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Build Your Own

How to create your own workflows, agents, and custom tools for legal work.

The earlier sections taught you to use Claude Code and connect it to your services. This section teaches you to build -- to create custom workflows that solve your specific problems and a system that gets better the more you use it.

What's Here

Page What You'll Learn
Your First Workflow The prompt-plan-review-revise loop. A hands-on walkthrough of the core method.
Skills and Agents Explained When to use a skill vs. an agent. Architecture decisions for different tasks.
Patterns and Templates Reusable design patterns for workflows. Quality checklist for anything you build.

The Core Idea

The most valuable thing about this system is not any individual workflow or configuration. It is the meta-skill of continuous improvement:

  1. Notice friction -- Where do you do the same thing repeatedly? Where do you copy-paste between tools? Where do you lose context between sessions?
  2. Build a solution -- Create a workflow or configure a process that handles it.
  3. Critique and iterate -- Use Claude to review and improve what you built. (Yes, use the AI to improve the AI tools.)
  4. Share what works -- Publish workflows that might help colleagues. Learn from what others share.

This cycle is what turns a collection of tools into a system that compounds over time. Every workflow you build makes the next one easier to build. Every pattern you learn applies to the next problem.

What This Looks Like for Law Faculty

Here are real examples of the kind of friction you might notice -- and the workflows that solve them:

Friction Workflow Solution
"I spend 30 minutes at the start of each semester reformatting my syllabus" A syllabus template workflow that updates dates, case assignments, and reading lists from a structured input
"I write the same type of committee memo every month" A memo template that pulls from meeting notes and generates a first draft in your voice
"I lose track of where I left off on my article draft" A session handoff workflow that captures decisions and open questions, so the next session starts with context
"I need to review 20 student papers and write individualized feedback" A feedback workflow that reads each paper, checks it against a rubric, and drafts comments for your review

Prerequisites

You should have:

  • A working Claude Code installation (Install guides)
  • A configured CLAUDE.md file (Setup guide)
  • Comfort reading and editing text files (markdown is just structured text -- not a programming language)

You do not need to know how to code. Workflows are written in markdown (structured text with simple formatting), not a programming language.

Getting Started

If you are new to building workflows, start with Your First Workflow. It walks through the core loop -- structure your thinking, make a plan, stress-test it, execute, and capture what you learned -- using concrete examples.

If you have already worked through that and want to understand the architecture, move to Skills and Agents Explained to learn when each approach is the right choice.

When you are ready to build something of your own, Patterns and Templates gives you the building blocks -- reusable design patterns and a quality checklist so your first custom workflow is solid from the start.