Notes from the drafting desk
Working notes rather than marketing. The current pieces cover AI in legal practice and its governance; immigration drafting notes on EB-1A criteria, Dhanasar and RFE preparation are planned and will only be published once a second lawyer has reviewed them.
Cowork turns Claude from something you paste into, to something that works inside your matter folders. That is a genuine change in how a small firm can operate, and it comes with exactly one thing you have to understand before you connect anything.
Formatting rules are the most automatable work in litigation and the least automated. They are precise, numerical, published, and completely different in every court you walk into. That combination is what a skill is for.
Most firms using AI have a person in the middle, copying between the case management system and a chat window. That person is the integration layer, and they are expensive, slow and the likeliest source of a confidentiality slip.
A date diary is a database that a human being maintains by hand, from memory, under time pressure, while doing something else. We have known for thirty years that this is a bad idea. The reason it survives is that nothing has been reliable enough to replace it.
The four things we have written about, working in matter folders, formatting skills, connected systems and scheduled tasks, all put firm data somewhere new. The policy is what makes that defensible, and most firm AI policies are not built to do it.