Automate the assembly, not the judgment.
Every new matter starts as fragments: an intake email, a voice memo dictated between meetings, conflict notes, fee and scope details. Someone has to turn that into a clean, accurate summary before anything moves. That first pass eats non-billable hours, and it has to be right, because a missed deadline or an overlooked conflict costs the firm the matter or worse.
Claude Cowork reads the folder, plans the steps, and returns a structured summary with the blockers at the top. What it does not do is decide anything. The seven steps below are the sequence from our recorded walkthrough, in the order you would actually run them.
Running the first pass
Steps one to five are the run itself. Six and seven are the setup you do once, before any real matter touches it.
Put the matter’s raw files in one folder
Intake arrives as fragments: the prospective client’s email, the attorney’s voice memo dictated after the call, the conflicts check results, and the fee and scope notes. Drop copies of all of them into a single folder. Start with one matter, not your whole document management system.
Connect that folder to a Cowork session
Open Claude Desktop, choose Cowork from the mode selector, and connect the matter folder. Cowork can only read and write inside folders you explicitly connect. It does not see unrelated client folders, and it does not reach your DMS unless you give it that access.
Write the intake prompt as a work product spec
Say what the summary must contain and what should stop the process. For example: produce a matter intake summary including client information, factual background, potential claims, deadlines, and open items, and flag anything that blocks engagement partner review before we proceed.
Read the plan before it runs
Cowork lays out its plan before touching anything: which files it will read, then how it will organise the output. On client work this matters. Read the plan, and stop the run if the approach is wrong before any output exists.
Check the blockers before the summary
Read the flagged items first. In the recorded walkthrough the conflicts check surfaced a former client of the firm holding a minority investment in the prospective client’s former employer, placed at the top of the summary as a blocker rather than buried in a list.
Set firm-wide global instructions once
In Settings, Cowork, Global instructions, write the guardrails that apply to every session: never include client-identifying information in file names or task titles, always surface potential conflicts at the top of every summary, never make legal judgments, only organise and flag. Set once, applied to every session after.
Choose the permission mode for privileged work
For confidential matters, set Cowork to ask before every action. It pauses and shows what it intends to do before proceeding. It is slower, and it is the right trade-off on privileged material. In every mode, Cowork asks for confirmation before permanently deleting a file.
What the first pass surfaced
Four items out of four unstructured files, on a fictional employment matter. Each one is the kind of thing that survives a careful read and dies in a rushed one.
A conflict two degrees out
A former client of the firm held a minority investment in the prospective client’s former employer. The kind of link that is easy to miss skimming four files under deadline pressure.
A filing deadline mentioned in passing
The EEOC deadline was never stated as a deadline. It was a date said out loud in a voice memo. The deadline math was carried into the summary.
A secure-transmission instruction
The note about not letting the client send documents through regular email was carried forward into the open items rather than lost in the memo.
The litigation hold reminder
Picked up from the unstructured notes and surfaced as an action item, alongside the rest of the open items list.
The full run is in the law firm guide, with the recording and a complete transcript.
This is not intake software
If you are shopping for client intake software, you are shopping for a pipeline: web forms that capture the enquiry, lead tracking, e-signature, conflict database, and a CRM record that persists. Clio Grow and Lawmatics do that. Claude Cowork does none of it.
What Cowork does is the step in the middle that no pipeline handles: reading whatever actually came in, in whatever shape it arrived, and producing the summary a lawyer reviews. A firm with intake software still has someone doing that by hand. A firm without one still has the same fragments to assemble. Both get the same hours back.
So the honest answer is that these are complementary, and if you only have budget for one, buy the pipeline first. The assembly step is where Cowork earns its place, and it is cheaper to test.
Legal intake automation, answered
What is legal intake automation?
Is this a replacement for client intake software?
How long does the first pass take?
Can a paralegal run this, or does it need IT?
Does this satisfy our confidentiality obligations?
What should we not use it for?
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