Anybody can be a builder.

A time entry skill, built in about thirty minutes

Amanda took two and a half years of one partner’s time entries, dumped them into a spreadsheet, and pointed Claude Cowork at it. First she had it write an instruction guide from the patterns alone, a three page rulebook for how that partner wants time written. Then she turned the guide into a skill, so a legal assistant can describe the work in plain language and get the partner’s own formula back. About thirty minutes of work, plus an hour to wrap it in something she could show people.

Builders, buyers, and users

Debbie’s frame for the whole conversation: a software company once tried to sort inbound callers into builders or buyers, and she told them it was the dumbest thing she had ever heard, because even the builders have a day job and no time to build, so functionally they are buyers. Her revision is a third role. Today there are builders, buyers, and users, and the user is the one who has to understand enough about how things get built to ask for the next thing.

Three one hour blocks a week, and nobody can touch them

Amanda’s answer to the no time problem is a calendar answer. Three days a week she holds a one hour deep work block that nothing is allowed to be scheduled over, and all she does in it is work on something AI related. That is where every build in this episode came from. Her advice for anyone starting: open a Claude chat and say, I want to build a time entry system for my partners, how do I do it.

Treat me like a five year old

Rob’s starting move is to go in with a small problem rather than a plan. When the answer comes back too dense, he says so: treat me like a five year old, walk me through it step by step, number the steps, give me links. Debbie’s version of the same point is that there is no product manual to read first, because the tool will teach you how to use it.

A lawyer example: eighty seven pages into a flow chart

Debbie’s team built a tool for a high net worth estate planning firm that takes the complex documents and renders them as a Visio flow chart and a PowerPoint. What happens if this person dies, what happens if they die together, all of it visual, with the lawyer verifying each branch before the client meeting. The point is not the automation, it is that the client on the other side of the table can finally understand what they signed.

A COO example: the performance improvement plan

Amanda’s low hanging fruit for any administrator. Put the supporting emails in a folder, add a performance improvement plan the firm has already used, add handwritten meeting notes as a phone photo, and ask for a draft. It comes back in the right HR language, so consistent disregard for attorney instruction instead of attitude. Something administrators do constantly, and a safe place to start.

Ship the artifact, then turn it into a skill

Rob pushes on the part most people skip: you built it, but is anyone else using it? Share the artifact, let other partners upload into it, treat it as a change management problem. Amanda adds the loop that makes it compound, which is uploading her edited final document back into the same chat so the skill learns what she changed and gets it right next time.

Transcript

Parenting in a different zip code

Rob: We’re live. We’re live.

Amanda: Here we go. All right, all right.

Amanda: I’m on a law firm administrator vacation, you know, where you go to a different location to work. It’s still vacation because you’re not in the office, but you’re still working just as much. So I like it.

Rob: You go on a vacation with your kids.

Debbie: Somebody said it’s parenting in a different zip code.

Rob: Yeah. A trip, or parenting in a different zip code.

Amanda: Yeah, I have my kids with me, so I am parenting in a different zip code, but I’m also working from a different zip code.

Thirty second introductions, finally

Amanda: So, you know, one of the things we have not done in our last couple of Lives is introduce ourselves. And I think maybe just like a thirty second introduction might be a good start to each one of these Lives, because we all have great egos and we assume people know who we are, but we might not have done a good job of telling people who we are.

Rob: Sure. So Debbie, you go first.

Debbie: Oh, I get to go first. Okay. Debbie Foster, I’m the CEO of Affinity Consulting, and I spend all of my time, well, most of my time, working with law firms on things that they’re stuck on. So it could be AI. In fact, oftentimes it is, but it also could be strategy. It could be leadership development. It could be general technology things, and it could be a combination of all of those things added up together. But that’s what I do. And I love hanging out with you guys in Sidebar. That has been a super fun project over the last couple of months, and I look forward to doing all kinds of new cool stuff.

Debbie: So Rob, you go next.

Rob: I was going to say ladies first.

Rob: No ego here, so I’ll just go ahead and say who I am. I don’t expect people to know, but Rob Joyner, I’m the SVP of Business Development at Centerbase. I’ve been with the company since day one, so I’ve really seen the evolution over the last twelve years of law firms going to the cloud, and now really cloud to AI, and just how that transformation is happening. I spend most of my time these days on the product strategy, so understanding where law firms are trying to use AI and how they’re trying to use it, and transferring that into product.

Amanda: You also spent a good solid year convincing Debbie and me that Claude was the superior chat program and got us both on board, to where we are now.

Debbie: I didn’t even need to say it.

Amanda: Yep. Okay, my name is Amanda Koplos. I am the COO of a mid-sized law firm in central Florida. We have about fifty-five attorneys, and I spend my day managing attorneys and, of course, now talking about AI, because it’s what keeps me alive and breathing. But really it was the job that I’m facing every day and the struggle I’m going through that was the impetus behind founding Sidebar. I just don’t have a peer network in a way where we’re talking about this. And so that’s where we all got started.

Rob: I mean, that’s how we really came up with it. You and I were sitting there and we had a room full of other administrators, and everybody was getting ideas from each other, asking questions. And Debbie’s seeing the same thing, where people are coming in, engaging her, because it’s a very lonely profession, right? There’s only one or two of you in the firm that you’re probably running these ideas off of.

This week: let’s get practical about building

Rob: So today. This might be one of my favorite topics. This might be like a three part series, if I’m guessing, we can take this further and we can have more guests on. Stephanie did an amazing job last week. If you didn’t see that, it’s on our Sidebar website, you can check out some of those recordings. But let’s talk about building. Let’s get really practical, really tactical. There are a lot of people out there that aren’t using LLMs yet, they’re not building anything. In fact, we’ve reached out to some people that have signed up for Sidebar and said, hey, how do we get you more engaged, and they’re like, I’m so far behind. Debbie says this very well, like you just have to get unstuck, you have to take one step at a time. And so I really want to break down those practical steps for somebody that’s trying to figure out how do I start with Claude, and how do I deliver value in a short time horizon.

Amanda’s time entry skill, built in thirty minutes

Amanda: Yeah, I mean that’s a good one. I did a presentation yesterday to the Jacksonville chapter of the Association of Legal Administrators, and it’s all about how law firm leaders can use AI, and I showed it in real time, and it’s for their jobs, right, not for practicing law. I showed in real time something I built, and I thought maybe I would just start by telling you all what I built, just to give ideas to people so they can start thinking about, here’s something someone did and it is possible and it doesn’t take a lot.

Amanda: I am building with Claude, and I have Cowork installed, and we have the enterprise versions, we have all of that locked in, so that’s why this is all secure. But we have a partner who likes to, his legal assistant likes to do his time for him. She does the time, he doesn’t write his own time entries. He will send, he’ll copy her on an email, and she does the draft. But he has a very specific formula he likes to use. It is, you know, drafting and doing this. It’s always an ing verb. It’s very specific. So I took two and a half years of time entries of his, dumped them into an Excel spreadsheet. And then I pointed Claude Cowork to that Excel spreadsheet. And I said, first, draft me an instruction guide where you analyze the patterns you see in two and a half years of time entries, so you could teach someone, based only on the patterns you’re seeing, what the rules are. So we created a three page guide of all the ways he wants time entry done, based on pre-approved entries.

Amanda: Then I said, let’s create a skill that’s called John time entry, so that if they use plain language to describe something he did, you can then take and apply the formula that you have. Now, there are entire products out there, we’ve talked about that, that will do this, and that’s great. But this is for somebody whose firm can’t afford that yet, or hasn’t done it, or it doesn’t integrate with something that they’re using. This is something I built in about thirty minutes. And then the final step is I built and created an HTML version of it so he could see, so I could show somebody here’s how you use this. And I did it in about an hour.

Wait, you’re the problem: too much jargon

Rob: Amanda, I mean Amanda, like you’re the problem. Am I talking too fast? You’re the problem. HTML, you’re talking in this, and people are probably stuck on, hey, enterprise version of Claude. Like, okay. Well, you who are used to simpler things in life, why don’t you explain this. Well, Debbie, I don’t know, like if a firm came to you, which they do, and says, hey, we want to start using Claude. Like, okay, you need X, Y and Z to start.

Builders, buyers, and users

Debbie: Yeah. So while Amanda was talking, I really will answer your question, Rob. While Amanda was talking, I was thinking the same thing, like how many people know what this stuff means? And I think that, let’s see if I can clearly articulate this. A long, long time ago, when one software company, not Centerbase, launched an AI product, they decided that the way that they were going to pitch the product is that they were going to figure out if the person who called them was a builder or a buyer, right? They wanted to figure that out because they wanted to know if they were selling to someone who knew what HTML was, who was going to like get their fingers on the keyboard and they were going to start to build. Or if they were talking to someone who was directed to buy something that the firm was going to use, right? Two different personas.

Debbie: When I’m listening to Amanda, and we had this question on Sidebar about like, what cool things have you built, I immediately go back to the builder versus buyer thing. And I wonder, because the second part of the story of how they came up with this builder or buyer thing is, I said, because you know, I’m so meek and quiet and I never tell anyone what I think, I said, that’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. Because even if they are builders, they don’t have time to build because they have a day job. So essentially they’re a buyer.

Debbie: So as I’m listening to Amanda, I’m thinking like Amanda has found time in her world to build. How many of the people listening to this want to be a builder, but they’re simply a buyer? And how many lawyers in our universe are like, I, today, I do not want to be a builder. I just want to buy it. I want Amanda to build it for me and then just show me where do I, what do I type and where do I type it? It’s secure, right? Where do I type, because I want to use what you built.

Debbie: Now, if we fast forward to five years from now, maybe everyone, in air quotes, has to be a builder. But today, there are builders, buyers and users. So who’s the buyer? Who’s the builder? Who’s the user? What does the user need to know about how things get built? So number one, they can effectively use what was built. And number two, they can ask for the next thing to be built, because they experienced what Amanda built and was like, wait, if you can do this, can you also do that?

Debbie: Now, what do you think?

Rob: Right. Right, yeah.

Debbie: So does everybody have to be a builder?

Three one hour blocks a week

Amanda: No, but in this day and age everyone can be a builder, I think. And that’s I think what Sidebar is designed for. Like, we want the members that we have to have time to build. I have learned a lot from Debbie. She did a session on how to become more of a delegator and spend more of your time being an architect. So I’m trying really hard in my life to become more of an architect, and I have built in time three days a week that I call deep work time, where nothing is allowed to be calendared and all I do is work on something related to AI in that time. It’s a one hour, three times a week block. That’s it. And so I have it blocked. I have it calendared. Nobody can touch it.

Amanda: But you’re right. In this day and age, anybody can be a builder. And all of that stuff I learned on my own. And yeah, I used a lot of big words, but the easiest way to say it is go open a Claude chat and say, I want to build a time entry system for my partners. How do I do it?

Debbie: Yes. That, it’s as easy as that. You don’t need to understand pointing it to a folder and a Cowork and anything like that. It’s going to, it will walk you through it. And I think that very simple step, people are so worried that they don’t know how, but they don’t realize that the great thing about Gen AI is it will teach you how. It’s the thing that will teach you how to use it yourself. You don’t actually have to know. There’s no product manual to read through.

Debbie: Yeah. Rob, you’re on mute, which is probably the best. I’m just kidding.

Treat me like a five year old

Rob: Well, you might have heard the feedback, I was trying to get the live screen, I was trying to watch us and talk here, I kept screwing up, so that’s why. But anyways, I think it’s a great point. When I started with Claude Code or some of the other programs back in the day, I didn’t understand the back end that well. My background is in revenue, and, you know, some of the product is, we built Centerbase. But you go in there, to your point Amanda, to just say like be curious. I think with AI, I always talk about, I think in terms of, I don’t think about limitations anymore, I think about opportunities, and I’m curious about those opportunities.

Rob: So if you go in there with a small problem, hey, I’m trying to solve this. How would I build this? It will walk you through each step. And sometimes I even go back like today. I’ve gone back a few times and I’m like, hey, treat me like a five year old. Walk me through it step by step. You just told me a few paragraphs and it makes no sense. Like I need you to say one, two, three, four, provide me links. And it’ll do that. It’ll take over your screen if you even need it to. And sometimes it’s just clicking for you. So you shouldn’t be scared. I mean, it’s about jumping in and actually asking. I think it’s a good starting place.

The cooking show: build it for them first

Debbie: And maybe it’s too that as we think about the universe of users in a law firm, maybe the safest way to get someone to believe that they could be a builder is to build a couple of things for them and let them see how they work. Kind of like the cooking show. Like you built it, you show it to them, they use it, and then you’re like, let me show you how I did that. Is there something else like this that you would like to do?

Debbie: Because I mean someone asked me, we’re having an internal conversation and they said, how did you know how to build that skill? And I said, I have no idea how to build a skill. I just said to Claude, that was really great work, now build me a skill to do it. Tell me what could go wrong with the skill. And then I’m like, make it better. How do you do an error proofing run into the skill? Like, how do you go through and check your work? Like, I’m going to check your work, but I don’t want to check your work until you’ve checked your work.

Amanda: Yeah. Right.

Debbie: And so they were just like, oh, you could just tell Claude to build a skill. Yeah. For sure.

Debbie: So how do we, how do we think about that when we’re thinking about law firms, and the concerns around security, and the concerns around hallucinations, and all of the things that our lawyers and our clients bring to us and say, but I’m worried about, and how do we say, let’s try it on something low risk?

Rob: Yeah, I think our Sidebar responses showed you that they’re doing a lot of low risk things, right? We’re jumping from here to here when we’re talking about building, when in reality, you know, you can jump right here, like make something just a little easier. You talked about skills, Debbie. Creating skills is almost like if you manage a team. It’s not as far as agents, but skills are like, hey, I have somebody that’s really good at proofreading, I have somebody that’s really good at design critiques, I have somebody really good at this, right? And you can pull them in as you’re working through something.

Start in Cowork and skip the back end

Rob: So if I’m starting to build, though, where I’m starting is in Cowork, and the reason I’m doing that is, I think Amanda said this, or maybe it was you, Debbie, but you don’t need to understand the HTML. You don’t need to understand the back end. You don’t need to understand that. You can build these, call them local applications, which that’s maybe even too far. You just type these things in, and it renders right within Cowork. So you’re not having to leave to worry about building software back ends or anything. You can build quick tools just within the chat.

Amanda: One of the things that you taught me that I really loved is I was trying to build something and I wanted it to have persistent memory, so like as I did something I wanted it to keep and track the data. And Claude said at the time, and probably it does now, I can’t do that, you need a subscription to X product and I can’t connect with that product, but you have to go and get your subscription there and then come back to me and tell me you have it and I will connect us, and then that’s where you use it.

Amanda: And that’s, I mean, if you think about it, you don’t need to know Python, you don’t need to know any of these products. And Python is not a snake, right?

Rob: It’s not a snake. Just checking, just checking.

Debbie: Yes.

What you actually need to get started

Rob: So, okay, so we’ve established now, like, hey, you’ve got to get, you know, at least a team or enterprise license. When you go to enterprise, you start paying per token versus, you know, the more traditional plans where you’re on a hundred dollar or twenty dollar plan and you get a certain amount of usage out of that. We’ve established, like, what skills are, how you build a skill. We’ve established jumping into Cowork, right? So Cowork is just a tab in there. Click it. It’s not going to kill you. It’s not going to hurt you. Just ask it a question and say something just top of mind that you’re trying to build, even if it’s small, and see what the results are. Now, I would jump into, what are we seeing people build? Like, what is that low hanging fruit? How do you do it?

A lawyer example: eighty seven pages into a flow chart

Rob: Give me a case study.

Debbie: Well, I can give you a lawyer example.

Amanda: I’ll give you a COO example.

Rob: Perfect, perfect.

Debbie: So to be clear, I am not a lawyer. I’m just giving a lawyer example. So on our team, we have a consultant who is working with a firm that does very high net worth estate planning. And one of the big challenges with doing these very complex estate planning documents is that you have very wealthy and often very smart people on the other side of the table that need a better way to understand what you’re showing them than an eighty-seven page document that the lawyer says, I promise you, it takes care of all the things.

Debbie: And so our team built a tool that takes those complex estate planning documents and uses Visio to put them into a flow chart, to show them what happens if this person dies, what happens if this person dies, what happens if they die together, and that can create a PowerPoint presentation. So when you bring your client in, you feed it the documents, it creates the flow chart, it walks you, the lawyer, through, like, that’s what I think is going to happen. Is that right? So it has the verification built in through the whole thing. And then it says, what format do you want it in? Do you want it in a Visio diagram? Do you want it in a PowerPoint presentation? Do you want it in both? And then they can use that to show their, you know, eighty-seven page document in a graphical format that actually makes sense to the person sitting on the other end of the table.

Debbie: So that’s like, you know, can you imagine how long that would take to build that out? If you had to do it, like hours and hours and hours. And so it’s just value add, like improves the client experience. I mean, there’s just some amazing things about that kind of a system.

Amanda: Well, one of the things that is hard is delivering these documents, you know, like our signature meetings are three hours long and we have to go through, look at page sixty-one, go back to page thirty-two. Like it’s hard to keep track of all that.

Debbie: So that’s my lawyer example.

Rob: Debbie, I know what Amanda’s doing after this. Amanda’s shooting a text to whoever works at her firm and saying, listen to this good idea.

Amanda: Well, what I’m actually going to do is do a text that says, can you just sell me that? I don’t need to go through any lawyers.

Amanda: In this circumstance, when you’re talking about the buyer and the builder, that is a buyer thing, right? Because I might eventually be able to build it, but if it’s already been built then I’m just going to buy it, because we do a lot of high net worth planning and that sounds amazing.

A COO example: the performance improvement plan

Amanda: So here’s a really easy one for you from a low hanging fruit law firm administrator: performance improvement plan. You are an HR manager. You’re in charge of HR. An attorney has been emailing you and copying you on emails that their legal assistant has sent, to show what they believe is a pattern of some sort of misstep. They are consistently arriving late. They are not using proper grammar. They are giving attitude, which you’re not supposed to use because you can’t change attitude, right? But they’re doing these things consistently. And you’re like, okay, I need to write all this up. I’ve got to use HR proper language so I don’t get sued for discrimination in this performance improvement plan.

Amanda: You take all the emails and you put them in a folder on your desktop. Then you create a folder that’s called inputs, right? Then you take a performance improvement plan your firm has already written and used in the past and you put it in the same folder. Then you go to Claude Cowork and you say, I need you to write a performance improvement plan. This document is an example of the format the firm uses in the past. All of these emails I have moved into the folder show the pattern of the missteps. And also, I met with her once, and here are the raw notes.

Amanda: By the way, you can also use handwriting now. Claude can take a scanned picture of handwritten notes and take the words and make it a document. Here are the handwritten notes, it’s an image, a picture on my cell phone of the handwritten notes, or I scanned it from the first meeting we had. Here are all of the emails. And you’re pointing it, I mean it’s literally as simple as attaching it to an email. Create a performance improvement plan. Within a few minutes it will create the plan. It’s going to get you a really solid draft and it’s going to use the right language. It’s not going to use attitude, it’s going to use consistent disregard for attorney instruction, which you might be able to come up with yourself, but Claude is going to do it. So that is something that as administrators every single day we have to do. It’s very low hanging fruit.

Amanda: And Rob, did I speak in clear enough language on that one?

Share the artifact, then turn it into a skill

Rob: Building. In my head, when I hear people talking about something like this, I’m like, man, is this something you’re only using? Or, you know, we talk about change management and adoption of these things. Like, have you taken what you created, which is considered an artifact in Claude language, have you shared that artifact with other partners? Are they also using it? And instead of pointing it to a folder that’s local, do you have a way for somebody to upload all those documents directly into that artifact? So that’s the next step, right?

Amanda: Yes. But then, after I’m done with that, I can follow Debbie’s advice and say, the next time, I want you to make this a skill, so that the next time we write our performance improvement plan, we will be set. But one thing I always do is, you know, it’s the first draft. You’re going to take that draft and you’re going to do some changes. You’re going to do some edits. You’re going to change some words and everything like that. I always take my finished document and upload it back into the same chat so that Claude can see the changes that I made, to see where the next time when it’s creating the skill, here are areas Amanda didn’t like and she changed, and that’s how she’s going to want it next time. So here’s my finished product, let’s create a skill, so that the next time I say draft performance improvement plan, you already know the things I like, you know where my example is, you’ve saved my example, and you know which folder I’m putting the documentation into.

Amanda: And so I think all of that is, you can probably figure that out in day two of using Claude.

Should Sidebar just build the skills?

Rob: Yeah, I think, you know, vendors aren’t going to be able to come up with a, well, they probably can come up with a product for anything. But the reality is, you’re not going to be able to buy a product for everything at a firm, right? And so, are there little use cases like this where there isn’t a one size fits all vendor solution that you can build in thirty minutes, right? Can you amass a set of skills or artifacts that you can use on these, you know, jobs to be done, smaller jobs to be done throughout your day? Or we could just, we should just build some skills with Sidebar that they could just grab onto. What do you think of that?

Rob: It depends on what people tell us. I mean, it’s a good, you know, that’s actually a good point. And for anybody watching this video, we’re trying to offer more and more value with Sidebar for administrators and legal management professionals. But we need that feedback in order to get there. And I actually have the chat working now, Amanda, on the side.

Amanda: Oh, do you? Good.

From the chat: what if IT says no?

Rob: Carrie says, IT is against implementing AI this way, but also is against bringing in a consultant who will help us be, quote unquote, builders.

Debbie: Well, then I guess you just get to stay right where you are. No, I’m kidding. Get new IT.

Amanda: That’s mean, that’s mean.

Who actually uses the time entry system?

Rob: Lori says, Amanda, can you explain how your time entry system works for the partner? In other words, is the user the attorney or the legal administrator?

Amanda: Yeah, so it’s actually great. Here’s an appropriate example. Right now, the legal assistant. The user is the legal assistant, specifically the one who has never done his time before. He just sends a, he will just forward a copy of an email chain that has all the emails he has exchanged with these clients in it. She doesn’t have to go back through and read the ten emails to come up with what they were talking about, because she can just bring it in and attach that email and it can create the time entry.

Amanda: Here’s the one step I haven’t taken that I’m excited about. I can re-export the time entries every month and continue building that list, or every six months. But one thing I found is cool is even if he says something like, hey, I talked to Joe about the Microsoft deal, can you make a time entry for that, it will immediately say, corresponding with Mr. Joe Bob regarding the deal. But because it’s pulling from all the data, when he says Joe, it has a pretty good guess of who Joe is, because over the last month he has talked to Joe multiple times.

Amanda: This simple program is not pulling matters and client matters and things like that. There are programs that do that. This is really just to help get the narratives right because it will make billing faster. He still has to go through, there’s Florida Bar rules, has to go through and look at every entry to make sure the time and the description adequately captures the work that he did. But this is so the first draft she creates is better. So it’s the legal assistant, specifically legal assistants who are new and change out regularly and that sort of thing. So that’s the user on this end. Now it could be the attorney, but in my case right now it is the legal assistant.

Bring us something you built

Debbie: Can I be selfish and say I want to bring this back next week?

Rob: Yes.

Debbie: Because I mean, I feel like we didn’t even get into it.

Rob: Yeah, that’s why I said it was a three part series, I knew it from the beginning. And we want to bring people in and like, hey, bring something in you built and let us help critique it and build it more. That would be really fun. If somebody has something, let’s talk about it. But I’m going to pull out some of our Sidebar answers and invite some people on.

Rob: So we’re going to do it. We’re at time. Please, please, please join Sidebar, be part of the conversation. That feedback loop is what feeds our ability to give you more value and greater tools. So make sure you join GoSidebar.ai. We will be back next week. And thank you guys for joining us.

Amanda: Thanks, everybody. See you soon.