“The editing process with co-counsel was seamless, and hours of time came back to me.”
Richard Serpe
Trial lawyer, 40 years in plaintiff personal injury
- Practice
- Catastrophic injury and product liability
- Drafts in
- Claude Code
- Courts
- Federal and state courts in several states
Before: good drafts, and hours of cleanup after them
Richard has practiced plaintiff personal injury law for 40 years, and he was always the partner in charge of the firm's technology. He now spends hours a day in Claude Code, and over a season of heavy pretrial briefing he was drafting or answering two briefs a workday against defense firms with six or seven lawyers on a case.
The AI had stopped hallucinating and the writing sounded like him. Everything after the draft was still manual. Claude's formatting was poor, so a paralegal reformatted each brief by hand. When co-counsel sent back a redline, Claude could only produce a new unformatted file, and the cleanup started over.
“My only solution was to figure out what I liked or didn't like about my co-counsel's redlines and manually do them myself, which just kind of felt like I was getting out a tablet and a chisel.”
Checking citations meant carrying each brief between AI tools by hand, relaying each one's critique to the other until they agreed.
“I was the delivery person back and forth between the AI engines until they could agree that everything was right.”
After: two problems solved in one fell swoop
With DocketDrafter connected to Claude, Richard's briefs come out formatted for the court. He started drafting in a state court we had not yet set up for him, without telling us first. The documents held up, and the small adjustments they needed were made right away.
“I just completely eliminated my paralegal from all my drafting. And that saved a tremendous amount of time that she could then plow into more productive work.”
The co-counsel round trip changed too. Richard's co-counsel keep working in Word, and their edits come straight back into the draft he works on with Claude.
- 1Co-counsel sends back a Word redline
- 2Claude reviews their changes and proposes more
- 3Richard decides what to accept
- 4DocketDrafter sends a new redline back
“The editing process with co-counsel was seamless, and hours of time came back to me.”
Citations checked while the brief is written
Some of Richard's summary-judgment briefs run 30 to 40 pages, and later sections build on earlier ones. He checks citations with DocketDrafter as each section is drafted, against the language of the authorities themselves, so an error in an early section never carries through the rest of the brief.
“If an inaugural error was put in a foundational piece, it could be carried through the entire brief and it could be a disaster. So I want to know that everything is right on the front end.”
“More like 10 minutes”
Richard budgets 10 hours to learn any new AI tool. DocketDrafter has no separate app to learn. It works inside the Claude session he already uses, and his standing instructions to Claude cover it along with everything else.
“I'm like, wait, I don't have to go to DocketDrafter and learn how to navigate around DocketDrafter? And it was more like 10 minutes of time to get up to speed.”
When DocketDrafter adds something, Claude tells him about it, so he doesn't have to read a newsletter to keep up.
One lawyer against a defense team
Richard's product-liability cases often draw six or seven defense lawyers, each filing on a different issue: one on Daubert, one on motions in limine, one on discovery. Keeping up with them used to be painful. Now he answers their briefs himself.
“That playing field's totally leveled now. If anything, it's an advantage to have one person in the control room who understands the whole case.”
“If I couldn't use DocketDrafter anymore, what I would miss most is the practice of law, because I'd be done.”
Richard Serpe
Want what Richard has?
If you already draft with Claude, DocketDrafter handles the rest: court formatting, co-counsel redlines, version history, and citation checking, all from the same session. We set it up for your courts and your firm's style the same way we did for Richard.
What Richard has
What your firm gets
- Briefs that come out court-formatted, with no paralegal cleanup
- Templates for your courts, or your firm’s own format, built and maintained by us
- Co-counsel redlines that flow back into the working draft
- Word redlines for every revision and a full version history, whether or not your co-counsel use AI
- Citations checked as each section is drafted
- Citation checking against the text of the authorities, available any time during the draft
- Everything run from the Claude session he already works in
- DocketDrafter connected to your Claude, with no separate app to learn
- A new state court set up as soon as he needed it
- A 30-minute onboarding call, first-month implementation, two coaching sessions a month for your firm, and email support