In “The 80/20 Principle,” Ernie Svenson demystifies technology and introduces tools that improve your workday. This time: Building custom, reusable AI Skills to replace traditional, static SOPs.
Table of contents
Your SOPs Are Collecting Dust: Here Is What to Do About It
Let’s say that you’re inspired to systematize your law practice, and so you meticulously document how things should be done — client intake steps, document formatting preferences, billing procedures. They’re stored in a shared folder (or God forbid, a paper binder).
Then what happens? Nobody uses directions. Including you.
Look, here’s the harsh truth.
Standard operating procedures are great in theory. In practice, they often relate to software that steadily changes. The screenshots and video guides become outdated and no longer accurate. In other words, useless.
I am not here to tell you that all SOPs are useless. A well-run business still needs documented processes, maybe even some that are stored in paper form.
But modern businesses now need to account for AI-driven workflows. And the traditional form of SOPs is a bottleneck for those workflows. In fact, traditional SOPs are becoming less useful for many kinds of workflows, not just the AI ones.
The Problem With Traditional SOPs
The friction with written SOPs is not the writing. It is everything that happens after.
You write a 10-step intake checklist. Six months later, you add a new practice area and forget to update it. A year later, your assistant finds the old version and follows the wrong steps. Or more likely, nobody looks at it at all because pulling up a document, reading through it, and translating it into action takes more effort than just winging it.
Written SOPs are static. They describe a process but do not participate in it. They are a reference document when what you actually need is a working tool.
Beyond the Binder: Enter AI Skills for Law Firms
In my last column, I wrote about switching from ChatGPT to Claude and discovering what I had been missing. One of the things I mentioned was Claude’s ability to build custom AI Skills — reusable instruction sets that tell Claude exactly how to handle a specific task.
I want to go deeper on that idea here, because I think AI Skills represent something more significant than a productivity trick. AI skills for law firms are the modern replacement for how we store and apply process knowledge.
What Is an AI Skill?
A Skill is a plain-text file, written in markdown, that contains your instructions for a specific task. It can include your preferences, your templates, your decision criteria, your formatting rules — anything you would put in an SOP. The difference is that instead of sitting in a folder waiting to be read, it lives inside Claude and gets applied automatically every time you do that task.
Here is a simple example. Say you have a standard way you want demand letters drafted — a specific structure, a tone, certain information that always needs to be included. Traditionally, you would write that up as an SOP or a template with instructions.
With a Skill, you write those same instructions in a format Claude can follow. Then every time you ask Claude to draft a demand letter, it already knows your preferences. No looking anything up. No reminding anyone. The process is built into the tool.
Breaking Workflows Into Pieces With Claude
The real power shows up when you start thinking in terms of “connected Skills” rather than a single monolithic SOP.
Take document drafting, which is something every lawyer does constantly. Instead of one massive set of instructions, you can break the workflow into discrete steps: a drafting Skill that selects from your library of templates and handles the initial draft, a review Skill that checks for your law firm’s voice and formatting standards, and a finalizing Skill that handles the finishing touches — adding your letterhead, checking typography, and preparing the document for delivery.
Each Skill has a focused job. Each one can be updated independently. And Claude moves through them in sequence, applying the right context at each stage.
This is not theoretical. I use this approach for my own content workflows, and the lawyers in my community who have started building Skills are finding the same thing: once you set them up, the quality and consistency of the output go up immediately.
The Markdown Advantage
Here is something that might not be obvious at first. Because Skills are written in plain-text markdown, they are readable by both AI and people. That means your Skill file can serve double duty.
If you need to hand a process to a human — a new assistant, a contract attorney, a colleague covering your cases — you can share the markdown file directly. It reads like a clear set of instructions. Or you can have Claude convert it into a formatted Word document with headers, numbered steps, and your firm’s branding.
The Skill becomes the source of truth.
The human-readable SOP becomes a downstream output — one that Claude can regenerate any time the underlying process changes.
This flips the traditional approach on its head. Instead of writing an SOP and hoping it gets followed, you build a working instruction set that produces both AI-guided execution and human-readable documentation from the same source.
Skills Evolve, Rigid Checklists Do Not
Maintenance is the other advantage of AI Skills for law firms. Traditional SOPs start decaying the moment you finish writing them. Updating them requires finding the document, editing it, and redistributing it — which is why most of them never get updated.
Skills are different. When something in your process changes, you tell Claude to update the Skill. It does. The next time you run that workflow, the updated instructions are already in place. No redistribution. No version-control headaches. No wondering whether someone is working from the old version.
Claude can also help you build Skills in the first place. You do not have to know Markdown or write instructions from scratch. You can describe your process conversationally, and Claude will structure it into a working Skill. Then you use it, notice what needs tweaking, and refine it together.
Where to Start With AI Skills
If this is new to you, the best first Skill to build is probably something you do often and wish were more consistent — drafting a particular type of document, running through an intake process, or preparing for a specific kind of meeting.
Start with one. Describe your process to Claude. Let it build the Skill. Use it a few times and see what needs adjusting. You will be surprised how quickly the output starts matching what you actually want — and how much less time you spend getting there.
The shift here is not about abandoning documentation. It is about putting your process knowledge somewhere it actually gets used.
SOPs told people what to do. Skills tell your AI how to do it — and they can still tell people what to do when that is what you need.
For solo and small-firm lawyers especially, this is a meaningful change. You do not have a training department or an operations team to enforce process consistency. Now you do not need one. Your processes live inside the tool you are already using, and they work every time you show up.
More From Ernie Svenson and the 80/20 Principle
Why I Switched From ChatGPT to Claude (And What Finally Pushed Me Over)
Loom for Lawyers: Why You Should Be Creating Shareable Videos
Top 8 Tech Tools for Solo and Small Firm Lawyers to End the Chaos
AI Tools for Lawyers: Why You Shouldn’t Stick to Just One
Our Fingers Can’t Keep Up With AI
Image © iStockPhoto.com.
Sign up for Attorney at Work’s daily practice tips newsletter here and subscribe to our podcast, Attorney at Work Today.
