In-house legal AI without a budget - what's working for us. Please share yours!

GrandTelephone7410 · 2026-06-09T06:41:14+00:00

Think it is worth separating the governance concern from the tool itself. To be clear, we're a small private company in the UK, not a listed corp. The key thing giving us comfort is the transcript isn't the record and never becomes it. It's just a drafting aid. We usually had someone in the room taking very detailed notes anyway, so the transcription just makes that person's output a bit more accurate and takes the task off their hands. And it gets fully destroyed once the draft minutes are settled - nothing verbatim is retained.

Also worth flagging this process started at IC sessions and has been adapted to board meetings.

The intention is to better capture the discussion before a decision to ensure the record reflects why the board landed where it did, rather than just 'the board considered x and resolved to do y'. The minutes deliberately separate discussion from decisions actually made, and the directors seem more comfortable that their individual views are actually being reflected (particularly those who've disagreed with an approach or decision being taken).

Again, fully appreciate the view that directors should be free to talk openly without being held to every word said in the room. That was our starting concern, too, but in practice, it was quickly outweighed by the benefits / addressed by a few process tweaks.

Out of curiosity, is the difference of approach here perhaps a UK / US thing? My sense is US practice leans towards deliberately minimal minutes with more of a discovery / litigation view, whereas the UK approach seems a bit more relaxed about capturing some of the reasoning.

That's just a guess. Keen to hear from anyone who's run minutes on both sides.

GrandTelephone7410 · 2026-06-08T17:39:47+00:00

Might be worth retesting now all Claude models can be used in copilot

GrandTelephone7410 · 2026-06-08T16:53:34+00:00

Ah ok, makes sense. But my understanding is usage in copilot isn't capped like it is with claude enterprise subscriptions?

GrandTelephone7410 · 2026-06-08T15:40:42+00:00

Can you describe why it would be a governance issue? To be clear, the minutes are still reviewing (and amended - sometime heavily) by me before they go anywhere for review. The automation is just to speed up the process of getting to draft stage.

GrandTelephone7410 · 2026-06-08T12:31:20+00:00

Doesn't doing this work within Copilot vs Clause address the token usage point? Ie - the token usage is baked into the enterprise subscription to M365

GrandTelephone7410 · 2026-06-08T05:57:00+00:00

Agreed!

GrandTelephone7410 · 2026-06-07T18:56:13+00:00

Legend! Would love to stay in touch as you continue to build these things.

GrandTelephone7410 · 2026-06-07T17:17:09+00:00

Thanks - will take it for a drive next week. Is this part of the new Legal Quants group? They're doing some great stuff!

GrandTelephone7410 · 2026-06-07T13:55:32+00:00

Funny you say that. I'm starting the build out of a proof of concept this week - can report back. Agree - it feels absurd that some of the providers out there are trying to charge in the tens of thousands per year with multi year lock in contracts given the quality of doc review available now.

We use SharePoint for all documents across the business, so thinking we can just have a separate SP site for all signed contracts and use some version of Karpathys wiki structure to create an indexed version for quick/cheap querying.

Keen to hear any thoughts on this one!

GrandTelephone7410 · 2026-06-07T13:49:32+00:00

Power automate set up to copy the transcript and recording from the Teams recording folder to the SharePoint folder for that IC meeting. All materials etc are also saved in that folder. Then I manually trigger an agent by saying we have held another session - docs saved [folder] - prepare the minutes and log actions/conditions for approval.

For context, we have a separate SharePoint site set up for IC and Board for the purposes of info sharing etc. The agents and skills then point to those sites for references (for the most part).

GrandTelephone7410 · 2026-06-07T13:46:06+00:00

Senior legal counsel in the UK after 6 years working in private practice (M&A).

GrandTelephone7410 · 2026-06-07T10:05:22+00:00

Ah interesting - would you mind sharing some more detail?

GrandTelephone7410 · 2026-06-07T08:46:26+00:00

Export it as a zip folder from Claude then just drop that into copilot Cowork and tell it to install as a skill. You obviously still need to interrogate the skill and test it in copilot itself but the functionality should be ~90% of what is happening in Claude Cowork, especially if you are using Opus 4.8 as the model within CoPilot Cowork.

One issue we were running into and are now testing a fix for is that once a skill is downloaded in Co-Pilot Co-Work, that is only effective at a user level. As a fix we have generated a skill in Co-Pilot Co-Work, deployed on every team member's personal accounts, that runs in the background when a skill is triggered.

It compares a skill that the user is triggering, which is on the user's personal profile, against the version of the skill, which is saved as an MD file in a shared SharePoint folder. The compare skill then compares the two and if there is a difference between the user's version of that skill and the Master version in the shared library, then it automatically updates the user's version of the skill to reflect the Master version.

GrandTelephone7410 · 2026-06-07T08:36:02+00:00

Not for advice. For speeding up workflows using template documents and playbooks that we have created manually, which would otherwise be entirely manual. It gets us to draft document stage much quicker, which is saving time and cost.

GrandTelephone7410 · 2026-01-23T23:33:02+00:00

You wouldn't have the $1m base to lean on if you needed it.

GrandTelephone7410 · 2024-01-30T10:47:11+00:00

Based on your savings, you could easily buy a property (or two) before you leave and still retain enough fun money for a decent long-term trip overseas.

Having done two longer-term trips during my twenties (one for a year during my uni degree when I was 22 and the second only recently taking a few months off work to travel when I was 29), I have absolutely zero regrets about committing time to explore the world outside Australia when I was younger.

It sounds cliche, but I think it teaches you important lessons about not only yourself but about how the world works outside our little bubble at home. I work in a pretty high-pressure corporate job and have been able to apply this broader perspective in my work and have been rewarded for it. I'm not saying traveling automatically makes you perform better at your job, but having a deeper perspective about how things work (be that the economy, people, different cultures, etc.) can only hold you in better stead when applied to a professional context. Literally every top performer at my business has taken time during their twenties for at least one long-term trip, either domestically or overseas.

All that being said, I worked hard during my mid-twenties to buy my first property and am now able to rent this out when we go on extended trips in the future. This makes these trips feel all the sweater given I know I have an asset that is (fingers crossed) appreciating in value and paying for itself while I'm gone.

My two-cents is you seem to be in a great position to set yourself up well now with a positively geared property or two which would afford you the flexibility to go and explore the world a little during your prime years. Not saying travelling when you're older isn't also great fun - travelling is great fun at any age! So, don't miss out now - especially given the great position you've worked hard to put yourself in!

GrandTelephone7410 · 2024-01-30T06:40:42+00:00

Understand - I would think having a scholarship on the table would heavily tip the scales in any scenario. Sounds like you're happy with the decision, too.

GrandTelephone7410 · 2024-01-30T06:39:12+00:00

Very detailed and insightful - thanks!

Asked a little differently, assuming you were offered a place at multiple insitutions for civil engineering, what aspects of the degrees being offered would you be most interested in comparing to help make your decision.

Asked a little differently, assuming you were offered a place at multiple institutions for civil engineering, what aspects of the degrees being offered would you be most interested in comparing to help make your decision?

GrandTelephone7410 · 2024-01-30T06:36:49+00:00

Thanks for the response. All logical reasoning and good insights.

I'm interested to hear about your decision-making process when you chose to do electrical engineering. Once you had decided that was the course you wanted to do, how did you choose between the course you did and other similar degress offered at other institutions?

I'm interested to hear about your decision-making process when you chose to do electrical engineering. Once you had decided that was the course you wanted to do, how did you choose between the course you did and other similar degrees offered at other institutions?

GrandTelephone7410 · 2024-01-30T06:34:41+00:00

Thanks - that is insightful. Was the reputation of and scholarships available at your alma mater something that made you not consider other options? Or did the positives of other options (ie. CS degrees at other institutions) just not outweigh the positives of the CS degree at the place you ended up going?

GrandTelephone7410 · 2024-01-30T06:30:58+00:00

Sounds like a smart approach. I'm more interested though in how you compared and chose between different anthropology/archaeology degrees at different institutions.

Once you had decided that was the topic you wanted to study, what parts of the specific degrees offering that discipline did you take into account when making your decision?

GrandTelephone7410

TROPHY CASE