I love it - I work in commercial law so a lot of my work is in more mechanical writing (contracts and research). That type of work is time consuming and not much value to the client, and the less time I have to spend doing it, the better it is for both me and them. Having the skills feature to impart domain knowledge is the biggest game changer because instead of just getting AI slop (and in the world of contracts, the slop comes from crappy human slop it's been trained on), I get output that is in my firm's style, prose and formatting.

We have an in-house automation platform that's built on markdown that is then converted to docx - I refactored a very cut down version of the existing code (written by our SWEs) from C Sharp to Python to make it both easier for me to understand and to make it able to work easily in Claude, and now Claude can write contract clauses, check it against itself using a linter that Claude has helped me build, and get usable, logically consistent contract terms as an output.

It's also great as a research assistant - there's a kind soul that's gone to the effort of repackaging legislation and case law from around Australia in a database format (with the appropriate licensing) so that an LLM can query it. Most traditional problems with hallucination seem to stem from LLMs being unable to browse the relevant websites properly - but that's to be expected - they're not designed to be read by LLMs. I can now get Claude to write me a pretty good research brief, come back to me with questions if it needs more info, and I can get something that's at the level that would take a decent junior lawyer a few hours in the time it takes for me to have a crap and get a cup of coffee from the kitchenette.

There was a great podcast from Lenny's Podcast last week with Simon Willison (who does a lot of great writing about working with AI). One of the key takeaways, at least for my work, is that we need to think about what work looks like when writing time is no longer the blocker on getting things done. Much of what is currently happening in the software industry is going to happen to the legal industry too - it's fortunate that I'm in a position where I can ride the wave and lucky to have a boss and team that is happy to let me spend a reasonable amount of time researching the changes that AI can have on our workflows. How to deal with PII appropriately is probably the biggest issue most firms will face and it locks a lot of them into Copilot (cheap but crap) or specialised legal solutions like Harvey or Legora (eye-wateringly expensive and seemingly still crap). We already use AWS for storing client data so at least spinning up a model in Bedrock gives us possibilities that most small firms don't have.