AI Used to Only Work While You Watched. That Just Ended.
The work that slips at your firm was never the billable work. Now the work around it can run while you're in trial, with one catch your risk committee will flag.
Claude Cowork Left Your Laptop. Here’s What It Opens Up for Law Firms.
TL;DR: Claude Cowork now runs on Anthropic’s servers by default, and it works on the web and your phone, not just the desktop app. The headline: scheduled tasks fire even when your laptop is closed, using the tools you’ve connected like email, calendar, and cloud storage. For a firm, recurring work such as intake summaries, docket and news monitoring, and deadline tracking can run overnight or during a trial day and be waiting when you surface. Hold onto two things before you get excited. Anything touching files on your own hard drive still needs your desktop app open and awake. And Cowork activity does not appear in your audit logs yet, which your risk committee will want to hear about.
You know the pattern. You shut the laptop Thursday night before an early flight to a settlement conference, and whatever Claude was working on stops cold. It sits there waiting for you. So does your inbox, and the intake queue, and the two handoffs you meant to finish before wheels up.
That changed on July 7.
What actually changed
Cowork is the part of Claude where you hand it a job and it works across your files, email, calendar, and connected tools until the thing is done. Not a chat that answers a question. A worker you delegate to.
Until this month it lived on your desktop and ran on your machine. Close the lid, work paused. Now the default flipped: sessions run on Anthropic’s servers and save to your account, not your device.
The one that matters for a firm is that the work keeps going without you. Set a task for 6am and Claude works through the overnight email, the hearing transcript, the recent filings, then builds the brief and leaves the follow-up drafted but unsent. You read it over coffee and decide what ships. Nothing goes out on its own. When Claude hits a call only a lawyer should make, it stops and the question lands on your phone, and nothing ships until you say so.
The rest is convenience, and it’s real convenience. Sessions follow your account, so you start something at your desk and check it from your phone in the elevator. Cowork also showed up on the web at claude.ai and in the mobile app, so people who could never install the desktop version are in now.
One more change hits you the second you open the app. Chat and Cowork share one home. There’s a small toggle in the message box, Chat or Cowork, and you pick. The old separate Cowork area is gone, and your projects live in one place across both. Desktop is still the full version, the only place Claude can reach files on your actual hard drive and drive your browser.
(If you set up local Cowork “projects” earlier this year, the standalone version of those is gone. Chat and Cowork run on one projects system now, and it travels across web, desktop, and phone. A project pinned to a folder on your Mac still only runs a Cowork session on that Mac.)
Why a firm should care this week
Here’s the honest version of where this kind of AI got stuck. It could do the work, but only while you sat there watching. Look away and it stopped and waited for you.
That part is over.
A partner’s week doesn’t leave much room to sit and watch a screen. You’re in court, or a deposition that was supposed to take the morning is still going at 4, and the calendar gave up on open space a while ago. So the work that slips is predictable. Never the billable work. It’s everything around it, the intake memo that’s half done, or the competitor filing you keep telling yourself you’ll read. Anthropic says more than 90% of what people do in Cowork has nothing to do with code, and the two biggest buckets are business operations and content. That’s the firm’s whole week outside the matters.
Some of that can now run on a schedule, unattended, and be done when you get back.
The cleanest first use is a morning brief. Every weekday at 6am, Claude reads your connected news sources and inboxes for anything touching your active matters or your practice area and drafts you a short summary. You wake up to it. From there it widens. A recurring intake pass that pulls names from new consultation notes in a connected folder, runs a first public-records look, and drafts a memo for a real person to check. A weekly deadline sweep that flags what’s coming due and what’s gone quiet on your matters.
Notice what those have in common. They run on connected tools, not on files buried in your laptop. That is the line that decides whether a task runs in the cloud with your lid shut or waits for your machine. No local folder attached, it runs on Anthropic’s servers. Point it at a folder on your hard drive and it drops back to running only while that computer is awake and online. Set that kind for 6am with your laptop in your bag and it never fires. Unattended means connectors, not local files.
The part your risk committee will ask about
I won’t soft-pedal this section. It’s a law firm, and the caution is the point.
Start with where the data goes. Because the session runs on Anthropic’s servers, the work is processed there, including any local files Claude opens through your desktop app. On Team and Enterprise plans that processing sits under commercial terms and your conversations are not used to train the model. On a personal plan you are under consumer terms. This is the distinction I keep hammering, and moving the compute to the cloud did not make it go away. The plan you’re on, not the price, decides how your client data gets treated. Settle that before you schedule one task against a client matter.
Now the gap almost nobody mentions. Cowork activity does not show up in your audit logs, the Compliance API, or data exports right now, and endpoint security tools can’t see inside the sandbox either. If your written AI policy says the firm can reconstruct who did what with client data, Cowork does not meet that promise today. Not a reason to avoid it. A reason to put the limitation in writing and keep client-identifying work off the unattended tasks until the logging catches up.
There’s a reassuring half to the architecture, and your risk committee should hear it too. Each session runs in its own isolated sandbox that gets destroyed when the task ends, and the connector logins never enter that sandbox. The tokens are short-lived and the calls happen on the server side. So a scheduled task reaching your email is not parking your credentials somewhere they linger.
Then the old ethics problem in new clothes. Persistent memory is what makes a scheduled brief smart, because Claude carries context between runs. It’s also how one matter’s information bleeds into another if you’re careless. The containment tool is the project. Scope a project to a single matter, and what Claude learns there stays there. A task that roams across everything is how you end up with cross-matter contamination while you sleep, which is a rough way to learn the lesson.
Two smaller flags. This is a beta, going to Max plan users first with other plans following over the next several weeks, so your firm may not see it yet. And the connectors you attach set the blast radius. A task reaches only what you hand it. Hand it less.
What to do Monday morning
You don’t need a committee to start. You need one safe task and a clear line about what stays local.
Confirm your plan and terms. If client data will ever touch this, be on Team or Enterprise, and read how your data is handled under those terms before anything else runs.
Draw the local line in writing. Client-identifying files stay in local desktop sessions for now, only connector-based work runs unattended in the cloud, and your AI policy notes that Cowork activity isn’t logged yet.
Pilot one low-risk scheduled task, scoped tight, approvals on. A weekday news and docket brief for your practice area is the easy win: no client files, real output, nothing sends without you.
Run it two weeks. Call it a couple hours a week of the work around the work handed off, and that’s a rough estimate, not a study. If it holds, widen it.
The firms that pull ahead over the next two years won’t be the ones that used AI. That question is settled. They’ll be the ones who worked out which work can run without them, and drew a clean line around the work that can’t.