Posted by Vytenis Sakalas, CEO and co-founder of Moterra, a private AI deployment company and a select services partner in the Claude partner network
Sakalas: Firms need a defensible set-up
Most law firms we speak to are already using AI, whether or not they have approved it. Fee-earners summarise bundles, compare clauses, draft first versions of letters and turn attendance notes into client updates.
The tool people settle on is often Claude, because it copes with long documents, dense contracts and the routine drafting that fills a working day.
Who will ask
Sooner or later, someone will ask where client data goes. It may be a corporate client’s panel review or outside counsel guidelines, a professional indemnity insurer at renewal, or the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA).
The second question, usually from the client’s own legal or procurement team, is what happens if the AI supplier stops trading.
The SRA code of conduct already requires firms to keep client affairs confidential and to supervise work effectively, and under UK GDPR a prompt that names a client or a counterparty is personal data. “We have an AI policy” is not an answer if fee-earners do something else.
Why banning does not work
Blocking public AI tools usually lasts about a month before the use moves to personal phones. The pattern is the same in most firms: a fee-earner tries Claude, gets a day’s document work done before lunch, then runs into IT or risk.
The question firms bring to us is simple: how do we keep the Claude our people already like, with the confidentiality and regulatory cover we need? The answer is an approved tool that is better than the free one: it can see the firm’s own precedents and matter files, and it runs somewhere the firm controls.
Specialist platforms and direct subscriptions
Many firms are also looking at specialist legal AI platforms such as Harvey and Legora. They are well built for defined legal workflows, from due diligence to drafting against a playbook, and several large firms have rolled them out across practice groups.
For a firm of 30 or 50 lawyers, the per-seat price is often hard to justify, the platform runs in the vendor’s cloud rather than the firm’s own, and fee-earners tend to keep using the general assistant they already know for everything outside those workflows.
The other route is to buy Claude Enterprise directly from Anthropic. It comes with a proper commercial contract: client data is not used to train models, and there are admin controls and single sign-on. It is a sound product, and for many businesses it is enough.
For a law firm, it still leaves gaps against the test outlined below. Prompts, documents and logs sit on the supplier’s platform rather than in the firm’s own account. Access is not tied to the firm’s matter permissions and information barriers unless someone builds that layer.
And the firm depends on the supplier for the evidence a panel reviewer or the SRA may ask to see. A contract records what the supplier promises; it does not put the controls in the firm’s hands.
A defensible set-up
A COLP should be able to describe the firm’s AI use in four sentences:
- It runs inside our own cloud, in a UK region and client material is not used to train anyone’s model;
- Access follows our existing matter permissions and information barriers, so a fee-earner’s assistant sees only the matters that fee-earner can open;
- Every request is logged somewhere the supplier cannot edit, and a named lawyer signs off anything that reaches a client; and
- If the supplier disappears tomorrow, the tool keeps running, because the environment, the keys and the logs were ours all along.
This is the approach Moterra takes, deploying Claude inside a firm’s own AWS or Azure account. The model itself does none of the second and third points: they come from the management layer around it, which is the part firms underestimate when they try to build it themselves.
What comes next
More lawyers now open Claude first thing and keep it open: it reads the inbox, pulls the matter file and drafts the first version, while the lawyer checks, decides and signs off. The case management system remains the record, but less of the working day is spent inside it.
Anthropic has already released ready-made Claude tools for legal work, so this shift is likely to come faster in law than in most professions.
Where to start
Ask your fee-earners honestly which tools they use. Then decide where an approved tool should run, who can see which matters, and whether you pay per seat or per use, before the first invoice arrives.
For a firm of 30 lawyers, this is no longer a six-month IT project. Firms that settle it now will have a short, confident answer when a client asks.
Leave a Comment