I Asked Who Was Setting Up Claude. That Pause Was The Whole Post.
Eight attorneys, one Claude subscription, and one partner who once set up the office printer.
Buying Claude Is The Easy Part. Setting It Up Is Where Small Firms Get Stuck.
Last week I sat across from a managing partner who had already made the decision. The firm was going with Claude. Eight attorneys, a couple of paralegals, a real plan to use AI on real matters.
Then I asked the obvious question. Who’s actually setting it up?
Long pause.
That pause is the post.
The pattern I keep seeing
In the past two years I’ve met with hundreds of law firms. Solo shops, mid-sized, AM100. The bigger firms have IT teams. They have procurement, security review, and someone whose actual job is to roll software out across hundreds of users. They might move slowly, but they have the muscle.
Small firms don’t.
Most of them outsource IT to a vendor. Sometimes that vendor has locked the Microsoft 365 tenant down so tight that installing a Word add-in becomes a three-week ticket. Sometimes there’s no real IT relationship at all, and the most technical person in the office is a partner who once set up the printer.
And there’s a quiet assumption baked into the industry that small firms will just figure this out. That if you can pick a tool, you can deploy it. I don’t think that’s true anymore.
What people actually don’t know
Pick any of these questions and ask a managing partner at a six-attorney firm.
Where do you buy a Claude Team plan, and how is that different from someone walking into the office with their own Pro subscription? What’s the difference between a Standard seat and a Premium seat, and which do paralegals get? Should we turn on web search? Connectors? Cowork? Claude in Chrome? Code execution? Memory? MCP?
Most partners will give you an honest answer, which is some version of “I have no idea, and I don’t know who to ask.”
This is a real gap. The frontier labs have built genuinely good products for firms. They’ve shipped Team and Business and Enterprise plans. But they haven’t shipped the thing a 12-person firm needs most, which is a clear path from “we bought it” to “we’re using it well.” The product page assumes a buyer who already knows what a connector is. Most small firms don’t.
My first attempt at filling the gap
Several of my clients recently bought Claude Team. Rather than walk each of them through the same setup twice, I wrote it down.
The result is a step-by-step guide for small firms setting up Claude Team. It covers what to do, in what order, and why. Privacy and admin visibility. Web search and the other capability toggles. Seat types. Roles. The Office add-ins. Starter projects for a small firm. A verification protocol you can hand to your associates before they put anything in front of a court. Where things live in the settings, because nobody has time to hunt.
You can read it here: Setting Up Your Claude Team Account: A Guide for Small Law Firms.
Is it perfect? Far from it. Products change, settings get renamed, new features arrive every month. The guide will need updates. But it’s a starting point that didn’t exist a week ago, and the firms that have used it have gone from “we bought it” to “everyone is logged in, projects are set up, and we’re using it on real work” in about a week.
What’s next
The Claude Team guide is the first of four I’m planning:
ChatGPT Business setup for small law firms
Claude Enterprise setup for larger firms
ChatGPT Enterprise setup for larger firms
Plus I expect to be back to the Claude Team version inside a quarter to update it. Cowork, the Office add-ins, and the connector list are all moving fast enough that any setup guide is a snapshot, not a finished product.
A last thought
If you’re a managing partner reading this, the part I want you to hear is the smallest one. Getting Claude installed is not your AI strategy. It’s the first hour of work in a much longer effort to figure out what your firm actually does with AI. Training. Governance. Billing model decisions. Client disclosure. The harder questions about which work gets pulled forward and what that means for your associates. None of that gets resolved by a setup guide.
But you can’t have any of those conversations until the tool is in your people’s hands.
So start there. The rest is the actual work.
Buying Claude doesn’t make a firm an AI firm. The work starts the moment someone has to decide which seats go to which people, which capabilities get turned on, and what your associates are allowed to put in front of a court. If your firm is sitting somewhere in that gap right now, I’d be glad to help you think through it. Reach me at steve@intelligencebyintent.com. The setup is the first hour. What you do with it is the next decade.