One day, while practicing law with my father, I told him I was going to create a procedures manual for the firm. He said we already had one. Which, after two years of working there, was news to me. But I was pleasantly surprised—if a little wary. So he reached into his desk and pulled out a three-ring binder.

A three-ring binder. In his desk. That I, a named partner at the firm, had never seen.

It was really good too.

No, I’m just kidding, it was massively out of date and lacked a lot of instructions.

This may not be the exact same story at your firm, but I bet it rhymes. We know SOPs are important. We take on projects to create them. We spend time organizing, defining, and figuring out exactly how much detail we want in our documents. We define our intake, we outline our onboarding, we even note how typical cases flow through our firms. And if we’re lucky, we get a pretty decent first draft done.

Then, we store it somewhere and we forget about it. Or we store it in everyone’s desks and they forget about it. Or worse, mark it up. And then forget about it. We work so hard. Create something beautiful, and for all intents and purposes, it’s useless the moment it’s printed.

We all do it. Well, most of us. And it’s not because we hate documentation, or want to hoard institutional knowledge. It’s because creating, using, and updating SOPs seems useless. Great in concept, messy in practice.

So in order to make this work, we have to change the practice. We can’t print our SOPs anymore. We can’t store them in an admin only area. And we can’t require a board resolution to edit and update.

Last month, Claude Chat gained a new ability. Instead of just read access in SharePoint, the Microsoft 365 connector now has write/delete capabilities. Which, if you’re paying attention, means Dad’s three-ring binder can now live in SharePoint—with all the rights and privileges pertaining thereto. And Claude Chat only inherits the access of its user. (I wrote more about what that shift means for client data in Revisiting Law Town.)

Practically, your firm can now store its SOPs in an appropriately gated folder, give read access to certain users who can then query the SOPs. And give read/write access to other users who are tasked with keeping their area of the SOPs up-to-date. You could even use Claude to create a shared artifact that tracked just how up-to-date everything is. (But that’s a project for another time.)

So instead of telling you to go start your SOPs, I’m going to ask you to go start starting your SOPs. The first steps in this project are 1) figuring out where the SOPs will be stored, and 2) setting up the Claude connector to allow appropriate read/write access.

You already know how work gets done at your office, and odds are you’ve written it down before. That was never the hard part. The friction was always what came after—the printing, the permissions, the copy nobody could find when it mattered. Claude, sitting inside SharePoint, is what actually clears that out.

— Zack