Last year I started tracking how I spent the first two hours of work. Almost all of it was sorting. Emails, requests, figuring out what was actually urgent. Real legal work didn't start until 10am most days.

So I built something to change that. A few weekends of Claude prompts and some basic automations. The whole setup costs less than a steak dinner.

By the time I open my laptop now, everything that came in overnight has already been tagged. Here's what the color coding means:

Green: AI handles it completely. A standard NDA comes in and matches our playbook. If no unusual terms, AI drafts the response, marks it ready to send. I spot-check a few per week.

Yellow: AI gets it 80% done. A counterparty sends an agreement with non-standard limitation of liability terms. AI redlines against our playbook, writes the initial response, flags the 2-3 issues that need my actual judgment. Usually 10 minutes of work instead of an hour.

Red: Needs my brain. IP renegotiation on an existing deal. A transaction structure question from the CFO. Something where there's no playbook answer. AI can pull context and prior examples, but the call is mine.

Gray: Not actionable today. Industry updates, informational stuff. Filed and out of the way.

What made this actually work was realizing that most of the weight of being a GC isn't the legal judgment. It's the operational layer around it. Tracking what's due, figuring out what's urgent, staging docs for calls. That used to eat my mornings. Now it doesn't.

I didn't build this because I saw someone else do it. I built it because I needed to leverage my mornings when my brain is fresh to tackle the complex problems instead of doing ops.

If you run a legal function and you're still manually triaging your inbox at 8am, it's worth asking whether you actually need to be.

What's the one task you do every morning that you know could be automated?

#inhouselegal #legaltech #AIforLawyers

My AI reads my emails before I do.

Every morning I wake up to a 2-minute summary of everything that landed in my inbox overnight.

No scrolling. No skimming. No "I'll get to that later."

Just a clean breakdown: what needs action, what's FYI, what can wait.
I built the agent in 10 minutes using Claude Cowork. No code. No developer. Just a prompt and a schedule.

Here's what it does:
Scans every new email. Sorts by priority. Groups by topic. Pulls out action items. Flags anything urgent. Ignores the noise.

47 emails become one summary I read with my coffee.
The average professional spends 28% of their workday on email (McKinsey). That's 2.5 hours. Every day. Just reading and responding.

For lawyers it's worse. Client emails. Opposing counsel. Court notices. Insurance adjusters. Medical providers. Lien holders. All mixed in with newsletters and spam.

Miss one email from the court? That's a missed deadline. Miss one email from a client? That's a bar complaint waiting to happen.

The agent catches everything. I catch nothing by accident.
I recorded a full Loom walkthrough showing exactly how I built it. Step by step.
10 minutes. You can build yours tonight.

Watch the full tutorial below.

If you want to integrate AI into your practice in the simplest ways, let's talk.