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Comment by spapas82 | Hacker News Reader

My gf is a lawyer with a single-person office and the only software she uses is a word document (advanced from an A4 paper) to write outstanding issues, next appointments, advances etc. As can be understood not very technical.

Could you recommend me a way to gently introduce some kind of software/automation to her office?

TIA

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My girlfriend is also a lawyer with a single-person office (well a part-time legal assistant).

I’d try to learn a bit more about her workflow. My partner has a contract with the state, cyber insurance, and has some records retention requirements which inform a lot of the technology. As an example discovery for some cases can run 100gbs and require 10 years of retention. She has to file a monthly report with very specific data requirements and we’re working on the extract out of the matter management because it doesn’t support an effective-as-of for the various fields which is needed.

I’ve found a good place to start is with how email and calendaring is used and implementing more security. Presuming she’s using hosted email (m365/gmail) or similar.

Maybe start with her calendar especially if she’s doing it on paper even more so if she’s using that to drive any client contact.

She is comfortable typing in MS Word and she uses a browser (assumed). Start her using a Wiki with Markdown.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki_software

The browser gives viewing, screenshotting, and PDF downloading/viewing for free.

MD is pretty simple, but why would a lawyer want to learn a limited,presentation-oriented syntax? And a wiki? Both of these decisions would make red lining a new, unpleasant adventure, something every lawyer I know does A LOT.

Highly relevant: On the Immortality of Microsoft Word [0] (and the HN discussion [1]).

[0]: https://theredline.versionstory.com/p/on-the-immortality-of-...

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46313518

Give her Claude and show her how to ask Claude how to do things. My wife uses it to write mini scripts now for all the annoying repetitive tasks she has. Zero programming background.

As a lawyer who vibe codes using Claude code all of the time and believes it's the highest value case... I'm going to disagree with this suggestion.

If she never uses ai at work at all, start with something dead simple: -do research with it -put a large corpus of documents into LLM context and ask questions of it

That's probably where I'd start.

Fair although I’m surprised lawyers can load privileged info into Claude? But I guess at this point Claude just gets all the worlds data haha

AFAIK no state level organisation has sanctioned someone for this. You can opt-out of data collection, which some practitioners think is good enough to satisfying their professional liability- risk tolerance depends on the individual (this is not advice, just my observation!)

A large corpus of documents does not have to mean privileged info. Put all of the public documents from a case in there and ask it about a judges reasoning.

Honestly that wouldn’t be a terrible product: Pull in all of a judges written judgements or stated logic about their rulings and preemptively craft your case around their biases.

Privilege isn't an issue with Claude (generally).

Maintaining privilege depends on taking steps to ensure the continued confidentiality of the data - put a lock on your file cabinet, sign an agreement with the vendor where they promise not to look at or use the data for their own purpose.

Even if hacker news thinks that agreement isn't ironclad doesn't mean privilege is or should be destroyed. It's more about whether you limit the distribution of the data in a reasonable way. Today, zdr remains reasonable.

It's her system. She uses it for a reason that may not make sense to you but makes perfect sense to her.

If you want to ease her into automation, either a calendaring system or a practice management suite like Clio or Zola. Leave AI and more technical solutions for much, much later.

Westlaw isn't software?

It's not so gentle, but lawyers in the US have told me that their malpractice insurance requires them to have practice management software - calendar, document management, case management, customer management, billing and accounting.

Find a web-hosted practice management system, start with the piece she finds most valuable and easy to use (maybe a calendar?).

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