Drafting litigation motions and supporting memoranda

The conversation surrounding artificial intelligence in the Canadian legal sector has fundamentally shifted. No longer a novel concept or a distant future projection, AI has become a baseline reality for modern legal practices. Today, the real challenge facing law firms and corporate legal departments is operational: how to move past isolated, ad-hoc digital experiments and turn generative AI into a dependable, structured part of how legal work actually gets done.

The recent market introduction of Lexis+® with ProtégéTM in Canada marks a significant evolution in this landscape. By moving the industry away from standalone AI utilities and introducing end-to-end, automated legal processes, this launch represents a major turning point in how the Canadian legal profession applies technology to everyday practice.

The recent market introduction of Lexis+® with ProtégéTM️ in Canada marks a significant shift in the legal tech landscape, moving the industry away from standalone AI functionality and into a new phase that where AI is woven into the fabric of legal work. This shift is worth paying attention to because it marks an important turning point in how the Canadian legal profession is applying the technology to legal practice.

I'm a solo trial attorney in Maine. Federal and state criminal defense, family law, state and federal appeals, and CJA panel work. I've been using Claude (Cowork mode almost every time) as a drafting and research assistant, and figured I'd share the setup in case it's useful to other litigators.

I have a dedicated project with standing instructions describing my practice areas, jurisdictions (Maine state court, Maine federal court, First Circuit Court of Appeals), and drafting conventions — formal prose matching Maine and First Circuit filing norms, numbered paragraphs, lead with the strongest argument, and citation priority to Maine SJC, Maine statutes, First Circuit, and Maine federal authority. Every draft it produces starts from that baseline instead of generic legal-writing defaults.

I have a custom-built plugin I put together myself for drafting trial-court motions and supporting memoranda (Maine state and federal court). It researches authority via CourtListener and Google Scholar and outputs a court-formatted .docx.

A standalone skill for drafting appellate brief argument sections (Maine Law Court and First Circuit).

Also a general "legal" plugin pulled from Anthropic's plugin library — NDA triage, contract review against a playbook, compliance checks, vendor agreement tracking, meeting briefings, templated responses to legal inquiries. Honestly this one's built for in-house/corporate legal teams, not litigation, so it's more "came with the toolkit" than something I use day to day.

CourtListener and Google Scholar are wired in for case law and citation research, feeding the motion-drafting skill directly.

The thing I've found most useful: Claude has a persistent memory built from reviewing my actual past filings — motions to suppress, Law Court and First Circuit briefs, motions in limine, sentencing memos. It captures my structural conventions per document type, citation format (Maine's ME-number format, Bluebook signals, First Circuit record-citation conventions), and specific style corrections to avoid. That carries across sessions, so new drafts already sound like mine instead of generic legal-AI output.

While I have used various providers and models over the years, I am only about a level above a noob. I have found that Sonnet can draft a decent federal sentencing memorandum (more difficult than it sounds), a motion to suppress in criminal cases and can review appellate briefs very well (have not drafted an appeal yet, but next on my list when I take another appeal on).

What I am looking for is where should I go next? Areas for improvement? New areas I have not thought of? Missing something obvious to others? Looking for human lawyers in appellate law, family law or criminal law who can give input based on their experience.

Happy to answer any questions if that helps. Thanks!