Notes on legal-AI work — memos as web pages, anonymizing client data, AI agents for legal research, formatting skills, trademark monitoring. Originally posted on LinkedIn.
Honest question to legal colleagues: aren't you tired of writing boring memos? Tech founders open a 14-page .docx in Times New Roman, see numbered paragraphs and a nine-line "Executive Summary," and ask privately: could you just tell me what this means? With Claude's design tool I turned the Duke Memo into a web page in a single prompt — headings that breathe, sections you can navigate, citations that look like citations.
Two days after I shipped PII Shield (500+ reactions, 80+ comments) I spent a night building what people asked for. HITL review: a local web UI showing every detected entity color-coded in context — click to remove false positives, select text to add missed ones. Plus an audit log of every MCP call and an NER log of every detection decision, both on-disk under ~/.pii_shield/audit/.
PII Shield is a Cowork Skill paired with a local MCP server. Connect a folder, type "write a risk memo for vendor_agreement.docx" — anonymization happens locally before Claude sees a thing. John Smith becomes <PERSON_1>, Acme Corp becomes <ORG_1>. Claude analyzes the anonymized version; PII Shield restores everything in the final .docx. 90%+ of PII gets replaced automatically, no flag-by-flag work.
An AI agent opened a case-law database, ran a search, screened 24 results, picked the four that mattered, followed their citation chains (ILVA A/S → Deutsche Wohnen → Nacionalinis → TR v Land Hessen), and delivered a structured digest. I made coffee. Not keyword matching — actual research behavior. Claude Max ($100/mo) holds the thread across 80-paragraph CJEU rulings without losing context.
I took our strongest memo and fed it to Claude's Skill creation. It parsed the .docx XML, figured out fonts, spacing, heading hierarchy, quote indentation, risk-assessment layout — turned it into a reusable SKILL.md. Now I throw raw notes from a call at it and get back a properly-formatted memo: Roboto 12pt, 11pt italic quotes, justified, single spacing, in my writing style. 20 minutes to set up. I still do the legal analysis. I just stopped doing the formatting.
I deployed an AI agent that finds trademark infringers and pirated app builds every week. App Store track: queries iTunes Search across countries, fuzzy-matches names and bundle IDs, narrows ~1,000 listings to ~50 candidates, runs icon vision on the high-risk ones. Piracy track: searches mod/cracked APK sites, parses download pages, collects evidence packages (screenshots, HTML, WHOIS). LLM scores risk and ships a prioritized Excel report. Single SKILL.md file — works on Claude or OpenClaw.