Lawyers are quietly becoming builders
The man who leads Claude for Legal built his own tools first. You can too — and you don’t need to write code.
Bob Ambrogi, the veteran legal tech journalist, just interviewed Mark Pike on his LawNext podcast. Pike is the associate general counsel at Anthropic and the product lead for Claude for Legal, the big legal push the company launched in May.
What stuck with me wasn’t the product news. It was how Pike got there. He came up through Facebook and Slack, and he says he was “as surprised as anyone” when he started pushing his own code into GitHub. He didn’t set out to build a product. He built tools for Anthropic’s own legal team, saw how much they helped, and only then turned them into something customers could use.
That’s the story worth paying attention to.
“Pockets of builders exist everywhere”
That’s how Pike describes what he sees when he talks to customers. People have solutions they’ve always wanted, but the old way meant convincing IT or an engineer that the idea was worth the trouble. Now anyone with an idea can make progress on it themselves. He calls it rapid prototyping.
For a solo or small-firm lawyer, this is the part that matters. You can test an idea inside your own practice — no budget request, no outside developer. You try it, see if it works, and keep the ones that do.
Why lawyers, of all people
Pike shared a detail I hadn’t heard: out of every kind of knowledge worker using Anthropic’s tools, lawyers are the deepest users and the ones who come back most. His explanation was blunt — “law is code.” A big stack of deposition transcripts or statutes is exactly the kind of large, messy document set these tools handle well.
That fits what I keep seeing. The work lawyers dread — reading, comparing, and summarizing piles of documents — is the work AI is best at right now.
You don’t have to become a coder
Pike is measured about this, and I appreciate that. He doesn’t think every lawyer needs to build. He expects a certain type who will, and he thinks everyone else needs to get good at using the tools. Either way, he says lawyers can’t ignore it.
Here’s the reframe: “building” doesn’t mean writing software. It means taking a repeatable task, setting up a way to do it faster, correcting it when it’s wrong, and reusing it. Pike’s own plugins work this way — you feed in your playbook and your preferences, and when the tool gets something wrong, you fix it and it remembers. That’s a skill any lawyer can practice.
What to do this week
Pick one repeatable task you do over and over — a certain kind of letter, an intake summary, a first-pass document review. Try to build a simple, reusable “recipe” for it in whatever AI tool you already use. Correct it a few times. See how close you can get.
That’s the whole muscle. Start small.
You can listen to the full episode here: https://www.lawnext.com/2026/07/on-lawnext-inside-claude-for-legal-anthropics-mark-pike-on-ais-next-frontier-in-law.html
;-)
Ernie
P.S. In the Inner Circle’s AI Lab, we practice exactly this — taking real tasks and turning them into repeatable AI workflows, together, so you’re not figuring it out alone