Getting started with Claude.

Administrators reach for Copilot, attorneys reach for Claude

This week’s synthesis asked what AI tools members are actually using, not what they bought. Legal management professionals skewed toward Copilot; the attorneys skewed toward Claude. Amanda’s theory: Copilot is what the firm purchased and provided, and administrators are rule followers who use the sanctioned tool. Attorneys go find whatever they heard about, which is the shadow AI everyone keeps describing. She is explicit that it is a theory with no evidence behind it.

Nobody talks about how the business side uses AI

Debbie spends her conference time watching the profession obsess over how lawyers deliver client work faster, and almost none of it on how the business leaders of a firm use the same tools. Her example got the strongest reaction of any webinar she has run lately: drop a meeting transcript in and ask where did I lose the room, and how could I have done that better.

Talk to it, do not type at it

Debbie’s single technique: Windows key plus H opens dictation, then talk. Do not correct spelling, do not backspace, do not wait for a fully formed thought. Say scratch that mid sentence if you need to, because the model benefits from watching you think. The failure mode is treating it like Siri and issuing a clipped command. Talk like a colleague is sitting across the room.

When you cannot articulate the problem, ask it to interview you

The move for anyone stuck at the blank box: say I am struggling to articulate my problem, but it has something to do with this, then ask it to interview you one question at a time and wait for each answer. It will run the whole interview, reflect back what it heard, and surface the real question underneath. Rob’s companion tip: when something lands, tell it explicitly to save that to memory.

A project is a case file

A project is a set of related chats that all share the same documents and instructions. Debbie keeps one for her book so every question is grounded in the same source material. Amanda explains it to beginners as a paper file folder. Rob’s translation for lawyers: it is a case file. Preferences and standing instructions live there too, so you set them once instead of every chat.

Having nothing to add is adding something

From the first member focus group: people skip the weekly question when they think they have nothing to contribute. Amanda’s correction is the most useful thing in the episode. "This has not come across my plate at all" is a data point, and it is what makes a finding like 60% of firms are not dealing with this possible. A non answer is an answer, so send it.

Transcript

Back for another week

Rob: Welcome to Sidebar Live. We’re back.

Amanda: What are we doing today? I think this is our fourth one.

Rob: I think this is our fourth Sidebar Live. I’ve had a lot of tea today, therefore I’m going to be pretty jumpy. So just expect that, keep me in line. But some exciting updates real quick as we’re kicking things off. One: we’ve been growing this in the open. We’ve hit 100 users. We’ve hit 100 firms, I mean. So we have 100. That’s a great start. We’re trying to grow it to 400. So anybody you know that you think would benefit from Sidebar, have them sign up. There are referral links. You can just send them to the website. We appreciate it.

Amanda: It’s 100 people just sharing what they are doing with AI in their law firms. And that’s pretty impressive. You cannot get a better cohort group anywhere else, where you can just say, how is somebody doing this? You’re not going to find that anywhere else. So sorry, Rob, I interrupted your pitch as usual.

Rob: No, that’s good.

Amanda: Back to your announcement.

Rob: I’m trying to see if we get comments. I got the comments working last week over here. I haven’t figured it out yet. I’ve got to figure it out.

Debbie: I feel like if I open that browser tab, I’m just going to hear myself back 11 seconds later. So I just stay away.

Rob: Yeah, well, it’s silent. It’s silent right now.

V2 Sidebar, and next week’s show and tell

Rob: But two other quick announcements. V2 Sidebar is coming. We’re meeting with members to really understand what you’re looking for. There’s a lot of information out there, but there’s still a big gap in where people can go and where it’s consolidated. So we’ve been talking to a lot of our members. If you have feedback on how we can add more value, let us know. Shoot us an email, send us a message on LinkedIn. We’re here to help. So, excited about that, more to come there. And then next week. Amanda, what are we doing next week that you’re excited about?

Amanda: I’m very excited. It’s something I’ve been pushing us on since before we started doing lives, which is a show and tell. And we have a Sidebar member, his name is John, he’s from, that was my fault, that was my fault. Florida. California.

Rob: California. The other way, the other way. John Fier, and he’s doing some really amazing things with Claude at his law firm.

Amanda: And we’ve asked him to come on and just spend 15 or 20 minutes and show you what he’s building in Claude. We’re looking for more people to volunteer to do the same thing. Trust me, no matter what you’ve built, there are others who can learn from it. So if you’re willing to just come on and show us what you’re doing, we’re doing these every week. You don’t have to plan for it. There’s no slide you need to make. Just share your screen and show it to us. Simple.

Rob: Absolutely. And I got the comments working, so if you guys want to drop any comments, anything you want to ask about, let me know. It is confusing. I was sitting here looking at the other screen and you’re doing this, because it’s 10 seconds late, and I’m like, what’s going on?

Debbie: I really do like this 10 second delay, because you really never know what we’re going to say.

Amanda: We need a blooper button then, or something. We need, on another screen, we need a mute button.

Rob: Absolutely. I have sound effects. I don’t really have a mute button. Although I guess I could mute you, Amanda, if I wanted to. Anyways.

Amanda: What about Debbie? Why is it only me?

Rob: I’ve never muted Debbie. Just you, Amanda.

The synthesis: Copilot for admins, Claude for attorneys

Rob: So one really interesting thing that came out of our synthesis this week. We talked about what AI tools are you actually using. Not just what have you purchased, what are you looking at, but what are you actually using. Something interesting to me was that most of the administrators, legal administrators, skewed towards Copilot. Whereas the attorneys, it skewed more towards Claude.

Amanda: I have a theory about why that’s happening. You know my theory? My theory is that Copilot is what firms have purchased and are provided. And firm administrators, present company excluded, are rule followers, and we are going to use what the company and the firm has provided as a safe, reliable tool. Attorneys don’t care. I love you all, I’m just kidding, you probably care. But they’re more likely to go out and use something they’ve heard about, and it’s the shadow AI we keep hearing about. That’s my theory. We do not have any evidence to back that up, but that’s my theory. Would you agree, Debbie?

Debbie: I think I would agree with that, mostly. I mean, when Amanda said she’s a rule follower, I don’t know about that.

Amanda: Well, I said present company excluded.

Debbie: Okay, good, good, good. All right, I feel better. I feel better about it for sure.

Amanda: Yeah, I think that’s part of it. I also think that maybe the business leader group of the firm hasn’t really figured out how to leverage AI as much in their role. And so Copilot feels like it’s in Excel, which I spend most of my time in, or it’s in Outlook. It feels like a more comfortable place to go. Whereas if they were thinking about, okay, I’m going to work on a growth strategy, they might want to go outside of the normal. I live my life in my billing and accounting program, and Outlook and Word and Excel and Copilot. It’s just such low hanging fruit there. So it could be a little of that too.

Nobody talks about how business leaders use AI

Debbie: Yeah, I think that’s right, I agree with that. You know, Rob, one of the things that came up in the webinar that we did the other day. I spent just a few minutes at the end talking about how we spend so much time talking about how lawyers can use AI tools to deliver services more efficiently to their clients. And we don’t spend as much time talking about how the business leaders really leverage the tool. So I spent a few minutes talking about that, and I got some really positive feedback on it. I never would have thought about putting a meeting transcript in and saying, where did I lose the room? How could I have done better?

Debbie: Just little things like that. I did a webinar today for someone, and it was about feedback and clear expectations and managing people, basically. And somebody put a question in the chat and said, I know you’re saying that clarity is really important, and I understand why it is, but I don’t know if I can clearly articulate what I need differently from the people that work for me. Do you have any suggestions? And I said, yes. Claude, ChatGPT, click the microphone button and say: I have been told that I need to be more clear about expectations, and I can’t figure out how to articulate what I need. Let me give you a couple of examples of things that are frustrating me about my team. And this person that I just talked to taught me this framework for feedback. How do I take this, put it into that framework, and have this conversation? And the person who wrote that comment wrote back with the mind blown emoji.

Rob: Right. Something simple like that.

Claude as a feedback loop

Rob: I totally agree, Debbie. I mean, two points on that. Earlier this week you called me and I got a little bit excited, and I sent a message real quick off to my team. Then I was like, is that the right way to send that message? Copied it out, threw it in Claude and I said, let’s say it a little nicer, a little less direct. And I corrected it. Today I was working in Claude Code, and I went to Claude and I said, hey, how can I be more efficient with tokens when I’m working with you? Or how can I code this better? What inputs could I give you? And just as you’ve mentioned, Debbie, it was able to give me three tips, and I implemented them really fast. We’ll see where I land, but it’s a great feedback loop.

Back to basics, for Amanda’s sister

Amanda: All right. I have something I want to try with us this week. We’ve talked about this on our focus groups and internally. Last week I got really, really excited and started describing a project that I was doing in Claude, and Rob, you stopped me at the time and said, whoa, whoa, whoa. You went way over everybody’s head. You need to go back to the basics. So this week I’m in Texas, and I’m with my sister, and she starts describing this problem she’s having. She’s trying to integrate a couple of different programs at her company, and she wants to hire a consultant. And I was like, wait a minute, we’re going to just try this in Claude. So, first question is, what is Claude? So I thought maybe, Rob, I would just start giving you some of the questions that she had and let you talk through it with me. How do you feel? Debbie and I will go between the two of you.

Amanda: Okay. First question. What is Claude? How is it different from ChatGPT or Copilot?

What is Claude, and how is it different?

Rob: Well, starting off, it’s a different company, so we can start there. Speaking of the mind blown emoji. Each model, so obviously they have different models. Each company has a few different models that they publish and that you can have access to. Different models are better at different things. For instance, I was working on some images this week, and videos that I wanted to make with AI. Claude will not generate images like that for you. OpenAI will. There are other models that are better at it. What I’ve found personally with Anthropic is that if you’re working in a business environment, you’re crunching numbers, you’re trying to analyze data, you’re trying to synthesize what do I do next, Claude is going to do a better job. I tend to sometimes use too heavy of a model, but I try to stick to Sonnet most of the time for my day to day work. And then if I’m trying to do something a little deeper, I will go up to Opus. Rarely do I use Haiku. I use it some in my coding for quick responses, but not usually when I’m communicating.

How do I actually get to it?

Amanda: How do I access Claude?

Rob: You can access Claude two different ways. You can go to, is it Claude.ai? I think that’s probably it. Claude.ai, and you can set up an account there. Debbie has spoken many times about different settings you want to click. You can find that in previous episodes if you want to go back there. So you can sign up for an account. There’s a free version, but as one of our other friends says, if it’s free.

Amanda: If the product is free, the product is me.

Rob: There you go. So there are different versions. You can get on a $20, hundred dollar, or two hundred dollar plan. Most people are fine with the $20. Or you can get on a team plan. You can access it right there from the browser, or you’re able to download a local version of it as a desktop app as well.

Amanda: And what will that get you? What extra can you do if you have a desktop version?

Rob: That’s changing every day. The cloud version tends to be catching up, but there are certain things, like if you want to do certain settings, you have to use the online version versus the desktop. With the coding, I find myself using a lot more of the desktop. Some people even go all the way to the terminal. They interact well together. For the everyday user just getting started, either works for you. It’s really preference. Do you want to access it from the browser, or do you want to access it from the desktop?

Talk to IT before you install anything

Amanda: I’ll give a caveat, though. If you’re installing it on your work laptop, work computer, and you want to install the program, you’re probably going to have to talk to IT. Because Claude does want some specific permissions to access and make modifications. And you’re probably going to have to let them do it, because you might not have administrative access to your own computer.

Debbie: Very true. We’re not all tech companies.

Rob: We’re not all tech companies. But installing it locally is also how you can access it within Excel, within Outlook, within PowerPoint. That’s how you get the add-ins. You can download the extensions. So that’s a separate download. When you go into Excel or Word, you can click on the, Debbie, you might know this better, but the add-ons, and you can find the Claude add-on. If I’m doing heavy data analysis, I tend to bring the file into Claude. If I’m doing small edits or something like that, I tend to do it within the Microsoft app itself. That could be preference, but that’s how I do it.

Amanda: We also have our spreadsheets that we love and we’re not going to let go of them.

Rob: Yeah, absolutely.

The one technique: talk, do not type

Amanda: Okay, Debbie, you’re next. You’re taking over. So what is the benefit? If I just want to get started on Claude and I don’t even know how to get started, and I really have this intricate thought I need to think through, what is one good way I can interact with Claude that will make it very easy? I’m kind of hoping you’re answering it the way I’m thinking.

Debbie: So I don’t know if this is the answer you would say, but for me, I hit the Windows key and the H button, which activates your microphone. I actually don’t use the back and forth microphone in Claude, because if you pause for too long it thinks you’re done and then it answers you. Whereas the dictation feature, which is just the Windows key and H, opens up your microphone on your computer. And then I just start talking. I don’t care if it spells things wrong. I don’t correct anything. I don’t backspace. I might get halfway through a thought and say, actually, scratch that, that’s not what I really want to do. I think there’s a benefit to it understanding your thought process. So I don’t worry about fully formed thoughts. I just pretend like Amanda was in my office and she’s going to help me solve a problem and I just need to tell her what’s going on. And then I hit the enter key and I go, well, that’s actually really smart.

Amanda: So there’s a tendency, when you open the microphone, that people think about it the way they think about talking to Siri. So the advice I have, and I had to give it to her, because she started saying, you know, this is what I want to do, period. Like you’re talking to Siri. So the advice is, you’re just talking to it like you have a person sitting across the room. You’re not having it write things for you, and it’s very good at picking it up.

Amanda: Okay, so she gets it. She’s got this chat going, and she keeps asking me, well, I don’t understand what this is saying, this doesn’t make any sense to me. What should she do? Oh, is this Debbie or Rob? I mean, you’re more likely to be confused about something than Debbie is.

Rob: Shots fired. Right, yeah. My response is always, I don’t understand, explain it to me like I’m a five year old.

Debbie: I say the same thing. I don’t understand, explain it like I’m five. Or I’ll say, explain it to me one step at a time. Tell me the first thing and then pause. Now tell me the second thing.

Ask it to interview you

Debbie: And I think that I probably should have given this advice to my other person too, because the other really powerful thing that you can do with Claude, or chat, or any of them, is say: I’m struggling to articulate my problem, but it has something to do with this. Interview me. Ask me questions one at a time and wait for my answer, and I’ll give you an answer, and then you ask me the next question. And it will literally interview you. It takes what you say. So what I’m hearing you say is this, what about this? Have you thought about that? Have you tried this? And it will go through a whole interview process with you.

Amanda: Okay. That’s great advice.

Tell it to save that to memory

Rob: Can I add something there?

Amanda: Yes, please, please.

Rob: So back to treat me like a five year old, or answer it like I’m a five year old. If there are things that you’re consistently asking it to do, tell it explicitly to save it to the memory. So like today I was working on something and I said, I’m ADD, I can’t follow you, give me something thinner. And so it did it. And I said, save that to memory.

Amanda: My sister’s going to really benefit from that one. Thank you.

Thinking out loud in the car

Rob: I think the other interesting way to interact with Claude, and you and I, I think you actually gave me this tip, Amanda, and I think all three of us do it. When I’m in a car for 30 minutes, or 15, 20 minutes, I sit there and have a conversation with Claude versus listening to music. I get the ideas out of my head. What Debbie was talking about was voice to text, I believe. This is not as powerful from a tool standpoint, but you can actually have a dialogue back and forth and there’s very little lag time. So as you’re driving, you can safely get those thoughts out. You can work on a strategy. You can use that car time to get something done.

Rob: There is an app, we didn’t mention that earlier. There is a Claude app. And the Claude app, the stuff you’re working on there saves into your desktop version or your online version. So if you have an idea, you can always say, remind me of this later, and you can put it into your Claude. And you can also use it if you’re tied into Word. You can say, send me an email about this, drop this into my email.

What do I tell my IT person?

Amanda: So the next question is. She was, like I said, getting really into this, and it kept getting very technical. And she kept going back and saying, I’m not technical. Well, you’re going to need to get an IT person to help you with this. And then she looks over at me and she goes, well, what do I tell my IT person? What do you think I responded to her?

Rob: I don’t know.

Amanda: I told her: draft an email for me to send to my IT person that includes exactly the settings you need me to set so I can get this done. And she’s like, oh my god, I just can’t even. But then she said to me, well, I don’t want to ask that in this chat because I don’t want to get lost. So what’s the advice you give her? If you want to talk about the same thing, but you want to keep different threads going, all about the same thing, what should they do?

A project is a case file

Rob: Create a project.

Amanda: Okay, what’s a project?

Debbie: A project is a compilation of chats that are all related, that can all access the same information. So, like, I have a project called Next Level Leader for my book. Every time I have any kind of question that I want to be grounded in the book, that project has a copy of the book in it, and the workbook, and other things that I’ve written. So when I go and ask it a question, it’s grounded in the same data, and I can have a hundred conversations about different things, and it can access the chats in that conversation and it can access the documents that I’ve supplied to the project.

Amanda: So it’s like persistent memory. I explained it to her like it was a paper file folder that you file different things in, and you can open it up, and if you looked through it you could see everything about that.

Rob: I guess for lawyers it’s like a case file, almost. That’s the best way to describe it. You can also add your preferences to it and give it instructions. So Debbie, to your point, you could say, if I ask a question about this, always ground yourself in this document that I’ve attached. Or always reference these things. Or don’t answer me without doing this. Or give it to me in this format, always. So you can do some of that fun stuff too.

Amanda: So she’s plowing through, she’s working on her first thing, and it’s really going great. She’s trying to connect Microsoft Teams to Salesforce to SharePoint, and she’s never used anything like this, and her mind is just blown. And she’s like, oh my gosh, I need to send somebody an update to tell them what I’m working on. What do you think I told her to do?

Letting the Chrome extension drive

Rob: Well, Amanda, if I can take a step back for a second too. With, like you mentioned, drafting an email to your IT person, if you have permissions to update something, there’s another way to do it, which is the Chrome extension. And you can actually have it take over your window. I do that often. I’m like, hey, I don’t want to deal with all those settings, you go ahead and set them for me and then I’ll come back and check them and click save.

Amanda: Stop. Oh my gosh, I just learned something new.

Rob: When I get a new application, that’s normally what I do when I don’t know how to do something.

Amanda: You just tell it to take it over? So could it do that in SharePoint? Anything in a browser?

Rob: Yes, for the most part. There are a few sites that block it, but for the most part, yes.

Amanda: Wow. Okay. And then, because we learned recently about the ability to screen record while you’re doing something, to teach Claude how to do something one time by just doing it. But I didn’t think about putting it on the browser, because she’s sitting there opening it back and forth, setting up the list in SharePoint. But I guess she could have just given it access to that.

Rob: And see, Sidebar Live. Learn something new.

Amanda: I love it.

Rob: It can be somewhat slow if it’s updating things, so have some time, be patient. Sometimes I don’t have it update, I just have it review. Like, where do I go on this screen, tell me exactly what field and what I should put in it, and then I go back and do it, just for the sake of speed. But there are different options.

Amanda: Awesome, great. So then the question was, how do I tell somebody what I’m doing today about this? And I think the overall advice is what I told her. I want you to think about it like I’m in the room next to you and we’re working on this. If I was not in the room next to you and you needed to know what to do next, you just ask the system in front of you. And it seems obvious to those of us who use this every day, but for new users who are just trying to dip their toe in, it was very much like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Amanda: So somebody else who’s using this for the first time, they’ve just gotten started today. Rob, what are some, or Debbie, what are some other quick things they should really think about before they get too far down the road?

Ask Claude what it could do for your job

Debbie: I’ll start with some really basic things. Number one, I was going to say Claude will not judge you, but every once in a while it does say something that feels a little judgy. But it isn’t a person. So you can ask it the thing that you think is the dumbest question ever, and it’s totally fine. The second thing is, if you’re like, okay, that was three things, but I can’t think of anything else that Claude can help me with: click that little Control H, or click your microphone button, and say, Claude, this is my job, this is what I do, this is what my days are filled with. Can you give me 10 things that you could help me with that would give me back 10 minutes a day each? What’s something that is just outlandish that you could help me with that I never would have thought of? Just ask it what it can help you with. You will be surprised what it tells you.

Rob: I love that one. I do the same thing all the time. I’m just trying to do this, like, how do I do it? I said on our webinar, maybe last week, my mindset’s really gone from, I want to do something, what are the limitations, how do I. To, I want to do something, what are the possibilities, let’s go to Claude and figure out how to do it.

Use it as a peer, not a tool

Rob: And that kind of leads me, you alluded to this last time in your comment, Amanda, but to land it: if you’re new, don’t use it as a tool, use it as a peer. Talk to it as if it’s somebody that’s working with you, not just a tool. You’ll end up getting a lot more out of it.

Debbie: The other thing we didn’t talk about are skills. Can we save that for next week? Because they can be kind of complicated.

Rob: No, we can save it for next week. We have three minutes left. So we can pick up with skills next time.

The builder series, and Debbie live from ILTA

Rob: Amanda, just as a reminder, we’re going to start doing a builder series where people come on, small firms, and talk about what they’re building. As Amanda said at the beginning, no matter how big or small, come show it off. Maybe we can give you a few extra tips to help you, or somebody in the audience can. Or you’re helping somebody you know that may be needing exactly what you’re showing. So again, nothing is too big, nothing is too small. Are there any other updates we have that we want to mention?

Debbie: The only thing that I’ll say is, two weeks from today I am going to be live from ILTA.

Rob: We should think about how do we have some fun with that. I don’t know what we could do, but come to you live from the expo hall or something.

Amanda: I’ll be in Mexico.

Debbie: Please don’t make me do this on my own.

Rob: So you know what, I’m going to have John Fier, so the two of us will just be.

Amanda: By yourself, Debbie.

Rob: I don’t think AI is going to be a hot topic at ILTA, so it might not be a good fit. Yeah, that’s great. As Debbie mentioned, she’s at ILTA, make sure you find her, say hello. Amanda, you’re not going this year, right?

Amanda: Maybe next year. I think it’s in Orlando maybe again next year. I’m not sure.

Rob: Is it back in Orlando?

Debbie: No, it’s two years in a row in Nashville.

Amanda: But I think it was in Nashville last year, right? Anyways, maybe next year. I do love Nashville.

Rob: I don’t remember where it was last year. D.C. maybe? National Harbor?

Debbie: It was. Yes, that’s correct.

Rob: So I just dropped the link to join Sidebar one more time. If you haven’t joined, take the time and join. You’ll be surprised. Go ahead, Amanda.

Having nothing to add is adding something

Amanda: I was going to say, one thing that we learned on our first focus group this week was that sometimes members of Sidebar do not answer the question because they feel like they have nothing to add. Having nothing to add is adding something. Our firm is not dealing with this at all. As a firm administrator, this has not come across my plate at all, period. That then gives us a percentage that helps you to know 60% of firms are not dealing with this. So even if you don’t have a response, that is a response. So please respond. We’re getting great rates, we really appreciate that from everybody. And sign up, send it along. If you’re in an ALA chapter, forward it to your whole chapter. Thank you.

Rob: All right, guys. People are tired of hearing from us this week.

Amanda: No, they’re not.

Rob: We’ll be back next Thursday. Looking forward to the conversation, and thanks for riding along with us. Talk to you later.

Debbie: Bye, everyone.