add value to them when they ask me their legal questions? How can I be there for my clients to help them overcome a problem or understand the situation or negotiate some sort of deal that they’re doing? How can I be more involved with them? I think that’s exciting for me.

That is getting to the core of being a practicing lawyer, a counselor. And that’s what excites me, honestly, about this stuff. It’s not the ability to, oh man, I’m so excited about automating these forms. I’m excited about automating the forums because I don’t want to do the forms. I don’t want to type things into the same kind of thing over and over all day. That’s not what I want to do. I want to let Claude or whatever system do that. And I want to do lawyer stuff. I want to practice at the top of my license.

Zack Glaser:

Ooh, I love that. Practice at the top of my license. We’re talking about Claude and Claude for legal in this episode in the previous episode, but that’s platform agnostic. That’s just kind of, let’s use technology to serve our clients better. I love that. Okay. Wrapping up here though, this one has already gone two episodes when it was supposed to be one. So we’ll try not to go three or we’ll go three if people want it, but we won’t intentionally do it. What should firms be experimenting with right now?

Sam Harden:

I think firms need to understand what’s possible with Claude. It’s as much as I want people to listen to this episode and get a lot out of it, don’t listen to this episode and go, “Man, I bet Claude’s really cool.” And that Claude, we should look at it someday. If you want to figure out what Claude can do, the best way is to do some experimentation. I add the caveat safely, understand your ethical obligations, understand confidentiality, but figure out what Claude can do by testing it out on some very basic scenarios and work

Natalia Rodriguez ·:

From

Sam Harden:

There. I preached about the need to understand your workflows and skills and how they fit in and workflows first, but I do think there’s room for and a need for experimentation on how can I create a simple skill that does something and then it starts to click, right? Then I understand what these things do and I can take a step back and go, “Now I understand how skills work. Let me look at my workflow and see where that can take things off my plate or automate a process that I have.

Zack Glaser:

” What did you, because I know that you have some things, what did you play with safely? And I’ll make my suggestion really quick. I like to use the Matrix screenplay as an example of something that I can upload into any AI platform and I can make queries against it and things like that. But I know you and I have both vibe coded some things and just played around. What are some examples of things that you played with that lets you get an idea of these things safely?

Sam Harden:

I use things that are public record. So pieces of legislation are really, really good

Natalia Rodriguez ·:

To

Sam Harden:

Play with, especially if you’re looking at ways to do analysis. And I kind of invent … I know I’m saying the word role play, but I’m playing the role of a different kind of attorney. Maybe my imaginary client is worried about dram shop liability. So I go and get some legislation that has to do with the liability of restaurant and license holders that can serve alcohol and have it do some analysis on that, write a client update. Don’t just do the analysis, do the analysis, send it to me, have me check off on it, and then use a skill to put it in the form of a client update that I can then put on my website and you can kind of see where things can go from there or make up a fake scenario that has nothing to do with your clients, your cases, but is kind of in your practice area and see what AI can do with it.

That’s a good way to experiment safely. I don’t think it’s wise to get a free ChatGPT license and then go, “Man, I’m going to dump all my stuff in there.” Don’t do that. Please, please. I

Zack Glaser:

Think you hedged more than we need to. Don’t do that. It is not wise. Don’t do that.

Sam Harden:

Don’t, please, please.

Zack Glaser:

Oh man. Well, Sam, I think that’s great advice. I think there are a lot of attorneys that have public law or code or things that they can look at that are out there in the public sphere that they could easily do that with. Well, Sam, thank you for talking with me about Claude, Claude for Legal, AI, Claw Firms, all these things. And I look forward to chatting with you about these things in the future. If people want to hear more from you, they can go onto our Affinity ThoughtHub YouTube channel. They can go to our lawyerist YouTube channel and where else can they find you? You’ve got a Substack, don’t you?

Sam Harden:

I have a Substack that I’ve been neglecting. I have a piece kind of in draft that I need to write, but it’s called Team Do Something. If you just look for Substack under my name, you’ll find it. That’s where I dump a lot of my hairbrained ideas into that Substack.

Zack Glaser:

The things not fit for print, right? No. I read Sam’s Substack all the time and then they can also find you on LinkedIn. We’ll put all the links to how to find Sam because if you’re listening to this, you should follow him. He’s a good guy, knows his stuff. Sam, once again, thank you.

Sam Harden:

Yeah, thank you.

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