Your Claude Project Is Already Obsolete. Here's What Replaced It.
Partners keep telling me the same story: built a Project, used it twice, stopped. Here's the fix.
Every Lawyer Should Have These Five Skills (The Claude Kind)
TL;DR: Skills are small instruction files that load automatically when Claude sees a task that matches. They beat Projects and custom GPTs for most lawyer work. Here are five to build first and how to actually do it.
The question I keep getting after trainings
Every training I run, some version of this happens. A partner pulls me aside at the break and says: “I built a Project in Claude. Uploaded the templates. Wrote the instructions. Added all the examples. I used it twice. Then I stopped.”
I hear this a lot. It’s not a Claude problem. It’s a container problem.
Projects and custom GPTs were the right answer eighteen months ago. They are not the right answer anymore. And the better option is sitting one setting away.
It’s called a Skill. Almost none of my clients have heard of them.
What a Skill actually is
A Skill is a small folder with a file called SKILL.md inside it. The file tells Claude: when you see a task that looks like X, load these instructions. Claude decides when to pull it in. You don’t have to remember. You don’t have to be in a specific Project. You don’t paste the same 500-word prompt at the start of every chat.
A Project is a room you have to walk into. A Skill is a reflex that fires anywhere in the building.
Anthropic ships a few Skills by default (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF). You build your own for everything else. They work in Claude.ai, in Claude Code, and through the API.
Why this beats what you were doing
The big thing is that Skills travel. A Project locks you into one workspace. A Skill fires anywhere you’re working in Claude, even in a fresh conversation with zero setup. That alone changes the math on whether it’s worth building one.
They also stack. If you have a firm style Skill and a contract review Skill, Claude uses both at once when you paste in a draft agreement. Projects can’t do that. You pick one container and live in it.
And when you need to change something? Edit the file once. Everyone using it gets the new version the next time they ask Claude for help. Nobody has to remember to rebuild anything or re-upload their templates. If you have ever tried to get fifty attorneys to update the same Word template, you understand why this matters.
One more thing worth knowing. Skills are built to an open standard, so the same file should transfer to other platforms that adopt it. I wouldn’t bet the firm on that yet. It’s just a reason not to obsess over lock-in.
The five that every lawyer should have
Firm voice and style
This is the one I’d build first for any firm that writes a lot. It captures how your firm actually writes. Brief structure. Memo headings. Citation format. Caption layout. The house rules nobody writes down: no passive voice in the intro, no “clearly,” no rhetorical questions in motions, no two-sentence paragraphs when the client is reading.
Every associate eventually turns in something that sounds off, and the senior associate or partner rewrites it. That rewrite is the expensive part.
I built one of these for myself, for my Substack writing. Took me a weekend to get close, and I’m still editing it most weeks. Which is kind of the point.
Contract review playbook
Every firm has positions. Indemnification. Limitation of liability. IP assignment. Governing law. Termination. Confidentiality. Most of those positions live in a few partners’ heads and in a Word doc nobody can find.
A contract Skill captures the firm’s positions plus preferred alternate language. Paste in a draft agreement. Claude produces a first-pass memo with the firm’s positions, flagged risks, and suggested revisions. It is not a finished redline. It is a starting point that saves an associate an hour per agreement and gets every junior attorney pointed at the same North Star. The partner who reviews the work stops having to teach the same five things every week.
Billing narratives
This one pays for itself in two weeks. Maybe less.
Most firms have clients with billing guidelines that nobody reads until something gets kicked back. No block billing. ABA codes. Specific formatting. Banned phrases like “reviewed documents” and “worked on case.” Attorneys break the rules, usually at 11 PM when they’re entering time from a phone. Billing catches some. The client catches the rest and writes off the time.
A billing narrative Skill takes raw time entries and reformats them for each client’s rules. Applies the ABA codes. Flags block-billed entries. Rewrites the lazy descriptions. “Worked on case” becomes “drafted opposition to motion to compel; researched authority re: work-product doctrine.”
If your firm writes off even five percent of fees to guideline violations, nothing else on this list comes close on ROI. And most firms are writing off more than five percent. They just haven’t measured it.
Plain-English client communications
Your general counsel and business clients keep telling you the same thing. Your emails read like briefs. They want the answer, the risk, and the recommended action. Short. In a language they can forward to the CEO without a translator.
This Skill takes a piece of legal analysis and rewrites it for a non-lawyer executive. Short summary up top. Risk rated plainly. Recommended action. No hedging paragraphs that sound like malpractice insurance talking.
Pair it with your firm style Skill and Claude produces two versions of every communication at once: the careful memo for the file, and the short email for the client.
Depo and discovery summaries
Dep summaries and document review are where associate hours go to die. Every firm does them a little differently. Every associate does them a little differently again.
A summary Skill defines the output format once and enforces it. Issue tags. Witness. Date. Page-line cites. Admissions flagged, contradictions with prior testimony marked. When the case moves toward trial, everything is already in the format you need for the cross outline. No rework.
What you’re giving up
A couple of honest tradeoffs.
Skills work best small and single-purpose. One for contract review. A different one for billing. A third for client emails. If you try to build one giant “everything for my practice group” Skill, it will do everything badly. This is the biggest mindset shift for people used to one-big-Project thinking.
On individual plans (Free, Pro, and Max), Skills are per-user. Team and Enterprise admins can push them out centrally. If your firm is on individual plans, each attorney uploads the file themselves. The files are portable, so it’s not a crisis. But someone needs to own the master version, or you end up with six slightly different contract Skills drifting around the firm.
How skill-creator actually goes
The official instructions are clean. The real process is messier. I have built a dozen or so of these at this point, for myself and for clients, and here is what actually happens.
First, make sure code execution is enabled at Settings > Capabilities. Then go to Customize > Skills and turn on skill-creator. Start a new conversation and say, “Help me create a new skill.”
It starts asking questions. What does the Skill do. When should it trigger. What inputs will come in. What should the output look like. This is where most people rush and regret it. Give it real examples. Three or four actual outputs from your practice, redacted if you need to. Not summaries of examples. Actual examples. The quality of your examples sets the ceiling for the quality of the Skill. Generic examples produce generic Skills.
After the interview, it drafts a SKILL.md file. Read it carefully. It will describe how you say you practice, which is not always how you actually practice. Edit the description. Edit the instructions. Get it closer to reality.
Then you test it on three live matters. You will find that it misfires. Either it doesn’t load when it should, or it loads and does something slightly wrong. Under-triggering is the most common issue, and Anthropic’s own team flags this in their docs. The fix is usually a more specific description of when the Skill should activate, plus a nudge in your prompt the first few times (”use my contract-review Skill on this”).
When you're happy with it, zip the folder up, go to Customize > Skills, hit the plus button, and upload the ZIP. Yes, it has to be a ZIP. The skill folder itself won't work. If you're on Team or Enterprise, an admin can push it out to everyone from organization settings, and you stop playing version-control whack-a-mole across fifty attorneys.
An hour in, you have something working. A week in, you have something good. A month in, after you have run it against thirty real matters and edited it six times, you have something you will not want to work without.
Monday morning
Pick the Skill that hurts the most right now. If billing write-offs are bleeding the firm, start with narratives. If associate drafts are always off-key, start with style. If you redline five agreements a week and explain the same thing every time, start with the playbook.
Spend an hour. Test it on three real examples. If it saves you thirty minutes a week, it already paid for itself.
The attorneys who pull ahead over the next twelve months aren’t the ones using Claude the most. They’re the ones teaching Claude how their firm works, once, and letting it remember.
The firms that pull ahead over the next twelve months won't be the ones using Claude the most. They'll be the ones that sat down once, wrote down how their firm actually works, and let Claude remember it on every matter after. Five small files. A weekend of real work. A practice that runs a little sharper every week after that. If you want a second set of eyes on a Skill you're building, or help picking which one to start with at your firm, email me at steve@intelligencebyintent.com. The attorneys who figure this out first will be very hard to catch.