Irene Liu: Welcome to AI Sidebar. I’m Irene Liu, your host and executive director of the AI Initiative at Stanford Law School. Today, I’m thrilled to welcome Mark Pike, associate general counsel at Anthropic and the creator of Claude for Legal. I first got to know Mark when he was a product counsel at Slack, so I have had the opportunity to watch his work evolve alongside the technology itself.

And he brings a particularly interesting perspective to this conversation as both a product lawyer working at the frontier of AI development and as a hands-on builder who has experimented with using Claude to build Claude for Legal. So today, we’ll discuss how product counseling is changing in the agentic era, including what it means to help build products, embed legal advice into guardrails, and advise an organization where anyone can create new tools and workflows.

We’ll also explore why hands-on tinkering matters for product lawyers, why strong managers may be well-positioned to work with AI agents, and whether AI will reduce legal work or create more of it. So, with that, let’s jump into my conversation with Mark Pike.

Mark, thank you so much for joining us today. 

Mark Pike: Thanks for having me. 

Irene Liu: So, Mark, you joined us back in May as well at our AI Initiative Speaker Series, and at that time, you talked about your recently launched Claude for Legal and your year building with AI. But what we didn’t get to touch on was that you actually started at Anthropic, not to build Claude for Legal, but to work as their product counsel. So, I’d love to spend some time today to talk about your product counsel role and how it has evolved. 

And Mark, I’ve actually known you when you were a product counsel at Slack. And so, looking back at the products and the legal issues that you were advising then, like how has product counseling evolved?

Mark Pike: Yeah. I worked at Slack for about seven years. I started there in 2016, and I loved doing these road shows where I would go talk to other in-house legal departments, in- including yours- 

Irene Liu: Yeah 

Mark Pike: … which is how we first connected, and sharing more about how Slack Legal was using Slack to get our best work done.

And at the time, I would share how to write crisp and concise Slack posts or even use emoji reactions to try to help legal departments basically adopt this new type of technology and meet their clients where they are. Because at the time, in-house legal departments were still used to working in documents and email systems.

Irene Liu: Yeah. 

Mark Pike: And Slack was a transformation. Actually-

Irene Liu: I love the emojis, by the way. Like, that, that made us more relatable to the business teams. 

Mark Pike: Absolutely. And so, they always feel like these whimsical, fun, creative ways of expression, but they were also ways to get good work done. You know, an eyeball emoji can say, “I’m looking at this.”

Irene Liu: Yes. 

Mark Pike: And you can signal without having to write an email that said, “I am looking into this.”

A green check mark can indicate to everybody on the thread that this has already been approved. You don’t have to get up to speed. Versus in the before times, you’d have to read all 17 emails, only to get to the last one to show that it’s already been resolved.

Irene Liu: Yeah. 

Mark Pike: So, these emojis are actually time savers, and that was, like, a big learning at the time. And it was one that I felt it was fun to share with other legal departments, and, um, I had a really receptive audience. 

Something fun that we built at the time was the pat signal. This was a lamp that I had at my desk, and we had an emoji reaction that people could hit to suggest that something their colleague had worked on was inventive and innovative, and that we need to submit a patent application.

And that would actually… I had a Wi-Fi connected light bulb that would blink at my desk. 

Now, I bring this up because I feel like that was a very, like, 2018, 2019- 

Irene Liu: Yeah 

Mark Pike: … type of thing. 

Irene Liu: Yeah, yeah. But really innovative in 2018, 2019. 

Mark Pike: Yeah. 

Irene Liu: And super fun. 

Mark Pike: But it still required the human to smash that emoji reaction.

Irene Liu: Yeah. Yeah. 

Mark Pike: And what I think is happening now, and to kind of segue into what it’s like doing these same talks about how Anthropic Legal uses Claude to get our best work done, is that we’re using agents- to scan our Slack, to scan our GitHub repositories, and the agent knows the criteria that we have for inventive and innovative new things. And Claude will suggest, why don’t you submit a patent application for this? 

Um, I still have a pat signal at my desk. I still have gadgets that are lighting up, but it’s this new type of agentic work that’s happening that I’m really excited about. Yeah. 

Irene Liu: And so how has it evolved though, from an issue standpoint? So obviously you were always thinking about how to make sure that you relate with the business, that the business understands you, and you were building ways for them to find ways to reach you, either through pat signal, emojis, or through Slack itself. 

But how has it evolved at Anthropic where everyone is building and there’s so much different types of work at play versus one main core product?

Mark Pike: Yeah. So, product counseling used to mean advising the product org. 

Irene Liu: Yeah. 

Mark Pike: Now with things like Cowork or Claude Code, anyone can ship and build things. I’m non-technical, and I’ve become a product lead for Claude for Legal. 

In that new environment, it’s requiring product counsel to understand where the new features are coming from and meeting your clients where they are. So, it, it might not just be a traditional product org. Anthropic was founded as a research lab, and many of our first product managers were researchers who were finding themselves writing product briefs for the first time. And so, I think all of us in the product counseling function need to understand that these things are being created with 10X more speed.

You know, agentic capabilities mean that Claude agents can work overnight to help make plans and ship new features, and you need to be getting further upstream to understand where these new launches are coming from- understand the motivations. And what I keep telling my own product legal team is 2026 is, like, have your agents talk to my agent.

So our legal advice needs to be discoverable so that the people that are building things can find that legal guidance and incorporate it as they’re building these new features and functionality. Yeah. You no longer have that traditional launch process on a, like, six to eight-week basis with like a- 

Irene Liu: Yeah

Mark Pike: The type of roadmap sight lines that you used to. 

Irene Liu: Yeah. So, I mean, let’s just step back a little bit and talk about the traditional product counsel role. Like, traditionally, when it was first formed back at Google, a lot of the times people described that role as, like, the general counsel for the product.

They’re issue- 

Mark Pike: Yeah 

Irene Liu: … spotting all the issues and trying to figure out how they can help with the launch, and they’re partnering with the product in that sense. Do you think that definition still remains? Is it still like a general counsel for a product, or is it even more in depth? 

Mark Pike: I think all of the above.

I still- I think the product counsel is acting as a bit of a miniature GC. I would encourage everybody listening to go check out a blog post that I think amac and Nicole Wong wrote about the, the first creation of the product lawyer- 

Irene Liu: Back in the day … 

Mark Pike: at, at Google. And when I was in law school in 2006, it really wasn’t a career that I knew existed.

Irene Liu: Yeah. 

Mark Pike: And so, I love the parallel to that, to any of your students at Stanford or anybody listening to this, thinking about the types of careers that are gonna exist five, 10 years from now. Because the role of the lawyer is evolving in the same way that it did back then, where the Google legal team had that-

Irene Liu: Yeah

Mark Pike: Innovative look at shifting and putting people closer to where the work was happening. 

Irene Liu: Yeah. 

Mark Pike: And so, what I do think has changed in being a product lawyer is that the work is happening quicker. And to be an effective product lawyer- 

Irene Liu: Yeah 

Mark Pike: … and that miniature GC who is setting your team up for success, you need to get closer to the work than ever.

Irene Liu: Yeah. And I think that’s a really good point. I mean, things are moving faster than ever. And like you said, oftentimes the product counsels, they partnered with the engineering teams and the PMs, the product managers. But in this age, are you becoming more embedded into those engineering and product organizations than ever before?

Mark Pike: Yes. A few ways that that’s happening. 

One is that we’ve built more signals to understand what they’re shipping and what their plans are. So again, our legal team has built agents to look at codes and understanding what we’re developing and building, oftentimes prior to even receiving that, like, concrete product brief.

Other ways this is happening is build other types of tools. Just this week I’ve started piloting a dashboard for my own team to get signal about our launch calendaring process. So, in the before times, we would probably have, like, a, a monthly or quarterly review with the product team. 

Irene Liu: Yeah. 

Mark Pike: And now we can do it more in real time so that we can meet the needs of a hypergrowth organization. And I’ve heard this from product lawyers at, at other similarly situated companies that, like, you can no longer wait for that quarterly business review to understand- 

Irene Liu: Yeah 

Mark Pike: … and make plans, that you need to meet your clients where they are and understand what they’re shipping, and that requires us to build tooling and solutions as well.

Irene Liu: And what’s interesting, like we were discussing about this original role of the product counsel, is that they partnered with the product and engineering teams. But right now, what is happening is that everyone is a builder. 

Mark Pike: Yeah. 

Irene Liu: And you see people building and becoming product builders throughout the organization.

So, how do product counsels distinguish who to partner with, whether it’s an internal experiment, workflow, or something that is a real product that actually requires formal review? What happens when everyone’s a builder? 

Mark Pike: Yeah. So, I think the, the goals and objectives largely remain the same. Who your client is has maybe changed a bit.

Irene Liu: Yeah. 

Mark Pike: And the methodologies that you use as a product lawyer have probably shifted. But at the end of the day, it’s still the same thing. You’re, you’re trying to understand what the business and product team’s objectives are, what they’re trying to ship, the solutions that they’re trying to come up with, and you’re helping them navigate potential legal risks and mitigate those and come up with creative solutions.

And you’re just having to do so on maybe a, a tighter turnaround time, or you’re having to do so using new types of tools. But it’s still the same type of thinking and it’s the same human judgment that I think we bring to the table as the product lawyers or the miniature GC of the function. 

You’re also having to bring in subject matter experts and synthesize information and be the translator. So, I always say that product lawyers need to be able to, to speak legalese and translate it well enough for your clients to understand. And then, going the other way as well, you need to understand at least enough about the product and the technical underpinnings to explain to other lawyers on the team what’s going on so that they can set up the, the team with the right legal advice for the moment.

Irene Liu: And so, as product counsels, obviously your core job is to support the product and engineering teams of the core products of the business. But since everyone is building, are you finding that you need to have more product counsels to support reviews of different projects that are happening internally?

So, are there more head count that’s being needed for that, or are people just leveraging agents? 

Mark Pike: That’s a great question. I, I’ve never found, like, the right ratio of like product lawyers to product managers.

Irene Liu: Yeah. 

Mark Pike: I’m not sure what it is. I think it’s different for every organization and what industry you’re in. I do think that these types of agents and using AI can help you scale and identify where risk might be. 

And at the same time, there’s such a human element of building these relationships and trust, and the best product lawyers are trusted by their clients to know how to engage, and that requires just some in-person elements. And there’s only so many hours in a day and meetings you can attend that I, I do think that you won’t be able to fully scale just using AI to build that trust. But I… If anybody out there is listening to this and they know the right ratio, let me know. But I think things are changing. 

Irene Liu: As a former general counsel, I used to always ask about ratios. What’s the ratio of- 

Mark Pike: Yeah 

Irene Liu: … You know, the number of lawyers for the size of the company? And so, I know, um, that if anyone does figure out this perfect ratio, please share with the world, because that’s something that everyone’s looking for. 

Mark Pike: Yeah. 

Irene Liu: So, Mark, I think it’s so important that product counsels and humans remain in the loop. There is a huge trust element. But obviously, when things are moving so fast you need to automate some things. So, what are you automating and what are the parts where humans remain? Where the product counsels remain? 

Mark Pike: Yeah. So, we found a lot of wins automating by providing self-help resources and again, providing the types of guardrails in place that are a bit more technical solutions. So, it could be things like frameworks that we provide or even prompts that we provide our product teams so that they can incorporate the legal guidance as they’re building things out. 

The thing that stays human is the judgment at each gate. So, the guardrails don’t replace the lawyer, they route to one. So, a lot of these frameworks that we put in place map to our risk matrix as a company and say, ” Before you proceed here, please make sure you talk to a lawyer.” And at the end of the day before shipping, we’re still doing a, a pass on everything that involves any type of legal guidance. So, that’s the way we do it. 

I wanna call out that the Claude for Legal plugin itself. I, I often tell people, “Don’t use it out of the box.” It’s a weird thing for the builder of a, a product to say is like, “Don’t use it the way we shipped it,” but it’s important. You need to customize it and tailor it so that it knows your organization’s rules and principles. It has your playbooks. And so, the way we do that in the Claude for Legal plugin is there’s actually a cold start interview that asks you questions about your organization, your existing playbooks, your risk tolerance, your house style so that it, it knows your voice a bit more. 

Irene Liu: Yeah. 

Mark Pike: The other thing it’s doing though is it’s embedding into these skills these types of gates to make sure that it’s pulling a human in for the right review at the right time.

And that’s kind of how we’ve built our in-house solutions here at Anthropic as well, where the product team knows to reach out to us if certain things are triggered. But at the same time, there’s always a human in the loop before things ship, so we review it as well. 

Irene Liu: Yeah. And definitely what I often say, building guardrails and frameworks, while it seems like it’s a timely process, it actually helps speed things up instead of creating a bottleneck because- 

Mark Pike: Yeah

Irene Liu: it’s predictable, it’s repeatable, it’s consistent. And so, product teams, for example, know when to reach out to you because they’re familiar. 

But there’s an element of training probably that comes with that as well too. So, what percent of your time is also training folks on how to use these tools that you’ve built for them so that they can speed up their process?

Mark Pike: One way we help train our product clients is there’s a launch calendar that we use. There’s some internal tools that we encourage all of our product teams to use to send information out to cross-functional partners. Not just legal, but our safety team, our security team, and others. And the first time they create a launch calendar entry, there’s some, like, self-help milestone things that the tool itself trains them to do and encourages them to reach out to the right cross-functional partners at the right time.

That way, when they first join the company, they’re not overwhelmed with invites for coffee chats and, you know, we’ve had to grow really quickly as a company, and there’s just not enough time to do all that type of traditional onboarding. And so instead, the tool creates those touchpoints at the right time. And as product lawyers, we know how to coach our newer product managers on how to work well with us. 

The other thing that my team did was we went to an all-hands that the product team had. And usually when lawyers go speak at these large audiences and introduce themselves and talk about risk and talk about how we can help save the team from bad legal headlines and things like that, you know, it’s usually like a PowerPoint and kind of not very memorable.

What the Anthropic legal team did was we vibe coded a video game called Product Counsel Quest. And in the game, you are our mascot, the Claude Crab mascot. 

Irene Liu: Okay. 

Mark Pike: And you have to navigate to ship something. And you address product gaps. You jump over them as a first, as a side-scroller video game, and it was so memorable. All the same points were in there. We showed them that we knew how their product worked by using Claude Code to build a video game. And so, we earned their trust. We used some sense of humor, and it just sort of fits into my approach to these things where, like- 

Irene Liu: Yeah, it makes you relatable. 

Mark Pike: It’s relatable, it’s memorable- 

Irene Liu: Yeah

Mark Pike: And it’s human. It’s, like, showing up for your clients to let them know that we’re all in this together, and we’re trying to create great product experiences. And as lawyers, we see the value in them. In fact, a non-technical person can build a video game. So yeah. 

Irene Liu: Well, I love that because at our sales all-hands in the past when our commercial counsels presented, when I was a general counsel of a few tech companies, I had one company where our commercial counsel team was so creative, and they would sing these really fun Disney type songs and make it sales related.

Or they would make cartoons. We would literally build characters of cartoons of our executive team members- 

Mark Pike: Yeah 

Irene Liu: … and really showcase how what to do, not to do. But really made it fun and engaging so that the teams will listen and find us fun and that we’re easy to approach and that we’re fun to work with. And I think that level of trust, whether you build it through singing, cartoon, or video games, I think that’s something that’s really important to do to make sure that the business teams know that you are there for them and that you’re relatable, that you’re easy to approach.

Mark Pike: Yeah. I think all legal teams are fearful of being perceived as the department of no or a bottleneck. 

Irene Liu: Yeah. Yeah. 

Mark Pike: And so, any chance you can get to show them that- 

Irene Liu: Yeah 

Mark Pike: … you’re approachable- 

Irene Liu: Yeah 

Mark Pike: … that you are part of the team and have a shared goal is really useful. And if you can deploy some wit and humor 

Irene Liu: Yeah

Mark Pike: along the way, it just brings some humanity to the role that- 

Irene Liu: Yeah 

Mark Pike: I think is really effective. Yeah. 

Irene Liu: And the wit and humanity is so much easier to deploy now with AI because you can leverage it to help you to build so many different things, even lyrics to songs and … And so, I think it’s a different universe of what we can showcase to sales and business teams and product teams.

The other thing that’s interesting about product counseling, back in the past before GenAI, a lot of product counseling roles involved privacy and security. That was, like, two core elements that a lot of product counsels focused on in addition to other elements. But right now, in this age of GenAI, there’s so many other substantive elements that a product counsel needs at least some breadth on. So, at what point does a product counsel need to call in an expert? 

Mark Pike: Yeah. I’ve always encouraged my product counsel colleagues to, like, be deep enough on these things to be able to spot the issue and frame it, but humble enough to know when it’s someone else’s brief or territory. And again, this gets back to, like, our role as, as the miniature GC of this team is, like, helping synthesize that information- 

Irene Liu: Yeah

Mark Pike: And bring in the right consults at the right time. But you’re right, I, I think privacy and security have always been some of the areas where you would need to go deep on these things. But in the era of AI, there are more and more considerations here. 

Irene Liu: Yeah. 

Mark Pike: And so, I’m finding that I’m needing to call in consults from, as you mentioned, national security lawyers, AI governance specialists, our commercial team’s IP, you name it. We talked about miniature GC. I also feel like being a product lawyer is oftentimes this hub and spoke coverage. 

Irene Liu: Yeah. 

Mark Pike: And I feel like there’s more spokes than ever, but the role remains the same. You’re still the hub there, but you need to know how to pull in the right people, and you need to be adept and versatile enough to be able to understand, again, when to be humble and bring in- 

Irene Liu: Yeah

Mark Pike: others and and set them up for success. 

Irene Liu: Yeah. Do you find that the translation layer is a little bit easier with the increasing number of spokes because of the fact that you can probably do a cursory deep research of the issue beforehand to get educated before you pull in the expert?

Are you doing more leveraging of AI on substance before you pull in experts? 

Mark Pike: I definitely use AI as a tool to, to just get a little bit more steeped in the matters or like- 

Irene Liu: Yeah 

Mark Pike: … almost like a Socratic teacher about things. Again, at this point in my career, I know enough about what I don’t know- 

Irene Liu: Yeah

Mark Pike: Which is quite a lot. And so, I’m not shy about using AI to, to, like, tease things out and be like, “I, I think this is something. Can you help me understand- 

Irene Liu: Yeah 

Mark Pike: … the different types of, ways this might go, and help me understand the decision tree a bit more?” Which helps me then set it up for the consult or know the right questions to ask of my colleagues.

But I try not to over-rely on AI in that spot as well. But I do think there’s people probably in smaller teams who might not have the benefit of, of having a fully fleshed out legal department with all these- 

Irene Liu: Yeah 

Mark Pike: … types of specialists, and I do think it can be useful in identifying outside counsel and, again, prepping you to know the right questions to ask of outside counsel to skip ahead- 

Irene Liu: Yeah

Mark Pike: a little bit in the process. So yeah, I think it’s an empowering tool to help accelerate and and get to the right place. 

Irene Liu: Yeah. I’m sure law firms love your response because you’re saying, “Call them in.” And I think that’s right. 

Mark Pike: Yeah. 

Irene Liu: Call them in when the expertise is beyond your depth. 

Mark Pike: Oh, absolutely. 

Irene Liu: And there’s a lot of spokes where we really need their help. And so, law firm jobs are not going away. 

Mark Pike: No, I, I think this is gonna help with issue spotting more than ever and- 

Irene Liu: Yeah 

Mark Pike: … I think it also can, if used the right way, and hopefully in a collaborative way with outside counsel, just skip things ahead a little bit. So, I’m finding that one way I’ve done this is I will use AI to write the shape of the memo that I know I need to provide back to my executive team. I send it to outside counsel and say, “Look, this is the shape of things I want to go. Can you please comment on this and get it to a better place- 

Irene Liu: Yeah … 

Mark Pike: based on the subject matter expertise? But this is the style of guidance that I’m looking to create.”

And so, you know, in the before times, I would get back, it would be a couple days of back and forth with outside counsel resulting in a 10-page memo that I’d then have to do the step of distilling into one page. 

Irene Liu: Yeah. 

Mark Pike: Um, I think we can skip, skip over some of that maybe. Yeah. That’s the hope.

Irene Liu: Yeah. And I think the key is we all want just a one page at the end, especially if we’re, we’re in-house counsel. 

Mark Pike: Yeah, especially for the in-house lawyers. Yeah. 

Irene Liu: Yeah. Maybe others, but in-house lawyers, one page is the goal. Yeah. 

So, the other thing with product counsels, in addition to trying to build trust, I’m sure you need to have some technical credibility as well. Do you feel like that’s becoming ever more important? And what level of technical fluency is actually needed to get that trust and credibility within the organization as a product counsel? 

Mark Pike: Yeah, it’s extremely important. I don’t think that simply vibe coding or, like, using these tools without understanding what’s going on underneath them is gonna get you far enough.

So, if you are an AI product counsel or if you’re an AI lawyer, or you’re working on AI issues at all, like, understanding how LLMs work- understanding their limitations, understanding when they’re hallucinating, or that they might be acting as a probability machine in certain circumstances.

Understanding that they work at their best when you give them the same tools that lawyers use, and giving them access to those tools via things like the Claude Legal plugins or- leveraging MCPs and knowing what the model context protocol is, knowing what skills are- knowing what connectors are, and really understanding how all these things orchestrate and work together to, to help you with your work, and not simply using the tool just for outputs, but understanding- 

Irene Liu: Sure

Mark Pike: What those inputs are and where things are headed. I think it’s incredibly important. 

Irene Liu: How would a product counsel learn those things? 

Mark Pike: Yeah. 

Irene Liu: Like, some of the initial parts about, you know, h- what an LLM is, I think there’s plenty of materials on that. As AI is moving so fast and there are new products being developed, I mean, MCP skills and all of the different plugins, like, these are relatively newer technologies that have evolved.

Yeah, sure. So how do you actually learn those different types of technical skills when the technology is moving so fast? 

Mark Pike: I think the best way to learn is by doing. So, use them. The tools are actually great at teaching you about how they work. 

Irene Liu: That’s true. Yeah … 

Mark Pike: I would also say you’re listening to this podcast right now.

You’re watching this clip- 

Irene Liu: Yeah 

Mark Pike: … on, on YouTube or something. There’s so many great resources. Yeah. There’s more resources than I know what to do with out there. That’s true. 

Irene Liu: Yeah … 

Mark Pike: So, yeah, just keep listening, learning from others, attending webinars. We’ve got some great ones about Claude for lawyers that we’ve put out.

But I think you learn by doing, and we’ve talked a little bit about some of the fun projects I’ve done along the way. I learn about how the technology works by doing some of these silly things. 

Irene Liu: Yeah. 

Mark Pike: Building gadgets. 

Irene Liu: Can you talk about those, Mark? Yeah, ’cause you’ve built- 

Mark Pike: Yeah 

Irene Liu: … a lot of fun, silly things. And that- 

Mark Pike: Yeah 

Irene Liu: … really shows your technical prowess and your wit. 

Mark Pike: So, each of these projects, I’ll name a few of them, but each of these projects have been me exploring how our product works, because I’ve been counseling the, the underlying technology. And if I wanna learn how Claude Code works, the best way to do it is to use Claude Code and maybe build something I can share back to the team to show them, “Hey, I was trying to do some issue spotting and here’s a website I built,” or, “Here’s a video game I built about product counseling by leveraging the technology.”

So, when I started my career in Silicon Valley in 2010 at Facebook, Facebook did a bunch of hackathons. And whenever we did hackathons, I’d always have to recruit an engineer, and I, it’s a bit like Huck Finn or Tom Sawyer with the white picket fence, trying to convince them that it was a fun idea and like, “Let’s all do this together.”

I am empowered to use the technology myself to, to bring some of my ideas to life. So, I built a, a, a sticker printer that’s my kid’s toy. I built an MCP to talk to my kid’s sticker printer, and I can tell Claude, “Write me a haiku about the foggy San Francisco weather.” And it’ll print out that. I then use an MCP so that it could print graphics as well. So, imagine an image of a fish, and it’ll print a fish. And then something new would get developed by our team, and I’d come up with a new fun idea and and try to build it. So, yeah. 

Irene Liu: One of the things I saw you recently built that you posted on LinkedIn was you were recently recognized and awarded as one of the top 50 Financial Times AI Legal Leaders. Congratulations. 

Mark Pike: Thank you. 

Irene Liu: And I love that you recognize the team that really helped you get to where you are with all of the work that you’ve been doing, and you built these certificates using AI. 

Mark Pike: Yeah. I did. 

Irene Liu: Can you talk about that? That was really fun. 

Mark Pike: Yeah. It was an honor to be recognized. 

Irene Liu: Yeah. 

Mark Pike: And I really wanted to use it as an opportunity to shine a light on all the amazing people I work with here at Anthropic and all the innovative stuff that they’re building, that I’m- 

Irene Liu: Yeah … 

Mark Pike: often just remixing so that it works well for lawyers. And I was trying to think of, like a, a fun gift to give them- 

Irene Liu: Yeah 

Mark Pike: … and I was like, “A gavel or a- 

Irene Liu: Wine 

Mark Pike: … a fountain pen. I don’t know. 

Irene Liu: Yeah. 

Mark Pike: Something stereotypically legal. 

Irene Liu: Yeah. 

Mark Pike: And I wanted it to be a gadget, because I like making gadgets. And so, an E Ink display is what I landed on, and it displays a diploma that’s like, ” You hereby are recognized for working on Claude for Legal.” But then there’s five other screens that do other fun stuff. And so, I used Claude Code to build that. 

I have actually, I’m currently in the building where a lot of our engineers sit, and, uh, I’ve got their gift bag with their, I’ve gotta go deliver it to their desks in a little bit. 

Irene Liu: Oh, that’s so nice. 

Mark Pike: Um, it’s just one of these E Ink gadgets. 

Irene Liu: Yeah. 

Mark Pike: And some of the other screens connect via MCP to show you- 

Irene Liu: Yeah 

Mark Pike: … your calendar for the day. Another one shows you what birds have been spotted nearby by using the iNaturalist API. 

Irene Liu: I love that. That’s so fun. 

Mark Pike: So, it’s just, like, a fun interactive thing to- 

Irene Liu: Yeah 

Mark Pike: … sit on your desk. And I think it’s like a nice little totem to, like, symbolize, like, that, that lawyers can build fun stuff- 

Irene Liu: Yeah 

Mark Pike: … and that it’s dynamic, and it’s- 

Irene Liu: Yeah 

Mark Pike: … ever evolving. 

Irene Liu: Yeah. 

Mark Pike: It’s also open source, so if anybody else is watching this and wants to build things, check out my GitHub folder. Yeah. 

Irene Liu: That’s so fun. Well, the thing about doing that is you’re really showing gratitude, and a lot of good managers do that. Good managers recognize their team. Good managers show gratitude. And they may exemplify that in different ways, but really, good management is ever more critical in this age of gen AI when things are moving so fast.

And one of the things that we talked about is that delegating to AI sometimes can look like managing a person. And so, in that context, what management skills are actually transferable to working with agents? Are you showing gratitude to agents? 

Mark Pike: I definitely thank Claude and express gratitude on a, on a regular basis. Every now and then I, I get a little frustrated with Claude- Yeah … as well, which apparently is not the, the best way to treat AI. But I do try to express gratitude.

And I think you’re spot on that being a good manager and having good management skills is such an effective way of getting the most out of AI. Contact setting, so starting things off, providing your AI tools with all the information that it needs to do a good job and understand what your objectives and goals are. 

Scoping asks, you know, review this NDA against our standard positions beats help with this contract. Like, you, the same way that you would want to provide a, maybe a first-year associate or someone on your team, you, you really need to scope the request appropriately. Reviewing work product, so keeping a human in the loop. You don’t just rubber stamp everything. And then creating feedback loops, like providing fair critiques, not just repeating the ask, but like steering it in the right direction and creating that recursive loop of, of how to improve. These are all things that resemble management skills Delegation, and then, yeah, I think gratitude at the same time so that you get that positive reinforcement, you get those better results. 

Irene Liu: And do you get better results with showing gratitude to AI? There’s been research saying that if you do say things politely or mention the thank yous, you might be able to get better results. Have you found that to be true? 

Mark Pike: Anecdotally, yes. I think there’s also some research showing that, and I know it’s something that’s of interest to our research team as well. And yeah, you don’t wanna spook the AI or, like, cursing is probably not a, a great habit. It, it also can probably seep out beyond just the interactions with AI. So, it’s, it’s just not a good habit to fall into. Yeah. 

Irene Liu: So be a good human and a good manager with your AI. 

Mark Pike: I think that’s a good rule of thumb. Yeah. Like, just be a good person overall. Yeah, that’s just, like, a good rule of thumb in the game of life. Yeah. 

Irene Liu: Yeah. Definitely. You know, obviously there’s a lot of questions about will there be lawyers? Will there be enough work? And some have suggested that as AI lowers the cost of certain legal tasks, companies may identify more issues, pursue more transactions, and ask for more legal analysis, creating more demand. There’s some people thinking that it might create less demand. 

So, what do you expect? Do you expect AI to reduce the amount of work, or will it expand the universe of work? It sounds like there’s a lot more spokes now, but what’s your take on this? 

Mark Pike: I do think that cheaper legal work should mean more legal work. So, if AI is pushing down the, the cost frontiers a bit here, it should create more opportunity, and I think a lot of the numbers are already showing that.

There’s also some historical parallels here. You brought up Jevons paradox, and I think the example people often bring up here is accountants and consultants being fearful that personal computers and the advent of the spreadsheet in the ’80s and ’90s would’ve led to a reduction in the need for CPAs. But instead, there was kind of an explosion and need for more professional services and more judgment.

The other thing I’d call out here is so many people with unmet demands for, for help in, in legal services, and so the access to justice angle here is very important for those of us- 

Irene Liu: Yeah 

Mark Pike: … that have worked on Claude for Legal. I’ve really appreciated hearing from the community here on the need for more of these types of tools to help people understand their rights.

Something like 80% of people are in, I believe it’s in, in civil matters are showing up without lawyers, and I, I just feel like there’s a, a huge opportunity here for the legal profession to expand who is able to receive the best legal advice. So, that’s, that’s my hope, and that’s what I think the numbers are starting to show.

Irene Liu: Hmm. So hopefully there’s more work in the end, and we’ll definitely be leveraging Claude for Legal. But what is the next iteration for Claude for Legal for you? 

Mark Pike: Yeah, so when we first shipped a legal plugin in February, there was sort of a, a one-size-fits-all, like, legal. When we launched in May, we had 12 personas with different plugins and connectors to the right tools for different types of lawyers. A product lawyer. 

Irene Liu: Yeah. 

Mark Pike: A corporate lawyer. Even, like, a law student plugin that helped people prepare for their coursework. If the question is what comes next, I think we will continue to flesh those out and introduce more plugins for different types of legal work. I’m hoping that people continue to build on this platform and the open ecosystem we’re creating so that Claude keeps getting better at doing legal work by having the right tools.

I think the model’s gonna just keep improving. We’ve, we’ve seen that happen at a steady pace, and that means it should be better at doing legal work. And so, there’s gonna be a lot more tools that get developed that Claude can leverage to help you get the, the most out of it. Yeah. 

Irene Liu: Wonderful. Well, we’re looking forward to that next iteration because so many of us are using Claude for Legal. So, thanks for helping to develop that and for talking about your product counseling role with us today. Really appreciate it. 

Mark Pike: Thanks so much for having me. Appreciate it.

Irene Liu: Huge thanks to Mark Pike for joining us. Having seen Mark in action since his time at Slack, it has been remarkable to see him leverage his product counsel background to keep innovating. And as you heard, he’s not simply advising on how AI products are built, he’s constantly experimenting, learning, and rethinking what it means to be a product lawyer in the agentic era.

And if you missed Mark’s Claude for Legal presentation at Stanford, please check it out on Stanford Law’s AI Initiative YouTube channel. And thank you for tuning in to AI Sidebar. If today’s episode gave you a new perspective, please follow the podcast, share it with a colleague or a friend, and leave us a rating. A five-star rating obviously helps more listeners discover the show. We’ll be back in two weeks. Until then, stay curious and keep learning