Episode 030 Workflow Options: Irys

Lawyers are building Claude skills, custom GPTs, and homegrown intake bots faster than ever. Most of what they're building will be obsolete in six months, because the foundation models keep swallowing whole product categories. Sabih Siddiqui left Big Law to co-found Irys.ai, a general-purpose legal AI platform. What started as a $299 off-the-shelf app turned into something closer to a custom infrastructure shop. His view is that a skill is a feature and a platform is a different thing. Should you build your own AI tools, buy them off the shelf, or pay someone to build them for you?

In this episode:

• Why Sabih thinks lawyers are "behind" on AI, and why the conference rhetoric hasn't moved past ROI and basic privacy fears

• The sustainability problem with building on Claude skills when the platform underneath changes every week

• An in-house legal team that ran its intake on Claude skills, and what changed when Irys rebuilt it with 36 engineering hours

• Irys's "dirty little secret": the $299 off-the-shelf app is an entryway into custom, white-labeled builds

• How a two-attorney pilot grew to 77 users across legal ops, compliance, and finance

• Growing to roughly 400 law firms and in-house teams through word of mouth, Facebook groups, and bar association channels, with no marketing spend

• Harvey and Legora as first movers, and what Sabih calls "wave 2" of legal AI

• Flat-fee opinion letters at $3,500 that take one hour, and why clients are paying for decades of judgment rather than the hour

• In-house clients demanding proof of how outside counsel uses AI, including shared workspaces and per-client-folder ROI reports

• Ron and Heather's disagreement over whether rank-and-file lawyers want custom builds or something that simply works off the shelf

We also discuss:

• Every CLE is about AI now, including Ron's skepticism about who's attending the Subchapter V session

• Heather's pushback that lawyers are racing to the AI CLEs, not implementing anything back at the office

• Tools versus platforms: whether a firm gets better ROI from mastering Word, Slack, and the phone system or from adopting an AI platform

• Practice Signals: a PI firm on Reddit losing track of who owns the next step on new cases. Sabih's answer is to set it up in Claude or ChatGPT if you don't want a vendor.

• Claude for Legal versus OpenAI's legal offering, and why Sabih thinks features are commoditizing while workflows hold the value

• Token-based billing and what happens when two attorneys run up a Claude bill in two weeks

Key Takeaway

Sabih's sharpest point is that a feature isn't infrastructure. A Claude skill gives the model a layer to work on, but it does nothing about ingestion, memory, permissions, or the three systems your documents actually live in. Every builder has to decide whether they're building something durable or something the next model release will make irrelevant. The judgment behind the work stays with the lawyer. Everything else is up for grabs.

That split runs straight through the Simpsons crowd. The lawyer who's already building skills at night is on a Jetsons path and needs to know where the ground is stable. The lawyer who shows up for a 30-second hearing and goes back to the office doesn't want to build anything. He wants something that works for $299 a month and someone who answers the phone when it doesn't. Heather and Ron don't agree on which group is bigger, and neither answer is obviously right.

Mentioned in This Episode

• Sabih Siddiqui, CEO & Co-Founder, Irys (irys; formerly Akita / Iqidis)

• Harvey

• Legora

• Claude, Claude skills, Claude Code, Cowork, Claude for Legal (Anthropic)

• ChatGPT and OpenAI's legal offering 

• Eve Legal

• Lexis (Harvey integration)

• Palantir (the "Palantir approach")

• Skadden

• Gmail, Google Drive, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Skype, Microsoft Word

• TTAB litigation

Highlight Reels on YouTube and Instagram

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