Corporate lawyer Zach Shapiro spent hours every day glued to his desk drafting legal documents in Microsoft Word.
The founder and managing partner of AI-native specialist law firm Rains says artificial intelligence has fundamentally changed the way law is practiced, freeing people from many tedious jobs and even getting them out from behind a desk.
“It’s dramatically increased my efficiency,” Shapiro told Business Insider late last month. “I basically automated all the unpleasant and tedious tasks that I used to do.”
Instead, the Yale Law School graduate said he now spends much of his time doing the kind of work he trained for: “strategic thinking, advising clients on what to do, talking to them personally, the real part of being a lawyer.”
Shapiro, who said he primarily uses Anthropic’s Claude, said he often uses the chatbot’s voice mode to talk about his legal work while walking around outside.
That’s when you do the “hardest cognitive work,” the New York-based lawyer said during a recent appearance on the live-streamed technology news show MTS.
Mr. Shapiro said that during his walks, he would “freelance at the microphone for three or four minutes” and by the time he returned to his desk, he had completed the first draft.
“This is a great way to practice law,” he said. “My life has become so much better because of you.”
Shapiro told Business Insider that his firm, which specializes in venture capital and M&A transactions, has only three lawyers but operates like a much larger company.
“It feels like we have an army of AI agents,” Shapiro said. “I am able to compete against much larger companies on a regular basis because real humans focus on the more human parts of the job: making decisions and advising clients.”
Earlier this year, Shapiro documented his AI-driven workflow in an online post titled “The Claude-Native Law Firm,” which garnered millions of views.
Since then, Shapiro said he has been involved in consulting work with several large law firms to help them integrate AI into their operations in the same way he is doing at Raines.
“I’m pretty bearish on certain legal tech products like Harvey and Legora,” Shapiro said, explaining that he believes the “best way forward” for lawyers is to learn first-hand how to use AI tools like Claude.
“It’s actually the prompts and instructions that lawyers give to the AI that are important,” he says.