How I run a law firm with a tool made for software developers
I run a small law firm in Sydney, Jake McKinley. About twelve months ago I started using Claude Code, a tool made for software developers, to do legal work. On paper that makes no sense. In practice it became something I rely on most days.
The reason it works is dull but important. It runs on my own machine and reads the files where they already sit. I point it at a folder of documents and it works on them there. I am not pasting confidential material into the cloud, and that alone is what got me comfortable using it on real matters.
What Claude Code actually is
Claude Code is a command-line tool. You work in a terminal window and type instructions rather than clicking around a website or app. We run it on our own server in the office. That server also runs a local AI model, which we use for inference alongside the Claude API, so a fair amount of the work happens on our own hardware.
Making sense of the document dump
Almost every matter starts the same way. The client or the other side hands over evidence in whatever shape it happens to be in: email archives, scanned PDFs, message files, photos of receipts and remittances. Before I can advise anyone, I have to turn that pile into something readable.
This is the job I now hand over first, to an app I created called Gemextract. It converts everything to markdown, pulls the attachments out of the emails, and builds one register of every document, each with a unique ID, sorted by type rather than by where it came from. Work that used to take a paralegal the better part of a week is done before my coffee is cold.
A fast first read of a file
Once the documents are in order, I ask for a plain summary of what is actually there. On a recent acquisition I had it work through the due diligence bundle and report on the risks. On other files I have asked the blunt commercial questions a client really wants answered: whether a claim is strong enough, and whether it is worth spending the money to chase it.
The writing around the work
A surprising amount of legal work is the writing that surrounds the legal work: file notes, emails back to clients, internal memos to open a file or to get documents drafted, a run sheet before a meeting, a letter of demand. I can take a note and have a file note and a draft email back to the client within a few minutes, ready for me to check and send.
Drafting and checking against my own precedents
I keep my own precedents and I am particular about them. I use the tool to draft to those precedents, whether that is a will, a shareholder agreement, a set of board resolutions or a costs agreement. I also use it the other way around, taking an existing draft and checking it for errors.
Research and a fact-check before anything goes out
Last, and the part I would not work without. I have it check our knowledge graph for case law, legislation and the rules, and I make it fact-check its own drafts and tell me where it is unsure.
The longest-running example was a public-interest case we took on largely pro bono. The research load was heavy: government information bundles to work through, authorities to verify, the relevant legislation to pin down exactly. I had it check the case law against a database rather than trust its own memory, and pull documents straight from the parliamentary API, so I was reading the current text and not a paraphrase.
How a new matter starts
After the first meeting I hand it my notes from that meeting and whatever the client has provided, and it drafts the lot in one pass: the formal file note, a memo to my team to open the matter in LEAP, the costs disclosure, and a memo to the solicitor working with me on the file, setting out the next steps. The half-day of intake admin that used to follow every new client is largely done by the time the client has left the building.
How I run it, day to day
The way I use it is straightforward once you have seen it. I keep a separate terminal window open for each matter. I use Git Bash, a free terminal for Windows. To start on a matter I point the terminal at that matter's folder on the server and open Claude Code there. That is two short commands:
The first command moves into the folder for that matter. The second opens Claude Code there. The continue flag picks up the last conversation in that folder, so when I come back to a matter a week later it still has the context and I carry on instead of starting over. The skip-permissions flag tells it not to pause and ask me to confirm every step. The name is a warning, and I run it that way only because it is our own controlled server. One window per matter means I can keep several open at once and move between them through the day.
Finding annexures for an affidavit
Litigation throws up one job that eats time like nothing else: going back through thousands of emails to find the handful of documents that have to be annexed to an affidavit. I export the mailbox material with Microsoft Purview, then have Claude write a small script to pull out exactly the documents I need, in the order I need them. A day of someone scrolling through a mailbox becomes a few minutes, and it is done the same way every time.
Reviewing the team's work
When one of the solicitors I am supervising sends me a document to review, I usually put Claude over it first and send it back with a memo of what I have found, before I sit down to review it myself. The junior gets useful feedback quickly, and my own review starts from a sharper position rather than cold.
The one job it is not allowed to do
Affidavits are where I am most careful. The Supreme Court's practice note on generative AI does not allow the tool to generate the content of an affidavit or a witness statement, and the reason is sound: the evidence has to be the witness's own. So the memo can flag the gaps, the inconsistencies and the places where the evidence does not line up with the documents, but the drafting stays with the solicitor and the witness.
We have built a reminder into the system, so that when it detects an affidavit being worked on, it raises the practice note before anything else happens.
What it gives back
What it has taken away is the grind: the sorting, the converting, the first drafts, the hours that never felt like lawyering. I get those hours back and spend them on the work clients are actually paying me to do.