Claude Code for law firms: what it is and what it needs.

Claude, and Claude Code

Claude is Anthropic's AI model, the one in the chat app. Claude Code is a separate program from Anthropic that runs Claude on your own computer and lets it use tools: read a file, call a service, run a program, with the results shown to you. It comes with the Claude desktop app and as a command-line tool. It is what developers use to work on code, and it turns out to be exactly the right shape for an assistant that has to work on a law firm's systems: the assistant is a set of tools and instructions that Claude Code loads, and every tool runs on the attorney's own machine with the attorney's own logins.

Why that matters for confidentiality

With a hosted legal-AI service, your mail and your matters are copied to the vendor's servers so the vendor's software can read them. With an assistant on Claude Code, nothing is copied anywhere. The assistant signs in to Microsoft 365 and Clio as the attorney, reads what that attorney can read, and writes only what that attorney approves, on that attorney's computer. The vendor - us - never holds a client's email, a matter, or a document. What reaches Anthropic is what any Claude conversation sends: the text of the conversation, under the terms of the attorney's Claude plan. The confidentiality page says exactly what that means and what to check with your plan.

What a firm needs

• Clio Manage, and a Clio administrator who can approve the assistant for the firm once.
• Microsoft 365 with each attorney's mailbox and calendar in Outlook, and an IT provider or administrator who can approve it once.
• Claude Code on a paid Claude plan for each person who will use it. The chat app alone does not run it. A plan with commercial terms - Team or Enterprise, or an organization's API plan - is the one whose data terms a firm should read; the FAQ covers the choice.
• A Mac or Windows computer per person, that they can install software on.

Two of those can be proved with a sign-in on the sign-up page, so a firm learns on the form, not on day three, whether its IT provider has to approve something first.

What it costs beside the subscription

The assistant is billed per attorney per month. Claude Code is billed by Anthropic under the attorney's Claude plan, and Clio and Microsoft are what the firm already pays. There is no server of ours to pay for, because there is no server of ours in the path: the account service that checks a subscription each morning holds a firm's name and a subscription status, and nothing about its clients.

What day one looks like

Open the folder in Claude Code, say "set up the assistant", sign in once to Microsoft and once to Clio, and ask for the morning brief. The assistant tells you what is on the calendar, what is unfiled, and what might be missing from billing, and then waits for you to say what to do about it.

How it works, step by step, and the fourteen-day trial on one attorney's real inbox.

Also read: What a paralegal can hand to an assistant and Filing Outlook email to Clio matters, and why it slips. All articles.