Corporate attorney Zack Shapiro used to spend hours each workday stuck behind his desk drafting legal documents in Microsoft Word.
Now, the founder and managing partner of the boutique AI-native law firm Rains says artificial intelligence has fundamentally changed how he practices law — freeing him from much of the tedious work and even getting him out from behind his desk.
“It’s making me dramatically more efficient,” Shapiro told Business Insider late last month. “I really automated away basically all of the unpleasant or grunt work that I used to do.”
Instead, the Yale Law School alum said he now spends more time doing the types of tasks he trained for: “the strategic thinking, advising my clients on what to do, person-to-person client discussions — the actual meat of being a lawyer.”
Shapiro, who said he primarily uses Anthropic’s Claude, said that he tends to use the chatbot’s voice mode to talk through his legal work while walking around outside.
The New York-based lawyer said during a recent appearance on the livestreamed tech news show MTS, that that’s when he does his “most difficult cognitive work.”
On walks, Shapiro said, he will “free associate into the microphone for three to four minutes,” and by the time he gets back to his desk, he’ll have a first draft.
“That’s just an awesome way to practice law,” he said. “It’s made my life so much better.”
Shapiro told Business Insider that although his venture capital and M&A deal-focused firm has just three lawyers, it operates like a much bigger one.
“It feels like I have an army of AI agents,” said Shapiro. “The real humans are focused on the more human part of the job — the judgment and client advice — and this allows me regularly to compete against much larger firms.”
Earlier this year, Shapiro chronicled his AI-driven workflow in an online post titled, “The Claude-Native Law Firm,” which garnered millions of views.
Since then, Shapiro said he’s been involved in a consulting practice working with some Big Law firms to help them integrate AI into their practices the same way he does at Rains.
“I’m pretty bearish on specific legal tech products like Harvey and Legora,” Shapiro said, explaining that he believes the “best way forward” for lawyers is to learn how to use AI tools like Claude directly.
“It’s really about the prompts and instructions that lawyers give to the AI,” he said.
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