You have a demand letter to write, a fact summary from the file, a medical chronology, and a version of the same letter you sent on a similar case last spring. What you do not have is two uninterrupted hours. Drafting with Claude is built for this moment: you hand it the materials and the shape you want, get a complete first draft, and spend your time on the parts that require judgment.
This page is about the method, not the magic. Done well, drafting with an AI assistant produces a first draft that reads like yours and needs one careful pass. Done carelessly, it produces a confident document with an invented citation in the third paragraph.
Templates versus drafting: two different jobs
Before anything else, sort the document. If the content is fixed and only the names, dates, and amounts change, you want document automation from your case management system, not an AI draft. Engagement letters, records requests, and standard notices belong there, and our page on legal document automation covers how to build them with merge fields.
Drafting with Claude is for documents whose substance changes every time: demand letters, motions, client memos, discovery responses, position letters, contract clauses tailored to a deal. The tool earns its keep when the argument, the tone, and the facts have to be assembled fresh.
Giving Claude what it needs: the source packet
The quality of a draft is determined almost entirely by what you give the tool before you ask for anything. We call it the source packet, and for a demand letter it has four parts. The facts: a chronology or intake summary, pasted or uploaded. The prior example: a letter you have sent before that sounds the way you want this one to sound. The constraints: jurisdiction, recipient, tone, length, the specific relief demanded. And the exclusions: what the letter must not say or must not concede.
Give all four and the draft comes back close to usable. Give only the facts and the tool fills the gaps with generic language and, sometimes, generic law. On an organizational Claude plan, the prior example and constraints can live in a Project so that you only supply the facts each time. Our Claude for law firms page explains the plan and confidentiality side of that.
A worked example: first draft of a demand letter
Here is the sequence we teach. Open the firm's demand letter Project, which already contains the style instructions and two prior letters. Upload the medical chronology and the intake summary. Ask for a draft with a stated structure: introduction and representation, facts, liability, damages with a specials table, demand and deadline. Ask the tool to flag any fact it needed and did not find, as a list at the end rather than inventing it.
Read the draft against the chronology first, not against your sense of the case. Every date, provider, and amount gets traced back to the source. Then read for argument: is the liability section making the point you would make, or a generic one? Fix that by instruction ("the theory is negligent entrustment, not simple negligence; rewrite the liability section accordingly") rather than by hand, so the tool learns the correction for the rest of the draft. Two rounds like this usually produce a version you would hand to a colleague.
Second drafts and redlines
Claude is at least as useful on the second draft as the first. Paste opposing counsel's response and ask for a list of every point they contest, with your letter's corresponding paragraph. Upload two versions of a clause and ask for the differences in plain language. Ask it to tighten a section to half its length without dropping any date or amount, then check that it did.
For motions and briefs, the same pattern works with a caution: the authorities have to come from your research platform. The workflow that works is research first, then give the tool the cases and holdings you intend to rely on, then draft. Asking it to find the law is where the trouble starts.
Cite-checking is not optional
A draft is not finished until every citation has been opened in Westlaw, Lexis, or your court's database and confirmed to exist, to say what the draft says it says, and to still be good law. This applies even when you supplied the cases, because the tool can misattribute a holding across two cases you gave it.
Courts have sanctioned lawyers for filing briefs with invented citations, and some judges now require AI-use certifications. Our page on AI hallucinations in legal work explains how these errors happen and lays out a verification routine that takes minutes rather than hours when built into the drafting process.
Where drafting fits alongside your case management system
The facts in your source packet already live in Clio or Filevine. The efficient setup is to export the intake summary and chronology from the matter, draft in Claude, and file the final document back into the matter's document folder with a note that records what was reviewed. Firms that build their templates properly, as described in our guide to Clio document automation, find that the AI draft and the automated template complement each other: one for the standard, one for the specific. All of this is covered in our Claude training for lawyers sessions.
Questions we get
Will the draft sound like our firm?
Only if you give it examples. Two or three of your own letters in a Project, plus a short instruction about tone ("formal but plain, no legalese, short paragraphs"), gets most of the way there. Without examples, the output sounds like every other AI draft.
Can it draft a whole motion?
It can produce a structured draft of one, provided you supply the authorities and the record cites. Treat the result the way you would treat a strong associate's first draft: the structure is usable, the argument needs your judgment, and every citation gets checked.
How do we bill for time saved?
Bill the time you actually spent, including the review. Ethics guidance is consistent that a firm may not charge for hours the tool saved. Many firms find that the time shifts from drafting to reviewing rather than disappearing, and that the client gets a better document for the same or fewer hours.
If you want to see this method applied to a document type your firm produces every week, tell us what you are working with.