His only programming language is English.

Nothing new at ILTACON, except that everything wants to connect

Debbie’s read from the expo hall: no genuinely new AI news, but connecting systems to each other is all the rage. Integration is the story now, not capability. Her other observation, the booths at the Gaylord are so large they can only be described as neighborhoods, and a few vendors would qualify for their own zip code.

Start with a problem you can already name

John’s tool exists because of one specific failure his firm kept hitting. Conference room requests ran through a single point of contact, and what a meeting actually needed, webcams, screens, a loaner laptop, quite often never reached the IT department. Not a technology problem, a communication problem, which is why he could describe it clearly enough to build for it.

The programming language was English

Amanda asks what coding language he learned to build this. His answer: Claude Code is my language, natural language, how do I communicate with the tool. Not Python, not Java, not HTML. Everything he demos in the next 20 minutes was built by describing it out loud, including a scrape of his firm’s website that turned its fonts, colors, and logos into a reusable design system.

What Spaces actually does

A live booking, start to finish. Pick a date and time and the tool deconflicts automatically, so only genuinely free rooms appear. Book a primary room and a breakout room in the same request. Four tiers of user, attorney, assistant, management, admin, each with its own authority and the ability to book on behalf of someone else. Client matter numbers, headcount, and a paste box that parses the phone numbers and links out of a Teams or Zoom invitation.

The IT setup card is the whole product

The screen the tool was built for. Cameras, screens, and monitors get requested per room, with firm wide defaults an admin configures once. The best detail is a deliberate forcing function: a loaner laptop is never assumed, so the person booking has to affirmatively say they need one. The breakout room gets water and nothing else.

Bring IT in as a partner, and let Claude write the brief

Amanda’s standing trick, ask Claude to draft the email to your IT team spelling out exactly which permissions you need. John went further. Before going live he had Claude write an Entra brief explaining the Microsoft connection, read write calendar access and single sign on, in both HTML and Word, pitched at what an IT director needs to know: the limitations, and which parts of their network get touched.

Under a month, part time, some of it in the car

Concept to a deliverable his IT department could review took less than a month of genuinely spare time, around a full time job and a kid at home. When the Microsoft permissions work turned out to be easier on Windows than the Linux he originally built for, he asked Claude to refactor it to run on Windows Server. That rebuild took less than a day. It runs on a URL inside the firm network, reachable by nobody outside it.

Nothing you build is fire and forget

Debbie asks the harder question, how do you keep control of what you develop. John’s biggest piece of feedback so far is that Microsoft changes everything all the time, so a tool wired into it needs an owner and active maintenance, not a launch. Amanda’s addition: schedule a regular check so a change in the Microsoft environment does not quietly break it.

Over 75% had not heard about watermarking

This week’s question asked members whether they had heard about Claude’s new watermarking feature and whether it had come up at their firm. Over 75% had not heard the announcement, did not know what it meant, and had had no conversation about it internally. The common reply was gratitude for the heads up, because now they know to go look it up.

Start small, but start

Debbie’s close, and the point of the whole episode. Everyone can build something. It might be intimidating, so start personal and start small, a recipe folder, something with no stakes. John, naturally, has a recipe app too. He could not find one he liked on the App Store, so he talked Claude through building one and shipped it through Xcode.

Transcript

Live from ILTACON, and Rob is in Mexico

Amanda: Well hello everybody. Welcome to another week of Sidebar Live. Debbie, where are you coming from today?

Debbie: I’m coming to you live from Nashville, Tennessee, at ILTACON.

Amanda: I feel like I’m the only person, or John and I are the only people, who aren’t at ILTA this week.

Debbie: Well, it’s all AI all the time.

Amanda: And you’ll notice we’re also missing Rob Joyner, because he is in Mexico.

Amanda: All right, so today we have a special guest, John Beyer, joining us. John is the operations manager at Newmeyer Dillion, something something. All those firms have so many names. So John, do you want to introduce yourself any further, or do you feel good with that?

John: Sure. I am the Newmeyer Dillion operations manager, out here in Newport Beach. We have a couple of different offices across the Southwest. I’m also the vice president for the Orange County Association of Legal Administrators. And thank you so much for having me on today. This is really exciting.

Amanda: All right. I hope we are live. It says we’re live, but this thing isn’t live. We’ll just see.

Debbie: I’m sure we’re live.

Amanda: So John, first of all, Debbie, I wanted to ask you really quickly. What is the biggest, newest thing in AI you’ve heard this week at ILTA? Any new lessons?

Booths the size of neighborhoods

Debbie: I’m not sure that I could tell you that there is anything new that I have heard. But what I will say is everybody wants to connect with everybody else. Connecting systems together is all the rage in the world of AI. And I’ll also just say, I have decided that this expo hall at ILTACON this year doesn’t actually have booths. It has neighborhoods. The booths are so large that they can only be described as a neighborhood. If they were issuing zip codes, there would be some vendors here that have their own zip code. It’s mind blowing.

Amanda: I mean, I wonder how much all that costs. That’s all I can think of. All that space. Because you guys are at the Gaylord again, right?

Debbie: Yes. Rob says we’re not live. Are we live? Are we not live?

Amanda: I don’t know. We’re just going to keep going.

John: It says live on the screen. Making me nervous.

Amanda: It says live up there. If Rob broke it, it’s all on him.

Show and tell, starting with a problem

Amanda: John, today we invited you on because we want to do a little show and tell. And it’s something that we’ve heard from our Sidebar members over and over again, which is that they want to see people doing the things that they want to see that they can do. When you and I first started chatting, you have so many projects, and you’re a lot like me. You’re like, I built this and I built this and I built this. And I said, okay, I need to pare you down to tell us about one thing you have built. So I’m wondering if you would just kind of tell us about your path with AI, and all the things that you have built and done.

Why he started building

John: Okay. Building is a lot of fun. What is so exciting to me is finding and identifying problems that team members are facing, that maybe we’re facing personally, and just saying, hey, let’s see if I can do this, and then doing it. That’s just super cool to me. That’s kind of part of the reason why I started doing the building piece in the beginning. I just wanted to see if I could do it. You hear about all these different people playing with these different technologies, and you think maybe I could do that, and you just want to prove it to yourself that you can. And that’s one of the coolest parts about implementing AI to do this. It really empowers us to make those types of changes and build tools that can save people time and stress, and that’s just a lot of fun.

The problem: conference rooms, and IT never hearing about it

John: So the tool that I’m going to talk about today came up because we had a problem. All the law firm administrators out there that are listening, you probably have conference room spaces, and you probably have areas where people need to work, and you have attorneys that want to meet with their clients. Well, we had that same issue, and we had it all managed in one specific area. There was one point of contact for getting anything done. There was one point of contact for making sure that all the pieces came into play. So whether the conference room is available, whether the IT department gets notified of what their requirements are. Maybe it’s going to be a Zoom call, and there are people that are going to be on site for it, but they’re also going to be needing webcams and different types of resources. What we found was that quite often those resources weren’t getting communicated back to the IT department, to be able to effectively and fully serve our internal clients, to be able to serve our external clients. And so I said, well, what if we made a conference room booking application that could really help us with this? It would be simple, it could be branded the way that we wanted it to be branded, and it could address all those types of issues. So that’s what we did.

Claude Design, and scraping a brand into a design system

John: What I did was, I had an idea of what the issues were that we needed to face. I knew the players that needed to be involved as different stakeholders, and I knew what the problem was that I was really trying to fix. And I had no idea how I wanted it to look. I had a good idea when it comes to user interfaces, I had a decent idea when it came to workflows and the process for how it should get accomplished. So I said, this actually needs to be a tool, but in order to do the design piece, I jumped into a tool called Claude Design. And Claude Design, if you have even the web version on your desktop, you don’t need the desktop app for this, it’s in the bottom left hand corner. It does a phenomenal job at building out user interfaces, document designs, and design systems themselves.

John: What I did was, I knew that I wanted the tool to be branded for my company. So I went into Claude Code and I said, hey Claude, I need help making this brand fit my tool, to fit the company that I’m going to want to apply this for. And so we went out and we did what’s called a scrape. We scraped that website to get what’s effectively referred to as the design system. It’s all your fonts, all your colors, all your logos, and it pulls it down into a raw format and then builds out a design system for you that you can essentially apply to all the tools that you want to build.

From Claude Design into Claude Code

John: I took that and then I finished building out the initial user interface inside of Claude Design. And what’s really cool about Claude Design, and there are a lot of tools out there that can help you put these designs together, is you can export it directly to Claude Code. It’ll give you a prompt that you’re then going to take into what I used to build this, which is called an IDE, or design environment. And the design environment I use is called VS Code.

Amanda: Can I stop you just really quickly? I want to reiterate a couple of things. First of all, John is doing what we’re telling a lot of our members to do, which is start by finding a problem. And your problem is one we all have. If you have more than one conference room, and even if you only have one conference room, it’s a problem most law firms struggle with, which is how do you make sure that the right people have got the stuff in the right conference rooms? So I like that concept. From there, a lot of these functions and features you’re talking about. This is a question I asked you in the pre show. What programming language do you know, and did you use and learn, to build this thing that you’ve built?

What programming language do you know?

John: What a great question. So there are a lot of different design languages out there, a lot of different coding languages. I know Claude coding language, and that’s it. I know natural voice language. How do I communicate with the tool? So Claude Code is my language.

Amanda: So your programming language is not Python or Java or HTML or anything like that. It is the English language is what you use to code with Claude.

John: Yes. Everything that we’re going to show you today was built using natural language.

Amanda: By you just saying, I want to do this, make it happen. And I don’t know how to do this, how do I do this?

John: That’s right.

Amanda: So why don’t you show us some of the things that you’ve done?

A tour of Spaces

John: Sure thing. So do you want to see the design environment that I use, or do we just want to jump right into the tool that we ended up building?

Amanda: Show us the tool you ended up building, and then Debbie and I will ask you questions about it.

John: Okay, perfect. So I’m going to go ahead and share my screen. I’m going to pull up the tool that I call Spaces. Can everybody see what we’re looking at here? Okay, so we’re looking at my desktop right now, and I have a window open. This is for a fictitious law firm called Where to Put Them and How. That’s what we came up with.

Amanda: That is the best name. I think you should have just left it that and not called it Spaces. Did Claude come up with that fictional name for you? Wow.

John: And I’m very proud of that, by the way. The idea is that I named it Spaces, and the reason being is because it can apply to conference rooms, hotel rooms, whatever you need it to apply to.

John: And this is the dashboard that it’s built into. When the person logs in, this is what they see. And just to let everybody know, if you haven’t figured it out already, this is all mock data. This is a mock law firm, the conference room names are fake, these aren’t real companies. Just a disclaimer, if there’s any company out there that does match this, then it’s purely accidental.

The dashboard, and matter numbers

John: The dashboard shows what is happening for that person, their day, it’s showing what’s happening this week, it’s showing what’s happening later. And all of these are actual conference rooms that have been booked into using mock data. So it’s got everything here. You have your dates and times, the conference room, where it’s at, how many people to expect, matter numbers if it’s associated, so that’s all built in. And you know how I built that in, Amanda? I said, hey, wouldn’t it be cool if we could document the matter numbers as well? That way we know exactly what this is for.

Amanda: Do you have a live feed from your practice management system that brings them in, or do you just trust people to put it in?

Booking a room, and automatic deconflicting

John: So that’s all part of the booking process, to get put in. And we’ll walk through that right now. So I’m going to log in and I’m going to book a new booking. Here’s our first screen. And we’re going to go ahead and just pick a date. Let’s do tomorrow. And we’ll pick a start time. It’s going to be a long meeting, so we’re going to do probably eight to five. So we’re going to be in there for a while. Please forgive me, I’m using 24 hour clocks on these.

John: Okay, we’ll jump into this. And as you can see, it automatically deconflicts. So if there is something that’s already booked today, it’s taking those things into consideration, so that you can’t book it. You can see that only Birch, Cedar, Elm, and Dogwood are available.

John: But that was an important piece of it. You don’t have to worry about, hey, is this conference room available, is it not available? We’ll go ahead and put it in Dogwood for now. And I want to share something else that we have happening here. How often do administrators and attorneys need conference rooms that also need breakout spaces? So we’re probably going to need a smaller room. We’ll just go ahead and take Elm 2 and we’ll put the defense in there. So I’ll click next.

Four tiers of users

John: There are a lot of different people that I want to be able to use this tool. And so what I did was I said, who are my tiers of people that need to have access to this? I need attorneys to have access to this. I need their assistants to access this. I need management, but I also need admins. So each one of those tiers has its own authority and its own ability to do different things, including booking on behalf of other people. I’m currently logged in as an admin user, so I can book on behalf of anybody that’s in my law firm. And it would directly go into who it’s being booked for, as well as later on down the road, when we go to submit this, who gets the invites for these.

John: Okay, so right now I’m not going to worry about that, but we’ll say our client matter number is 1100. And we’re not going to add any additional attendees at this time. But there are going to be a few people here, so we’re going to say seven people. And probably eight, to make a nice round number. And we’re going to be doing a deposition. The deposition is going to be on Teams. Maybe it’s a Zoom call, so we’ll just say it’ll be virtual for now. And then it allows you to take those blocks that are inside of your Zoom meetings or inside of your Teams meetings, paste it into here, and then it parses it all out for you. So it parses out the phone numbers, it parses out the links, all the different things that are important. But we’ll just leave it for now, and I’m going to click next.

The IT setup card, the whole reason it exists

John: Now, remember how we had two different rooms booked. So here’s how we get the setups for those rooms. If we’re going to use Dogwood as our primary room, maybe we want coffee and water. And this is the main room, so we’re going to need some IT setups in here. This is an important part that I felt that we needed to build out. This is the whole reason we built this thing out, to make sure that IT knows, hey, we need cameras, hey, we need screens, because that wasn’t getting to them. So maybe we just need one. And it defaults all of these things, and this is something that the user can set up to say, hey, in every IT setup, I want there to be default items. And we’re just going to assume right now that the attorney is going to bring their own laptop. What this does is it forces the person that’s booking this to say, hey, I need a loaner laptop, I need a conference room laptop. It forces them to say, yes, I need it. It’s not by default.

John: We can get up to a few monitors in here, which is nice. So maybe your opponent needs a monitor, but you need a monitor to look at this. And then any types of special requests. Now, in our breakout room, we’re not really worried about them. They can have water, fine, but they’re not getting anything special. They don’t need any IT setups, and it’s just going to be an empty room that they can break off into.

Confirm, and the invitations go out

John: And once they click next, this is the full event that we’re looking at. It’s got all the different people and all the different players that are involved. So who’s in it, what conference rooms are being used, and what goes into it. And then as soon as you click confirm, we can’t do this right now because it’s not tied into an actual Outlook instance right now, and I didn’t want to use one that was tied into it, so we’re not going to click this. But it’ll send off all those bookings and invitations to the people that are necessary. Most importantly, it’ll get those IT setups correct, so that we make sure it’s all done and committed.

Wiring it into Microsoft 365

Amanda: Okay, I have a couple of questions. So you mentioned tying into your Outlook. The locations it pulled in came directly from resources set up in Outlook, right? With your users, is it by any chance tied into your 365, or do you have to individually enter new users in there?

John: So this ties directly into Office 365, using the Microsoft tenant credentials to be able to go in and grab those pieces. So you can have it filter by all the users, or whatever the case is. But once the IT department drops in their tenant ID and client IDs, it’s going to give them access to be able to pull that information in, including the conference rooms, which are listed as resources, to be able to automatically assign those. So you’re not hand typing out Dogwood. It’ll go out and find those resources and pull them in.

Have Claude write the email to IT

Amanda: One of the things that I always tell people is, I don’t know what to tell my IT team. Like, what kind of permissions do I have? And one of my favorite little tricks is to always ask Claude, draft the email to IT asking for what you need me to ask for this. And it’ll draft the whole thing and say, Amanda needs access to SSO, or Amanda needs access to, you know, she just needs the tenant. Whatever she needs, it’ll tell me. So that’s always my favorite way. We love IT.

John: We do, we do. And I’m really glad that you brought that piece up. When I was building this out, that was a really important relationship for me to have, to make sure that we were doing this hand in hand with the IT department, because they know their systems, they know their networks. So when I ran into that end state where I said, okay, I think we’re ready to put this online, I did exactly what you said. I went to Claude and I said, hey Claude, you can see my code, you can see what we’re trying to accomplish here. I have some concerns that I want to share with my IT department, because I want to be able to answer their questions, because they’re going to have a lot.

An Entra brief for the IT director

John: And I wanted to make sure that I could do that. So what I did was I had Claude build out what I called an Entra brief, because that’s the main connection piece, connecting to Microsoft. Because at this point you’re asking for read write access to calendars, you’re asking for the ability to get single sign on for your users. There are a lot of pieces. And so I had it build out that document. And I did it in an HTML format as well as in a Word document, so I could give it to him however that person wanted to review it. And it went through all the different things. I said, I need you to explain this in a personal way, but in a technical way, that an IT director understands what I’m wanting to do, but helps them understand what the limitations are and helps them understand what parts of their network would need to get touched, changed, whatever the case is.

Amanda: That’s awesome. Okay. Debbie, what do you think? I don’t know that you’ve seen this before. What is your immediate first thought?

Debbie: I have not seen it. I’m curious how long it took you, John, from the idea to actually having, like, what do you call it, an MVP. How long did that take?

Idea to working tool in under a month

John: I would say that I spent from concept to deliverable to the IT department, working very part time, by the way, less than a month. Maybe a few weeks, because I have a kid at home, so he takes up a lot of my time.

Amanda: And you have a full time day job.

John: This is all full time day job, and this wasn’t done during day job stuff. This was done at home. And I’ve got to share something else. This was also done in the car, but that’s a different story, so we won’t go down that route. Safely, by the way. But yeah, I’d say less than a month to be able to put out something working, very part time, and that includes everything from build out to scraping.

Linux to Windows Server in a day

Amanda: And where does it sit? How do people get to it at your firm?

John: Well, originally what I did was I built it using my MacBook, but I built it to sit on Linux, and that’s just because I understood Linux. But what we found out was that the permissions piece that comes along with Microsoft, and being able to access different websites, it’s a lot easier if you just do it on Windows.

John: So what I did was I said, hey Claude, I need this to run on a Windows server. And Claude said, that’s called IIS, you need to run Windows Server. Okay, cool. Can you refactor this to run on a Windows Server? Sure. And then you just send it off to do its thing, and it rebuilt it to run on Linux and on Windows. And that second piece took less than a day. So it rebuilt my entire thing.

Amanda: So then somebody in your firm has just an HTML link they go to, or do you have it on your intranet?

John: I’m so sorry, I thought you were asking about the server it sits on. It’s just a URL that’s on the local network. And what’s nice is it’s completely secure, so it’s not accessible outside the network, and nobody else can get to it except for your people.

Microsoft changes everything, so nothing is fire and forget

Debbie: What kind of feedback have you gotten, and how do you incorporate the feedback into whatever the next version of this will be? Because that’s the next challenge that we have to think about. We can develop these things, and we can do it in a short period of time, and then how do we keep control of what we’re developing?

John: Boy, how do we keep control of it? The biggest feedback that I think I’ve gotten was that Microsoft changes everything all the time. And that was probably the biggest feedback that I had gotten. It’s like, how do you continue to make sure that this is supported when those changes happen and all of a sudden everything in Microsoft is different? So that’s one of the considerations we have to take into consideration. But just knowing that this isn’t something that you can deploy and fire and forget, as they say. It needs to be hands on, actively developing it.

Amanda: Or setting up a debug on a regular basis to make sure there’s nothing that’s changed in the Microsoft environment that would impact it. Never manual anymore.

Could anybody else build this?

Amanda: This is awesome, John. Now, if somebody wanted to build something like this, similar to this, could they call you and get help? Or could they get the code? Or could you make an MCP connector? How can we help our users do this?

John: Great question. So the answer is yes. I love talking about this stuff, just because it’s super fun for me. I’m all about trying to help people build tools to help serve others. But I do think that there’s something that Sidebar’s working on in order to be able to become a better distributor of tools like that.

Amanda: We are hoping Sidebar 2.0, or whatever we’re calling it right now, will be able to have a portal where administrators can share tools they’ve built that other people can use and modify. I mean, that’s kind of the beauty of what we’re building here.

This week’s synthesis: Claude watermarking

Amanda: So before we go, I want to talk a little bit about what we found in our Sidebar summary this week. One of the things that we asked about this week was about Claude’s new watermarking feature. And while the explanation is very detailed, we did ask a question to our users, like, have you heard about this, have you had conversations in your firm? And overwhelmingly, over 75% of our users had not heard about this announcement, and didn’t know what it meant, and didn’t have conversations in their firm yet. And so most of them said something along the lines of, we’re really glad Sidebar is here to tell us and keep us up to date on these things, because now I can go out and look it up and figure it out and do all those kinds of things.

Amanda: So while I didn’t figure out how to drop the cool link in the chat, because I did forget to ask Rob how to do that, if you are watching and you’d like to join, you can go to gosidebar.ai, and you’ve got a little form that you can fill out and sign up for it. And one of the things in the beginning, we told a lot of our users we only wanted one user per firm to join. But we have added some basically deduping software in there, I guess is the best way to put it, so that if two people from the same firm are answering, and it’s a firm based question, it will consolidate those answers before filling it out, so you’re not overexposing. If you had six people from one firm, you’re not overly weighting the answers. But a lot of the questions we do ask on Sidebar are personal, so it’s important for us to hear from everybody. We’re always looking for question ideas, so if you have anything, please let us know.

Amanda: We’ve got about three minutes left. Debbie, what’s on your mind over there?

Start small, but start

Debbie: I really am grateful that you came and shared all of that with us, John. That’s some really cool stuff. And I also know, from spending some time with you earlier this year, that you built some other really cool stuff too. So I think that was a great example to show us. And I think maybe the most important thing that Amanda asked you was, what language did you use to code it? And the answer is, everyone can build something. It might be intimidating, but start small. Start by building a recipe folder, or something like that. Start with something personal and play around.

Amanda: Well, John has one of those too.

Debbie: Of course he does. Thank you, John. It was really great having you.

Amanda: Well, he has an entire app.

John: This was a lot of fun. And thanks for letting me be a part of it.

Amanda: When we were talking the other day, Debbie, he’s like, let me show you what I built, it’s my second brain. And I was like, okay, well, we’re not putting our listeners through that, because that’s like here and then here and then here and then here. I can’t even understand what you did. But I think yours is a really good use.

Amanda: So John, what gets you out of bed in the morning with regards to what you can build with Claude? What’s your constraint besides time?

The recipe app that made it to the App Store

John: Trying new stuff. Finding out what areas people need something fixed in. When I built the recipe app, I built the recipe app because I couldn’t find one I liked on the App Store. I was like, I bet you I could probably make one of these. Then we got it through and built it and got it through Xcode and on the App Store. And you know how I did it? Just by talking to Claude. I don’t know any of the coding, I don’t know how to use any of those apps. Claude does.

Amanda: I love it. Are you constantly looking at your firm and, like, what can I solve at the firm today? And are you teaching a lot of people? Are you helping others?

John: Yeah, I love talking about stuff like that, and just having discussions around what we’re doing. Hey, this is a trick that I found out today, or this is something that I used to solve a problem for an attorney last week. Those are the super cool conversations, and yeah, we’re absolutely having those here. And I’ll be honest with you, luckily I have a team of administrators, my executive director, who’s extremely supportive and very forward thinking.

Last word from ILTA

Amanda: Awesome. Debbie, last thoughts from ILTA? Other than how much you miss us.

Debbie: Yes, I do miss you guys. I miss the crowd, although I’ve seen lots of ALA crossover here this past week. So no, ILTACON’s been great. This has been great. Big shout out and thank you. John mentioned Lisa, his firm administrator, is very supportive. We really appreciate you coming on here and showing us what you guys are working on.

Amanda: All right. Well, thanks everybody. Appreciate it.

Debbie: Bye guys.