Legal AI has become a partnership-level governance question; Harvey, Legora and Claude made sure of that. Airclerk helps NZ firms put Claude to work on real matters, governed and evidenced, on the systems the firm already runs. We reviewed all 151 skills in Anthropic's open-source Claude for Legal suite and built an NZ Law Pack for the gaps that matter most.
Use Copilot? We can implement on your preferred platform.
New Zealand law firms use Anthropic's Claude models across document-heavy legal work such as matter chronologies, discovery review and privilege sorting, contract review against the firm's playbook, due diligence, briefs of evidence support, Privacy Act access requests and permission-aware precedent search. In legal practice Claude needs to be connected to the document management system, matter files, permissions and lawyer approval steps before it can be used safely on client work, with matter isolation so one client's material is walled off from another's.
The lawyer-referral lists name Australia, Canada, Scotland and Northern Ireland; the New Zealand Law Society is absent. Many suite outputs carry US-style "attorney work product" markings. The operative NZ questions are legal advice, litigation and settlement privilege under the Evidence Act 2006; a label can signal intended confidentiality, but it does not create privilege.
The termination review assumes at-will employment; NZ dismissals need justification and fair process. The patent intake treats the US one-year grace period as a green light; NZ's grace period is newer and narrower, and relying on one can still sink the overseas filings. Contract deadlines roll against US federal holidays, so Matariki and anniversary days silently don't exist. US demand-letter workflows do not map cleanly to NZ letters of demand: settlement privilege and costs strategy, professional-conduct duties and misleading-conduct risk all land differently here.
Deposition prep, in a jurisdiction with no US-style depositions; briefs of evidence are the NZ procedural document. Subpoena triage, where the NZ equivalent depends on context: witness summonses, notices to produce, non-party discovery orders, regulator information-gathering notices. A DMCA takedown workflow and an EU AI Act register, neither of which is NZ law unless a client's overseas footprint brings it into scope.
The Airclerk NZ Law Pack: a starter set of New Zealand skills for employment, privacy, companies, litigation and regulatory work, written to the suite's own structure and QA rubric. Employment Relations Act dismissal reviews, IPP 6 access requests on the 20-working-day clock, Companies Act 1993 board and shareholder resolutions, briefs of evidence, letters of demand with the open or without-prejudice call flagged for the lawyer. Every skill is source-linked with verification dates to current primary and approved materials: legislation, court rules, practice notes, regulator guidance and case-law references where the firm approves them. The pack is an accelerator, not a finished product: it is where an implementation starts, and each firm's version diverges from there as skills are adapted to the firm's own precedents, playbook and risk settings. We provide the localisation matrix behind it: the original skill, the US assumption, the NZ risk, the replacement workflow and the verification date. Ask us about it.
The patterns that produce the cleanest path from pilot to production. Each is a candidate first workflow for a Readiness Sprint.
De-duplicated, significance-tagged chronologies from the matter file, every entry cited to source.
First-pass sorting for lists of documents, potential privilege issues flagged for a lawyer's call, nothing silently stripped.
Term-by-term deviation analysis against the firm's own positions, with surgical redlines and NZ-law deltas.
One row per document, every cell cited, straight from the data room to a review-ready grid.
Chronologies, document references and inconsistency checks from the witness's instructions; evidential issues flagged for counsel. Evidence stays settled by the witness and lawyer.
IPP 6 access requests on the 20-working-day clock, refusal and withholding grounds analysed per document.
Permission-aware search across the firm's precedent bank, styles and internal knowledge.
Select committee calls for submissions, regulator consultations and commencement dates, tracked with owners and deadlines.
Matter status summaries by audience: the client letter, the partner brief, the file note.
Behind every workflow sits AI Process Assurance: the reasoning, sources and sign-off retained as an AI review record, the AI Workpaper, so the firm can show what the AI did, how it was checked and who signed off.
The first production workflow is chosen by volume, source availability, permission complexity and ease of lawyer review. For most firms that means bounded, source-heavy work: matter chronologies, due diligence tables, contract review against the firm's playbook, Privacy Act access-response grids, regulatory watch. Court filings, settlement correspondence, witness evidence and final advice stay behind stricter gates.
Each workflow defines who reviews what: partner, supervising lawyer, privacy officer or practice lead. The AI Workpaper records which sources were attached, what changed in review and whether any required gate was missed.
We run the workflow on held-out examples before a lawyer relies on it: does it cite the right sources, refuse when sources are missing, respect matter permissions and route consequential outputs to the right reviewer. Prompt-injection, cross-matter-leakage and hallucinated-citation checks are part of the production gate.
The configured workflow on your systems, a Workflow Charter setting out stages, evidence and approval gates, the evaluation results from the held-out tests, a runbook with training run separately for lawyers and support staff, a retained AI Workpaper for each material run, and reviews at 30, 60 and 90 days to check the workflow is being used, not just installed.
Two-week, fixed-price plan.
First governed workflow into production.
Controls, approvals, audit trails.
Monitor, improve, expand.
Everything is deployed to your own Claude instance, under your own agreement with Anthropic.
A Claude implementation plan your partners and risk committee can stand behind, in two weeks.
New Zealand law firms use Claude across document-heavy legal work: matter chronologies, discovery review and privilege sorting, contract review against the firm's playbook, due diligence, briefs of evidence support, Privacy Act access requests and permission-aware precedent search. Airclerk designs and implements these as governed workflows, connected to the firm's document and practice management systems, matter files, permissions and approval steps, whether that is SharePoint and Microsoft 365, iManage, NetDocuments, Actionstep, LEAP or another stack, so a lawyer reviews and signs off every client-facing, advice, filing, settlement or otherwise consequential output. We are Claude-preferred but platform-aware, and can implement on Copilot where that is your standard.
Claude for Legal is Anthropic's legal offering for Claude, launched in May 2026; its plugin repo is open source under an Apache 2.0 licence, with 12 practice-area plugins, scheduled agents and legal-system connectors. It is well engineered, and almost all of its hardcoded law is American. Airclerk reviewed every skill in the repo (151 as at July 2026) and found New Zealand appears nowhere in it; several defaults would actively mislead an NZ firm. We built an NZ Law Pack to the suite's own structure: a starter set of New Zealand skills for employment, privacy, companies, litigation and regulatory work, source-linked with verification dates. The pack is an accelerator rather than a product: it shortens the path to a firm's own build, and each skill is adapted to the firm's precedents, playbook and risk settings before production use.
No. Every output is a draft for a lawyer's review, with sources cited and uncertainty flagged. The reviewing lawyer takes professional responsibility for anything that leaves the building. The workflow is supervised like delegated work, with added AI-specific controls for source verification, confidentiality, disclosure and audit trail. Airclerk is an AI implementation consultancy, not a law firm, and the workflows we build are designed around that boundary: consequential actions stop for human sign-off, and supervision stays with the firm. We design workflows to support the firm's obligations under the Lawyers and Conveyancers Act 2006 and the Lawyers and Conveyancers Act (Lawyers: Conduct and Client Care) Rules 2008: competence, supervision, confidentiality, privilege, client-care information, billing transparency and duties to the court.
Two protections come before anything else. Matter isolation: one client's material is walled off from another client's work. Permission-aware access: the workflow sees only what the person running it is allowed to see in the firm's existing document stores. Before any client material is connected, we check the vendor terms: whether inputs are used for training, what is retained and for how long, who the subprocessors are, and where data goes offshore (IPP 12). Everything runs on the firm's own Claude instance, under the firm's own agreement with Anthropic; client material goes to Anthropic on the firm's terms, not to Airclerk. Some steps never move into the workflow at all: clearing conflicts, giving undertakings, filing documents, sending settlement offers and crossing information barriers stay with the firm's authorised lawyers. And where people at the firm are already using personal AI accounts on client matters, we treat that as the first thing to fix, not a fact of life: an engagement starts by finding where AI is already in use and moving that work onto governed rails.
Harvey and Legora are strong products, sold as platform subscriptions. Airclerk's approach is different: we implement Claude on the systems the firm already runs, starting from Anthropic's open-source Claude for Legal plugins localised for New Zealand, so the firm controls its configured workflows and prompts, and keeps the record of what the AI did. For many NZ firms the honest comparison is a platform subscription against a build the firm keeps. We think the record of AI-assisted work on client matters is worth owning.
Because the repo is the easy part. What is left is the work that decides whether it sticks: drawing out the firm's playbook and encoding it, localising the US defaults for New Zealand law, connecting the firm's document and practice management systems, designing the approval gates, testing the workflow before a lawyer relies on it, and training people so adoption is deliberate rather than informal. A firm with engineering capacity can do this itself; the repo is Apache 2.0 and our review of it is on this page. Most firms would rather buy the weeks back.