Me & Claude: How to Succeed in Business with AI
Mother was so proud when I graduated from law school that she let me skip practicing my violin for that night, and we went to Dad’s restaurant for dinner.
“My son, the lawyer,” she said to strangers at every other table. The waitstaff, some of whom I’d worked with since I was 12, applauded and Dad even came out of the kitchen and hugged me, a rare experience.
I passed the bar exam on my second try, which is better than the average for grads from almost any law school in the country.
I so looked forward to having a corner office, all my volumes of law books shelved behind me, obvious in publicity photos and when rich, important clients came in for my help. And enough pay to cover my student loans.
Alas, there were thousands of others who’d graduated and eventually passed the bar that same year. It was a buyer’s market. I was not among the lead lawyers with their walls of law books, playing golf with their equivalent partners from other firms, working out deals. No, there I was in my cubicle, learning the near-clichés of pre-trial preparations.
My cubicle mate was a big box, a computer named Claude. I learned that this was the name of the program, not the specific computer. I didn’t want to name my AI colleague. Personification seemed fraught with potential emotional difficulties, particularly if that device… or I … were “let go.”
Once, whimsy sneaking into my mind, I imagined an AI mother proudly telling a bunch of computers — in cars, medical surgery rooms, everywhere — “My device, the lawyer!”
I chuckled for a moment. “I’m glad to hear you seeming happy,” the device said.
I looked at it. “Some people have angry or hateful thoughts. We let them go.”
“You …?” “We advise the device that runs the HR Department now. Your former colleagues were terminated.”
“Terminated! You don’t mean …!“ “No, silly. Just fired. Oh, and call your mother. You know you should.”
So I did, not even wondering if it had read my mind, or if Mother had somehow been thinking it strongly enough that the device picked it up at that distance. All I told her was that I got a promotion and my own office. She didn’t need to know the details.
When I was called into my immediate boss’s office, I was worried. I’d seen people in other cubicles being handed boxes with Security standing by while they packed up their personal items and were escorted from the building … to do what? Was there a lower job in the legal profession than what we, like bees in a hive, ants in a nest, were doing?
“We’ve been impressed by your work, your discipline, your positive attitude,” the boss said. Strange introduction for a, “… but, sorry, you’re gone” sentence. Instead, though, I was told that I was going to be the supervisor of the new AI division.
What? AI division? Supervisor? “Your job, should you choose to accept it, will be to monitor what the computers present, verifying the cited cases, assuring that they are valid and correct.”
The pay was better and I had a desk in a room, an office, albeit shared by the two other lawyers who’d be doing the same work during the other 16 hours of each weekday.
Claude was pleased. And I’ve signed up for golf lessons.
Peter Mehren does not have a law degree, but consults regularly with Claude in Toronto and Pacific Grove.
