Custom instructions for lawyers

0:00 Hi everyone, welcome to today's session where we're going to discuss how, what are the kind of features that Claude AI offers us, specially as lawyers. I'm going to be sharing my screen. Now, this is the kind of first view that most people have when they log in to Claude. Now, I'm not demonstrating a paid account here because I'm assuming many of you may be having free accounts. Uh, usually most of the features are going to be the same.

0:21 It's just that in a paid account you get more usage. The quality usually doesn't change, but the quantity improves. So, this is a free account as you can see on top. So, almost every feature that you see here, all of you should be able to replicate. So, it's ideal if on your screens you also log in to your Claude account, so you can follow along. Now, most people would, would just start off by asking a question here.

0:46 But actually, there are a lot of things that we need to configure before we even start to ask questions. So, the first thing that I wanted to do is click on Customize. Now, this shows you a lot of features. And the first thing that we need to look at is General. I hope you can all see this clearly on your screen. Now, here obviously whatever your name, you want to add, that's fine. But this instructions for Claude, this is something a lot of people usually do not fill in.

1:17 Now, here we need to give some context about us and the kind of work that we are going to do on with Claude. This will help it generate better answers. Now, I want to know from you, have you guys ever filled this before? Like in your Claude accounts, have you ever entered anything here in instructions? Give me a quick yes or no. Then I'll decide, no, how much deeper to go into this. Can more of you reply on that?

1:46 Okay. So, uh, now what are the kind of things that we should put here? Okay, since I can see, uh, most of you don't already do this. So, first, I give it a context, that I'm a tech lawyer practicing in India since 1999. This is my background. And because I have to tell it, do not explain fundamentals, define common legal terms or summarize what provision generally does. So, the reason we need to say all this is because you may notice when you ask questions, a lot of times there's text which is showing on your screen which is not relevant to you.

2:23 You may be very good in a particular field, but the AI is explaining the basics a little too much. So, you need to tell the AI that. So, that is why we put in the context. Then we put in the jurisdiction and conventions, very, very important. Now, for example, here I've said it is Indian law, unless I specify otherwise. Now, whichever country's laws you're working more on, you would ideally write that. Now, you may notice that we've also told it the date format and the currency to use.

2:59 Why date format? Because for example, in America, it would be month, day, year. But in India and many other countries, we write date, month, year. So, we need to specify that. Otherwise, every contract or every output that we get will have a lot of errors that we need to then sit and manually do. Similarly, here, you know, when it is citing a statute. So, do it by section and act, site cases in a particular format. We need to tell it all this.

3:31 Now, for example, in India, there was a lot of amendment, uh, sometime ago, where IPC, CrPC was changed, and the new acts came in. So, we can also say that where these new acts have replaced the older ones, give the new provision and the corresponding old ones. So, these are the kind of things that are going to be used in almost every chat or conversation that we have. So, it is better to put all this in the instructions once, rather than then repeating it in every chat.

4:04 Then we also need to give it some accuracy clause that never produce a citation that you are not confident is real. So, we all know that hallucination is a very big problem for AI. I'm not saying that just by adding these few lines, it will 100% remove it, but to a great extent, it is going to do that. So, for example, we are also saying, distinguish clearly between what is settled law, contested law, and your own reasoning by analogy.

4:33 The more of these instructions that we give, the better is going to be the quality of the answers that it gives us. So, another very critical thing, a lot of people, you know, wonder that when we are giving confidential client-related information, what does AI really do with it? Now, obviously, we cannot completely stop the AI from using that, but we can say that treat every fact, document, name, and figure that I give you as privileged client material.

5:01 Do not reuse it in general explanations or in hypotheticals. that you need to do. As always, if there are any questions, keep putting them in the chat and I'll answer them. So I hope this part is clear. So we did all this in the general tab under the instructions for Claude.