Artificial Intelligence cops a lot of shade (as the young people say) these days. When we think of AI we think of AI 'slop', tech oligarchs, data centres using up our water, and the RAMpocalypse. What we have lost is the vision of the immense potential that AI technology has to transform our lives.
I have had a couple of 'holy moly' moments - moments where I really got to see what AI could do - the impact it could have on accessible lawyering and, in the case of my second holy moly moment, access to justice through legal tech.
Background: A lawyer who codes (sort of)
I have an IT background. I've written code throughout my career but I'm not a software developer by trade. I wrote utility stuff - scripts for monitoring, backing up systems, or automation tasks. It's the kind of stuff a system administrator would write to make their life easier.
I have tried my hand at software development. I can do it but it takes me ages. I need to learn new languages, new technologies and a bit more programming and testing discipline. I have done this a couple of times. Many years ago I wrote a Chinese-English dictionary for the iPhone. I even put it on the App Store! It made tens of dollars per month in revenue. That project took me 18 months! A professional developer would have finished it in a few weeks.
Most recently I decided to write an app to help me manage my checklists when I go flying (I'm a private pilot). After six or seven months I had a bare skeleton up. I was learning as I went - new languages, new frameworks, new syntax - an the learning curve was simply outpacing the time I had. That project has fallen by the wayside now.
The short story is this: I can code, but it takes me ages. Practically, this means most of what I want to write doesn't get written. I have my day job and I just don't have the time.
Enter Claude Code
Before I start I should say that Claude Code is not the only AI coding tool, and some say it's not even the best. But it's what I found and it's what brought me to where I am now.
My journey started with a client who came to see me seeking advice about an app he had developed. In the course of our interview he showed me what he had written. I quizzed him on how he went about doing so and what came out was that, firstly, he had hardly any coding knowledge, and secondly, he had gone from idea to a working app in three months! Here I was slaving away on my checklist app for months and months and this client had written something more sophisticated and more quickly and with far less coding expertise.
That prompted me to sign up for Claude Code and try it out.
Before we move on you also need to know a bit about how I run my practice. I run Linux (Ubuntu) instead of Windows on my computers. I use Microsoft 365 for emails and file storage. I use Clio to manage my matters, and I use Odoo for accounting, lead management and some other things. In short, I have stuff all over the place. I do this as part of running a lean (and private in the case of Linux) practice. But what I save in money is offset by complexity, as we shall see...
Odoo is my 'source of truth' for client information. Odoo, though, does not integrate with Microsoft 365 or Clio. This meant that when a lead converted to a client I'd have to re-enter the contact into Clio and Outlook. This also made things difficult when emailing leads in Outlook - I'd have to copy and paste addresses manually.
I thought I'd try to see if I can fix this with Claude Code. I described the problem above to Claude and asked it to sync my Odoo clients with my email client. Twenty minutes later I had an extension that I could drop into my email software that synced up my clients.
Twenty minutes!!!!
The package was written in a language I had never used. It didn't work first up so I fed back the errors into Claude and it updated the code and got it working. All in 20 minutes. I was completely blown away.
That code (which is available here if you're interested) made my life so much easier. I would never have written this myself. It simply would have taken too long.
All of a sudden I could see doors opening. All these things which I would have liked but were beyond my capacity became within reach. I have since written software to:
- check the Courts website for upcoming hearings and put them in my calendar;
- keep local copies of court documents in sync with the officially filed version on the Courts website;
- automate my matter creation process so that contact details are pulled out of Odoo, sent to Clio, the matter number is extracted and all the correct subfolders are created;
- write web apps that automatically generate an Enduring Power of Attorney and Advance Care Directive; and
- set up a mesh VPN between my laptop, desktop and servers so I can keep my apps and data secure yet still access them when I'm not in my home office.
I'm at the point where if I need something written, between me and Claude Code, we can get it done in about a day or so.
Just think. I can code, I'm just not good at it. I never would have written this stuff and my productivity as a lawyer (and legal tech consultant) is markedly improved.
This has been transformative. But wait! That's not all!
The Impact on Access to Justice
Back in the 'olden days' I used to be an academic. I was a teaching academic at Flinders University from 2019 to the end of 2025. I was responsible for the legal technology curriculum. In 2019 coding and blockchain was all the rage, and I wrote a curriculum that taught law students how to code web apps using Python and CSS on an open source framework called Docassemble. As part of my topic we would engage with the not-for-profit community, who would give us a real-world problem for our students to work on. Our students would use their neophyte coding skills to write an app to address that problem.
As you can imagine, my students wrote rather simple applications (some of which are still available here). What struck me about this was how useful these simple applications were. Their simplicity was entirely disproportionate to their utility. I had not-for-profit 'clients' become emotional at what they saw, and we had a steady stream of organisations wanting to partner with us.
My experience as an academic showed that there was this huge demand for small, simple software applications that could have an enormous impact on access to justice. Applications to help with emergency accommodation, or disability discrimination or finding out penalties for a drink driving offence. All simple to write but nobody writes them. Not-for-profits don't have the skills or funds. Commercial developers don't (usually) scale down to this level of simplicity.
Again, enter Claude Code.
What students could write in 14 weeks, and myself maybe in one or two, Claude can do in under an hour. What kind of doors does this open up in the access to justice space? This is a market segment that is so closed that most people, on the not-for-profit and the development side, are not even aware it exists. What about now? Instead of spending tens, or even hundreds, of thousands of dollars to develop these applications they could be prepared for orders of magnitude less, making it more affordable for not-for-profits.
I can see the journey for not-for-profits being similar to my own: having their own holy moly moment and then starting to commission software to solve all manner of problems, given this new accessibility.
The risks (and there are some)
I have been all enthusiasm so far, but I want to temper it somewhat as there are risks.
In my view Claude Code is not a tool for those with no technical background at all. It will happily introduce all manner of security issues into code, such as embedding passwords in plain text, or running a database fully open to anyone on the internet, unless it's instructed otherwise. I've had it test my code and the tests it wrote have been completely irrelevant to the code itself. Claude happily tells me all tests have passed though. It also has no qualms about using suboptimal coding practices, such as embedding constants in code and creating inordinately long code files.
I had this experience myself with a second contact synchronisation application I built. My first few attempts at instructing Claude on the synchronisation logic ended up corrupting both my Odoo and my Outlook address books simultaneously. The problem was that I hadn't given Claude sufficient direction on how to handle conflict resolution - which records should take priority, how to maintain a record of changes, how to manage duplicates. Once I understood the problem and could articulate it properly, Claude solved it. But it took technical knowledge to recognise what the problem was in the first place and then to direct Claude as to how to resolve it.
The contacts I had to clean up myself.
In short, Claude Code needs direction from someone who knows what they're doing.
I should also state that making coding more accessible opens other legal risks as well. I have had clients use Claude or other AI tools to generate terms and conditions and privacy policies for the apps they write. The output is usually subpar and can be a risk to the clients instead of an aid. Poorly drafted terms can expose a business to real liability.
So, the tool is not doing away with coders, or lawyers for that matter. However, this doesn't take away from its transformative impact.
Where to from here
I am genuinely excited about where this is heading - for legal practice, for access to justice, and for the kinds of things small organisations can now afford to build for themselves.
I've made some of the software I've built available on GitHub, and I'll link to those repositories below. Some of it may be useful to others; all of it illustrates what's now possible for a sole practitioner with a bit of technical background and the right tools.
- Transcriber - a tool that transcribes voice recordings. It uses an on-device language model instead of going to the cloud
- OdooAddressBook - My first project (twenty minutes!!!) - synchronises my Odoo contact list with my Thunderbird email client
- Voice Filenote - dictate filenotes and have them transcribed and summarised. Uses Microsoft's AI platforms for data privacy reasons. Requires Obsidian
- MFLP LaTeX - this is really one for the nerds. LaTeX is a typesetting language. It allows for creation of beautiful and accurately typeset documents.
If you're a legal practitioner curious about what's possible, or a not-for-profit wondering whether technology could help your organisation but assuming you can't afford it, please contact me - I'm more than happy to help.
Postscript - How this article was written
I used AI to write this article. I thought I'd take you through how I did so.
Firstly, I used my Voice Filenote tool to get the ideas out of my head. It recorded what I said, transcribed it and then summarised it. I then asked both Copilot and Claude Code to read the transcription and summary, and prepare a blog post for me. I used the Claude output as I preferred it.
I then starting writing this post by hand. I would look over at the Claude post every now and then to get ideas about structure. Funnily enough, I'd see its structure and that would cause me to come up with something different!
I did use some of the Claude-generated content in the post. In some places I've pasted in certain words and phrases. In other places I've copied in entire paragraphs. The first two paragraphs of Where to from here are a good example.