Building and maintaining a legal AI knowledge base

Starting this week, CoCounsel Legal customers will get early access to the next generation of CoCounsel, ahead of the full launch planned for later this summer starting in the U.S, and followed by rollouts in Canada, UK and Australia. The product will keep getting better. But it is already good enough that keeping it from you any longer felt like the wrong call.

The next generation works the way an attorney works with a teammate. Describe your matter in plain language. CoCounsel Legal creates a plan, dives deep into legal authority, reasons through the legal issues, retrieves what it needs from your own precedents, and from Westlaw and Practical Law, and drafts with citations. When new information changes the picture, it adapts. Instead of getting piecemeal answers, you get a professional standard response that you can iterate on.

Claude is my operating system.

It's a CLM, Word plugin, assistant and agent all rolled into one.

Right now, while I'm answering legal questions, Claude is running in the background restructuring my folder system, adding context where it needs to be, organizing everything under a single file that tells it how to work with me and how to work with legal at Worksome.

The CLAUDE.md file.
Think of it as the instruction manual for Worksome's legal department and me. Except I didn't write it for humans.

The structure is three layers:

1️⃣ The CLAUDE.md file
It includes who I am, how legal works, what I care about, how I like information presented, how I want AI to think and handle queries, which folder to go to for which task.

2️⃣ A context document written for AI in each folder
Plus the actual knowledge. Ya know - the files and Word docs lawyers love.

3️⃣ Claude has navigation instructions
In the CLAUDE.md file and context files within each folder.

Baby experiments first. Low stakes. When those work, and only then do I apply it to the things that matter.

It's a little scary.
Mostly exciting.

And I genuinely have no idea what the end state looks like yet.

I'm documenting all of this in AI Field Notes from a GC. Next issue is entirely about my CLAUDE.md file and Cowork.

If you're building something similar and rethinking where context lives, how your systems are structured, what it means to actually run legal on AI, I'd love to compare notes.

(See, I told you I didn't need a CLM or a Word plugin. 😉)

My legal AI demo battles got hundreds of replies. I can't keep up. Plus, people ask where to find that prompt I shared 3 weeks ago, or that workflow from last month. Everything's buried somewhere in my feed. So I built a solution (with AI, obviously, duh). What's there? Weekly AI Field Notes from a GC (free weekly updates on the latest demo battles, what's working in my legal function, what's failing—organized, searchable, permanent) and The Field Guide (paid membership with the prompts and workflows I use daily, vendor evaluations, implementation guides, and monthly Q&A videos).