From Chat to Cowork: How In-House Lawyers Are Building AI Workflows

Let me start with what I hear most from in-house lawyers on using AI. Some version of: "I know how to use Claude as a chat. I've even put in time to get decent at prompting. But everyone's suddenly vibe-coding and shipping agents, and I have no idea where to start and no time to figure it out."

I know it feels like every lawyer is now a developer and pushing code on the weekends and you're stuck in 2023 typing questions into a chat box. But many people are exactly where you are. And here's the genuinely good news: the tools got so good, so fast, that much of the headache you were dreading (learning to code, wrangling infrastructure) evaporated before you ever had to suffer through it. You didn't fall behind. You waited out the worst of it!

One GC told me, only half-jokingly, that what they really needed was to be locked in a room and told exactly what to do.

So we didn't lock anyone in a room. But we did host a Claude for Legal: In-house Edition webinar where four in-house lawyers walked through the workflows they've built using AI.

Why Chat Isn't Enough on Its Own

Mark Pike, Associate General Counsel at Anthropic, put it directly: "A lot of lawyers stop there. They just ask a question, get a response, and think that's the bulk of what AI can do."

The problem with chat isn't that it's bad. In fact, it can be incredibly useful for quick one-offs – rewrite this message or explain this regulation in plain English. But it’s the wrong tool for anything requiring sustained context or multi-step work.

The better mental model: if you'd ask a colleague a question in the hallway, that's chat. But some problems don't fit in a hallway conversation, and that's where the real leverage starts.

Asking versus assigning. That distinction separates practitioners getting real leverage from those still treating Claude like enhanced Google.

The First 45 Minutes, Automated

Heather Stevenson, General Counsel at Red Cell Partners, was spending 45 minutes to an hour every morning just sorting through email. She built a solution in about 15 minutes.

Using Cowork, Claude's tool that can connect to other systems, she set up a triage briefing that scans her inbox and Slack each morning, prioritizes items by urgency, flags carry-forward items, and delivers a structured summary before her day starts. It runs automatically at 8am every weekday.

Cowork isn't a chat window. It drafts documents, analyzes your systems, and runs scheduled tasks asynchronously. The question to ask yourself: would I assign this to a junior colleague? If yes, it probably belongs in Cowork.

Context You Don't Have to Re-Explain

What makes Cowork sustainable is Projects – persistent workspaces where your playbooks, contracts, policies, and internal guidance live permanently, so Claude isn't starting from scratch each session.

Roman Perchyts, General Counsel at airSlate, has six product teams moving at growth-stage pace, all generating requests that carry legal implications. By the time they reached him, decisions had often already been made. So, he built a product review agent loaded with airSlate's policies and competitor benchmarks that scans a designated Slack channel, runs a preliminary analysis, and delivers a pre-researched memo before he's even looked at the message.

"By the time you touch it," he said, "there's some work that's already been done."

Writing the Procedure Down Once

Projects hold context. Skills hold process. A skill is a procedure you write once in plain language and Claude runs the same way every time, regardless of who's prompting.

A marketing claims review, a vendor risk assessment, a contract redline checklist: build it once as a skill and it runs consistently whether you, a team member, or a new hire triggers it.

Anthropic launched 12 open-source (Apache 2.0) legal plugins covering use cases from in-house product review to law firm work. Roman started with that foundation, then spent a few minutes enriching it — feeding in airSlate's privacy policy, DPA, and public competitor data. "It went from a plugin 101 that knows everything but nothing in specific," he said. "Now it kind of knows airSlate."

By design, the plugins are a starting point. Treat them like a junior attorney and onboard them into your company's specifics.

Grounding the Output in Your Actual Work

Shaun Sethna, CLO of The L Suite, described himself as "incredibly, incredibly disorganized." (This is a direct quote and his words, not mine. I will neither confirm nor deny.) His contract repository was a spreadsheet – with file name, date signed, a link. No CLM. No playbooks. He gave Claude Code access to that archive and his email history and let it run for about an hour. It generated 12 contract playbooks from his actual negotiating history, including the back-and-forth in email threads and the rationale in document comments.

Then he connected the Lloyd MCP, The L Suite's connector to its member platform, to benchmark the playbooks of his positions against over a decade of peer GC knowledge from the community. "You can click here and it comes to a thread on the Braintrust that shows what the actual discussion was," he said. "It's not just making things up, it's taking you back to the Braintrust."

"You're essentially asking for help from 2,500 other GCs and their teams without wrestling with the imposter syndrome that you might get if you were to actually ask 2,500 GCs."

So Where Do You Start?

Every single practitioner said the same thing: pick one small use case, get it working, build from there. You don’t need a formal plan. Heather's version for anyone hesitant: open a personal Claude account and try things with nothing sensitive first. Roman framed it as compound interest: "Start early, stay invested, and the returns compound."

That's the message. You don't need to be locked in a room. You need a problem in search of a solution, fifteen minutes, and the reminder that the starting line is wherever you are right now — which, I promise, is not behind.

This post draws on a live practitioner session from The L Suite's Claude for Legal In-House Edition webinar (Part 1), featuring Mark Pike (Associate General Counsel, Anthropic), Heather Stevenson (General Counsel, Red Cell Partners), Roman Perchyts (General Counsel, airSlate), and Shaun Sethna (CLO, The L Suite).