How Claira and Claude Work Together

Your firm may already be using Claude. Someone keeps a tab open for it, drafts in it, thinks out loud in it between calls. When the next matter crosses into six figure document counts, the question arrives on its own: can Claude simply handle the review?

The useful answer is more specific than a yes or a no. Claude is very good at a class of work that sits immediately before and immediately after document review. It is not built to carry the review itself, and the reasons have almost nothing to do with how capable the model is.

Claude and Claira sit at different points in the same matter. This post is about where the seam falls and how to work it.

What Claude Does Well

Claude is Anthropic's general purpose assistant. It reads what you give it, reasons over it, and writes with you. It is available in the web, desktop and mobile apps, through the API, and inside tools your firm may already have connected to it. Projects let a team keep a persistent set of instructions and reference material in one place, so the assistant starts every conversation already knowing how your practice works.

For litigation teams the value tends to show up in the same handful of places. Pressure testing a theory of the case before you commit to it. Turning a rambling review protocol into criteria a human being can actually apply. Building a chronology from the twenty documents that already matter. Drafting the first version of a privilege log entry, or a meet and confer letter, or a set of deposition questions. Reading a transcript and telling you which half hour is worth your evening.

That is real work, and Claude does it well. We are not going to argue with any of it.

Where the Handoff Has to Happen

The boundary is not intelligence. It is location, volume, and record.

Start with volume. Claude takes documents through an upload, one curated set at a time. Forty exhibits is a reasonable ask. A hundred key custodial emails is a reasonable ask. A post-cull discovery population of two hundred thousand documents is not a set anyone hands over an upload dialog. Attempting it is not a workflow. It is a data entry project with a deadline attached.

Then location. Your population already lives in Nuix Discover, where every document carries a document ID, a family relationship, a batch assignment, a coding layout, and an audit history. Moving that population somewhere else to be read means severing the decision from the record that proves the decision was made. The same volume and location boundary shows up with the research and drafting assistants built specifically for law, which is the argument we worked through in our post on how Claira and CoCounsel work together. General purpose assistants inherit the constraint rather than escaping it.

Record is the one that matters most in litigation. A review has to survive a meet and confer, a privilege log, and eventually a production. That means every document needs a decision written against a field, timestamped and attributable to a reviewer or to a documented process. A chat transcript is not that record, and no amount of copying answers back into a spreadsheet turns it into one. Claira runs inside Nuix Discover and writes its results into the coding fields, which is the whole reason it lives there.

There is a fourth consideration worth naming plainly. Whatever your team pastes into any external assistant is governed by your firm's own agreement with that vendor and your own client confidentiality obligations. That is a conversation for your general counsel and your information security team, not for a blog post. Have it before the population moves, not after.

Turning a Claude Conversation into Case Context

This is where the two tools stop competing and start compounding.

Claira's prompts are only as good as what Claira knows about your matter, and Case Context is where that knowledge lives. It has five sections: parties and people, description and timeline, relevance and issues, privilege indicators, and collection details. Our guide on setting up Case Context walks through what belongs in each one.

Read that list again and notice that it describes exactly the output of a good strategy session. If your team has already worked the pleadings, the key custodian list, and the theory of the case through Claude, most of that material exists in a conversation somewhere. Ask Claude to restate it in those five headings. Ask it to be specific about roles, because "Jane Doe, General Counsel at Acme Corp" does work for privilege identification that "Jane Doe" does not. Ask it to write the relevance section the way it would write a review protocol, including the exclusions.

Then have a human read every line before it goes in. Claude drafts the context. A senior reviewer approves it. If your organization has the approval workflow enabled, that step is already enforced for you. Case theory that has never been checked by someone accountable for the matter should not be shaping decisions across two hundred thousand documents.

Sending Coded Evidence Back Up

The loop closes in the other direction, and this is the half most teams forget to build.

Once a bulk scan has run, the population is no longer a population. It is a coded set with a responsive subset, a privilege queue, and a much smaller pile of documents that actually change how the matter goes. That smaller pile is precisely the size and shape of set Claude handles well.

Export it and bring it back up. Build the chronology from documents that have already been coded rather than from memory. Draft the motion against the evidence rather than around it. Prepare the cross from the four threads that survived review instead of the four hundred that entered it. Case theory flows down into Claira as context. Coded evidence flows back up into drafting. Neither tool is doing the other's job.

Where the Budget Splits

Assistant seats are inexpensive measured against review hours, which is why the split is usually easy to defend. Claude carries the thinking and the writing at both ends of the matter, priced per person. Claira carries the population in the middle, priced against the work it actually removes from your reviewers. You are not paying twice for the same task, because the tasks were never the same.

The volume in your matters is not going to shrink. What you can change is how much of it a person has to open before the useful documents surface. If you want to see where the seam falls on a matter you are running right now, book a short session with our team and bring the real numbers.