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Workflow Options: Claude for Legal and Strongsuit · AI Tools for Practicing Lawyers

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Connectors and plugins and skills, oh my.
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_00: The AI world is rapidly evolving from just on-off prompting to repeatable AI workflows.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_00: We're going to unpack that during this workflow options episode.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_00: Lawyers are moving from just typing isolated prompts into a chat bot towards selecting reusable presets, loading documents, and launching structured workflows that repeatedly will produce motions and contracts, financial analysis.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: ChatGPT gave me a whole laundry list, checklists, onboarding systems, emails, research, you name it.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: AI is going to do it on a persistent workflow basis.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_00: Increasingly, these workflows live inside, and here's a writer-downer, persistent AI environments where the system remembers instructions, workflows, matter context, and repeatable processes.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: An important point is that AI is evolving from just stateless conversations that live in isolated context to persistent work environments.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_00: This is why you hear Jetson's lawyers declaring on LinkedIn that prompting is so 2025.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_00: Workflow prompting is increasingly being seen as inferior to skills and markdown creation.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: So the company leading this charge most aggressively right now is anthropic.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_00: And we saw that in a very big way in its newly released Claude for Legal Initiative, which is 22 connectors, 12 plugins, MCP architecture.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: We're going to talk a little bit about what that is, and persistence co-work workspaces.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: But while Claude's legal strategy is aimed squarely at big law enterprise firms and large in-house departments, other companies are taking a really different path.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_00: One example is Strongsuit, which is a specialty AI platform focused specifically on divorce and family law workflows.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_00: And the contrast between those two approaches may tell us quite a lot about where legal AI is actually heading.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: All right, so let's talk about prompts to presets.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_00: And this is one of the most important conceptual points here and really in the entire AI world.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_00: The AI world is moving beyond one-off prompting.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_00: Because since the launch of large language models, lawyers interacted with AI like typing into a prompt box, write me a demand letter, or summarize this case, or draft a motion with these parameters.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_00: But more and more developers and legal engineers and plenty of sophisticated lawyers believe that repeatable workflows are better.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_00: And it's pretty obvious why.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_00: They provide consistency, structure, repeatability.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_00: So now this is where we're seeing phrases like skills, GPTs, gems, plugins, and presets enter the picture.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_00: So let's spend a couple of minutes defining what these terms mean.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_00: And by understanding what they are, you'll be able to move forward more intelligently within the AI universe.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_00: So let's talk about some connectors.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_00: API.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_00: That's a way for software systems to communicate.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_00: An example is practice management software, talking to DocuSign, or just moving data points in between different tools.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_00: Then there's just the concept of a connector.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: Certainly an API is a connector.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_00: Connector is any bridge that allows an AI to access outside systems.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_00: For example, there are connectors allowing AI to look at a Google Drive or Outlook or iManage or Net Documents or Westlaw or the Free Law Project, Trellis, DocuSign.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_00: And I list this group of tools because in Claude's Claude for Legal Initiative, they mentioned that these are connectors that are now going to be available for use on its platform.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_00: Without connectors, AI is really trapped in its own little world.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_00: That brings us to a phrase called MCP, which is model, context, protocol.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_00: This is Anthropic's effort to standardize how AI connects to outside tools and environment.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_00: It's a much beefier connection because it allows AI to control the connected to tools instead of just trading data back and forth with it.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_00: Claude didn't invent MCPs.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_00: Some time ago, Google launched an open source MCP for its Google Drive so that a lot of AI tools can connect to your Google Drive and look and see what's there so that it can work within that environment.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_00: Doesn't have to pull all those documents up into the AI environment.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_00: And we talked at length about this concept in the folder mania episode.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_00: Then there's the concept of a plug-in.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_00: Plugin is a packaged workflow capability.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_00: It can combine a lot of the different connectors, it can combine workflows, it combines skills, which we haven't talked about yet, and interfaces and automations.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_00: An example is you could have a DocuSign workflow.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_00: You could be working in AI and then say, bring a DocuSign workflow into what we're working on so that when we spit out the final output, the user will be able to get it signed in the DocuSign environment.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_00: Legal research workflows, you're working in AI, and you know, hallucinations aside, you tell the AI, I want you to pull down some cases from Westlaw that are relevant to what we're talking about here.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_00: And again, we're not going to talk about hallucinations today, but that's naturally a danger that you're going to get.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_00: But still, it's intensely helpful to be able to do your legal research from within the AI environment.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_00: Now we get to something that's really critically important, which are skills or GPTs or gems.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_00: And these are different phrases for the same thing.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_00: OpenAI and ChatGPT, they call these items that we're going to talk about in a second GPTs.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_00: Google calls them gems.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_00: Anthropic calls them skills.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_00: In anthropic or in Claude, they live within projects.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_00: But what these all are gems, skills, GPTs, are reusable AI behavior systems.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_00: So what is Claude for legal?
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_00: Claude is trying to become a legal workflow environment, not merely a chatbot.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_00: It's creating all these plugins that can help attorneys in different practice areas output finished projects on a repeatable basis.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_00: It means if you've got a workflow that comes up repeatedly in your practice.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_00: For example, creating a client service agreement when you're intaking a new client.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_00: That's a repeatable workflow.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_00: You're going to go through that process more or less the same way every time.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_00: If you've got a plug-in that's connected to that, it's going to make it much easier.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_00: And it's going to operate on a more elevated basis than just pulling out a form, filling in the new data to override the old data, and then using that document in the normal course of your practice.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_00: While saying that sounds pretty easy, there's actually a fair amount of friction to that.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_00: Because, for example, you could have a client service agreement that is for a single client.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_00: You could have one that's for joint clients.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_00: You could have one that's for a corporation.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_00: And you could have several different forms and either pick out the right form or use one form and change it around a little bit.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_00: Make sure that the data in the prior usage of that form is gone and only the new data is in there.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_00: By using an AI skill, you eliminate all of those dangers because the AI is going to know when you upload data into that persistent workflow that it's a husband and wife, or it's an individual, or if it's a business, or if it's chapter seven, or it's if it's a chapter 13, or if it's a state court litigation, or federal court litigation, you could use one skill for all of these different forms.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_00: And it really is a revolutionary way to go about managing your work.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_00: So Claude is trying to create that environment of repeated workflows using these plugins, connectors, and MCP infrastructure so it can go and talk to these other tools, the persistent workspaces, and the reusable workflows.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_00: Unfortunately, Claude for Legal's a little bit mislabeled because everybody knows that 50 to 75% or more of law firms are solos or small firms of one, two, or three lawyers.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_00: That is not anthropics target market.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_00: It's looking to big law, in-house departments, enterprise legal environments.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_00: For example, they they had this big launch on Zoom and they showed an MA demo with enterprise integrations and workflow assumptions and infrastructure requirements all way beyond the scope of most small firms that have their practice area, that's dealing with consumers or small businesses.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_00: Not a whole lot of solo practitioners or two lawyer firms are doing complicated MA type transactions.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_00: So that's really what Claude is trying to reach.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_00: That's why they listed connectors to iManage, Net Documents, Thomson Reuters, Co-Counsel, and Harvey.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_00: Anthropic is simultaneously competing with and connecting to platforms like Harvey.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_00: We did the Harvey FOMO episode.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_00: It's beyond the scope of small law firms.
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_00: But you know what?
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_00: There's lots of tools that are beyond the scope of small law firms.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_00: And while I initially felt a certain kind of a way about Claude's launch, Anthropic is entitled to reach the market it wants to reach.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_00: And who knows, maybe someday it it will try to come back to smaller firms.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_00: You could still use Claude Pro with these plugins.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_00: You got to be super careful because it's not three-legged stool compliant.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_00: You don't want to put confidential client information up into Claude Pro.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_00: But you can use these plugins where it might be appropriate.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_00: There's one last phrase that I want to talk about, and that is markdown workflows.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_00: A few months ago, if you'd asked me what a markdown workflow was, I would have had to shrug my shoulders.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_00: But while working through my podcast and researching AI tools, I came upon repeated workflows myself.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I I finish recording, I get a trans, I get a transcript, I upload a document.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_00: Let's say I've been using Ivory Mind to get transcripts.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_00: Then I feed the transcript into uh ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_00: I prompt, please give me show notes and give me LinkedIn blurbs and other things that I'm going to need to move forward with publishing an episode.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_00: And what I realized was that I was doing this over and over and over again.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_00: So Claude helped me create a persistent workflow for my podcast.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_00: And what's wonderful about these markdown workflows, you could have them created by your AI.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_00: You don't have to learn markdown language.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_00: You could walk through this with your AI.
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_00: This is like learning AI from AI, the the I Wanna Hold Your Hand field note that we just released.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_00: But once you have this markdown file, and you could tell it's markdown because instead of having like dot PDF or dot DOC or dot txt at the end, it has.md.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_00: And you can execute a dot MD workflow from any of the big frontier tools.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_00: You could do it through Claude, you could do it through Chat GPT, you could do it through Gemini, and that's really cool.
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_00: And you could have different outputs.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_00: It's not going to be identical outputs because each of these tools has its own language and has its own personality.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_00: And has its own personality based upon the user's prior use of it.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_00: So you will get different outputs, but you can use those.md files in any of these frontier tools.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_00: These plugins are open source.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_00: So an enterprising solo could theoretically adopt them for his or her practice, but that's going to be a lot of effort.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_00: And for now, the juice may not be worth the squeeze.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_00: So let's not write Anthropic off for smaller firms just yet.
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_00: You can still use Consumer Claude for many purposes, but again, Consumer Claude Pro is not three-legged stools compliant for confidential legal data.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_00: All right, I've spent a lot of time talking about Claude for Legal, but it deserved it because it's a big development moving from solo chat box to coordinated choreographed plugins and workflows.
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_00: But there's another approach that a lot of developers are doing, which is instead of building these big configurable ecosystems, which is what Claude is trying to do, there's tools like StrongSuit, which says, here's your divorce workflow.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's got to be, you know, three-legged stool compliant.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_00: And it looked to me like it's trying to be SOC 2 compliant, no trading of its models.
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_00: It's important to make sure that it can be configured on the IT leg of the stool.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_00: It assures me that it can.
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_00: I have not done separate investigation.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_00: For the time being, we're going to assume that it can, but you must, if you're going to consider bringing it into your workflow, you must verify that on your own.
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_00: But by uploading bank statements, tax returns, and similar financial documents, Strong Suit will do a forensic financial analysis to identify affair spending, gambling patterns, suspicious transfers, asset concealment patterns.
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, this is extremely lawyer native.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_00: Plus, there are all these guided drafting presets, parenting plans, marital settlement agreements, financial affidavits, divorce complaints, petitions, and more.
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_00: And the user interface, the UI, is very clean and very easy to navigate.
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_00: They've got these boxes that they set up in one of their tabs.
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_00: And you just click on the box, and the box is labeled marital settlement agreement or financial affidavit.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_00: And you click on that box and you feed the information to the AI, and it will output the document you're looking for persistently.
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, you can upload your own prior forms and you can configure and tailor and upgrade that environment to make it a little bit more you-friendly.
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_00: So, but the the important thing is that tools like Claude for Legal and tools like Strongsuit are fighting blank prompt box anxiety.
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_00: You look at a blank page and you say, What do I do?
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_00: Where do I go?
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_00: And that was that was something that the uh big law associates talked a lot about in our episode on how big law associates are dealing with legal drafting and using AI.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_00: They mainly are using it to battle blank page anxiety.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_00: And these presets help battle blank prompt box anxiety because thinking and fretting and worrying about how you're going to fill up that page or how are you going to intelligently populate that prompt gives real friction.
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_00: And presets, especially tools like StrongSuit, that tailor their UI to relieving that anxiety, provide real value.
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_00: And StrongSuit has a workflow visibility.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_00: Users can see the stages of the AI thought process, the categories, the analysis, the workflows, the tasks, and the progress.
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_00: And knowing what's going on and how it's moving forward matters a lot psychologically for lawyers.
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_00: The AI market may just split into two parallel tracks.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_00: There's the enterprise ecosystem platforms like Claude or Harvey or Enterprise Orchestration or even tools like Gemini in the Google ecosystem and copilot in the Microsoft ecosystem.
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_00: Just join the ecosystem and let it carry you forward.
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_00: The other one is more of a vertical workflow tool like Strongsuit, like litmus.ai, like Glade.ai for bankruptcy, which are specialty practice AI guided legal workflows.
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_00: When you're considering the product or the tool for your practice, you may want to just think in terms of, well, do I want to buy into an ecosystem?
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_00: Or do I just need this one tool to handle this one category of work?
• 21:31
  SPEAKER_00: So the future of legal AI may not belong to the smartest model.
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_00: It may belong to the platforms and workflows and presets and persistent AI environments that reduce the most friction for practicing lawyers.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_00: Lawyers should focus less on the fanciest AI tools and more on identifying workflow bottlenecks and pain points in their practice.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: This is Ron Drescher, and this is AI Tools for Practicing Lawyers.
• 22:04
  SPEAKER_00: We'll see you at the next episode.