AI gets Shapiro off his desk, fast drafts

Zack Shapiro, founder and managing partner of the AI-native law firm Rains, says artificial intelligence has taken the tedious drafting work off his plate—so much so that he now walks and talks to Claude in voice mode, returning with first drafts in minutes.

For attorney Zack Shapiro, the workday used to start with long stretches of sitting still—hours at his desk drafting legal documents in Microsoft Word.

Now, the New York lawyer says he’s rarely stuck there.

Shapiro, the founder and managing partner of the boutique AI-native law firm Rains, told Business Insider late last month that 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 said. “I really automated away basically all of the unpleasant or grunt work that I used to do.”

Instead of spending that time buried in drafting. Shapiro says he focuses on the work he trained to do: strategic thinking. advising clients on what to do. and direct person-to-person discussions. “the strategic thinking. advising my clients on what to do. person-to-person client discussions — the actual meat of being a lawyer. ” he said.

He primarily relies on Anthropic’s Claude. Shapiro says he tends to use Claude’s voice mode as he works, including while walking outside. On a recent appearance on the livestreamed tech news show MTS, he described those walks as where he does his “most difficult cognitive work.”

During the walk, 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,” Shapiro said. “It’s made my life so much better.”

The change isn’t only about how Shapiro bills his time—it’s also about how his firm scales. Shapiro said Rains has just three lawyers, but he frames the operation as working “like a much bigger one.”

“It feels like I have an army of AI agents,” Shapiro said. He added that “the real humans are focused on the more human part of the job — the judgment and client advice,” which he says helps the firm “regularly compete against much larger firms.”

Shapiro’s experiment has also moved beyond his own practice. Earlier this year, he chronicled his AI-driven workflow in an online post titled “The Claude-Native Law Firm,” which “garnered millions of views.”

Since then, he 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.

Still, Shapiro’s stance on the market is selective. He said he’s “pretty bearish on specific legal tech products like Harvey and Legora.” His view is that lawyers shouldn’t rely on product-specific tools as a shortcut.

“The best way forward” for lawyers, he said, is to learn how to use AI tools like Claude directly—because it comes down to the prompts and instructions lawyers give the system.

“It’s really about the prompts and instructions that lawyers give to the AI,” he said.

AI-native law firm Zack Shapiro Rains Anthropic Claude legal tech Microsoft Word voice mode venture capital M&A Big Law consulting