Every law firm owner has “write SOPs” on a list somewhere, and it has been there for years. The reason is not laziness. It is that the only person who can write the intake SOP is the person running intake, and that person is busy running intake. Asking them to spend eight hours writing a document is asking them to stop doing the job you need done.
AI removes the writing step entirely, which changes the economics of the whole project.
The method
Record the person doing the task while they narrate. A screen recording with audio, or just their phone if the work is physical. They talk through what they are doing and why as they do it. This takes exactly as long as the task takes, because it is the task.
Transcribe the recording. Any of the tools in AI transcription for lawyers handles this.
Feed the transcript to AI and ask for a numbered standard operating procedure: prerequisites, numbered steps, decision points with what to do in each case, and common exceptions.
Then hand the draft back to the person and ask them to correct it.
That last step is the one that makes this work. You have converted “write a document” into “fix a document,” and those are completely different requests. People who will never author an SOP will happily spend 20 minutes fixing one that is 80 percent right, because the blank page is the actual obstacle.
Why the narration matters more than the recording
The instruction to give your expert is to explain why, not just what. “I check the mileage against the purchase date here” is a step. “I check the mileage against the purchase date here because if it is over the threshold the warranty claim changes and we route it differently” is a procedure someone else can actually follow.
The why is what turns a checklist into training. It is also the part that lives only in the expert’s head and disappears when they leave, which is the real reason to do this at all.
What to document first
Go where the pain is, which is almost always one of these.
Intake, because it is the highest-volume repeated process in the firm and variation there costs signed cases directly.
Anything only one person knows how to do. That is not an SOP project, that is a business continuity project, and it should jump the queue. If one person being sick stops a workflow, document it this month.
Whatever generates the most questions to a manager. Every recurring question is an undocumented procedure announcing itself.
New hire onboarding for the role you hire most.
Skip anything that changes every time or happens twice a year. Documenting rare work is how SOP projects die: enormous effort, no daily payoff, everyone concludes the project was pointless.
Making them findable
A written SOP nobody reads is the same as no SOP, and the failure is almost always retrieval rather than content. Staff will not go find and read a nine-page document while a client is on hold.
Load the finished SOPs into a shared Claude Project so people can ask “what do I do when a client’s warranty expired last month” and get the answer from your own procedures, in a sentence. That is a different experience than searching a drive, and it is the difference between SOPs that get used and SOPs that get written.
Keep the source documents somewhere your team already opens. Do not introduce a new system for this.
The honest limits
The output is only as good as the recording. If your expert skips the exception they handle automatically without thinking, it will not be in the SOP, and it will not be in the SOP a year later when someone hits that exception and improvises.
SOPs go stale, quietly and fast, especially after a software change. An SOP describing a screen that no longer exists actively damages trust in the whole library, because the person who hits it stops believing any of them.
And documenting a bad process just makes the bad process official. If the recording reveals seven manual steps that a Zapier automation could handle, fix the process first, then document the fixed version.
Do this today
Pick the one task where a single person is the only one who knows how it works. Ask them to record themselves doing it once, narrating as they go.
That recording is the whole input. Run it through transcription and AI drafting, send the result back to them for corrections, and you will have your first real SOP by end of day, on the process where losing that person would hurt most.