Setting up your Claude Team account

You bought a Claude Team plan. Now what? This guide walks you through the configuration that actually matters, in the order you should do it. No technical background required. Plan on about an hour for a clean first-time setup, plus a few minutes per person for installing the apps.

A note before we start: the person doing the setup should be the Primary Owner or an Owner of the account. The Primary Owner is usually the person who signed up and entered the credit card. If that's not you, find that person before going further. Many of these settings can only be changed by an Owner.

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Part 1: Confirm your foundation

Step 1.1: Make sure you are in your Team account, not your personal account

If you used Claude before signing up for Team, you may have a personal Free, Pro, or Max account on the same email. These are separate accounts with separate data.

1. Go to claude.ai and sign in
2. Look at the bottom-left corner of the screen. Click your initials or name
3. You should see your Team organization listed. Select it
4. Confirm the top of the screen shows your firm name, not just your personal name

Why this matters: Your personal account and your Team account do not share data. Anything in your personal account is governed by Anthropic's Consumer Terms, which have different privacy treatment than Team. For client work, you want to be in the Team account every time.

Step 1.2: Find your Organization Settings

This is the control panel for everything that follows.

1. Click your initials or firm name in the bottom-left corner
2. Select Settings
3. Look for Organization settings in the left sidebar

If you don't see Organization settings, you are not signed in as an Owner or Admin. Stop and get the Primary Owner involved before going further.

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Part 2: Privacy and confidentiality (do this first)

This is the most important section for a law firm. Your duty of confidentiality under ABA Model Rule 1.6 and your state's equivalent does not pause because you are using AI. Get this right before anyone touches a client matter.

Step 2.1: Understand which agreement governs your account

On Claude Team, your firm's account is a Work account governed by the agreement Anthropic has with your organization, not the Consumer Terms that apply to Free, Pro, and Max accounts. That distinction is the central reason to be on Team for client work.

The operational rule for your team is simple: client work belongs in the firm's Team account, not in anyone's personal Claude account. A junior associate using their personal Pro account on the side has a different privacy posture, different terms, and a different retention treatment than the firm's Team workspace. Make this part of your day-one orientation.

Step 2.2: Understand admin visibility before users do

Claude Team is a firm-managed work account. The firm, not the individual user, is the customer.

What this means in practice: the Primary Owner of your organization may be able to request data exports that include conversations, uploaded files, and usage information. Owners can also see usage analytics at the user level. Anyone you invite should understand this before their first chat.

This matters for several real-world situations: lateral partner movement, internal investigations, malpractice claims, partner disputes, employment matters. If you would not write something in firm email, do not type it into Claude in the firm's Team workspace.

For genuinely personal questions ("help me draft a wedding toast"), users should be in their own personal Claude account, not the firm account. Make that boundary explicit.

Step 2.3: Set sensible data minimization rules

Configuration alone will not protect you. Before anyone uses Claude on real matters, document and circulate firm rules. A workable starting set:

• Minimize regulated identifiers. Do not include Social Security numbers, financial account numbers, medical record identifiers, or other regulated data unless it is necessary for the task, permitted by the firm's privacy posture and applicable client agreements, and minimized or redacted to the smallest amount needed. Sometimes employment, tax, PI, med-mal, immigration, or financial work genuinely needs these. Sometimes a redacted version is enough. Make the question conscious, not automatic.
• Be careful about pairing identity with strategy. Do not place client names alongside candid case strategy in projects that are public, organization-wide, or shared more broadly than the matter team.
• Treat Claude inputs like vendor inputs. Anything copied into Claude should be considered the same as anything sent to an outside vendor: subject to your engagement letter, your privacy policy, and your AI use disclosure. Confirm whether your engagement letters and outside counsel guidelines permit AI assistance, and update them if not.

Step 2.4: Manage retention thoughtfully

By default, your conversations are retained while you keep them. You can delete chats individually, and deleted chats stop being available after about 30 days.

For law firms, consider these practices:

• Delete chats containing client confidences once the work product is finalized, consistent with the firm's document retention policy and any litigation hold or audit obligations. Some firms want a record of AI-assisted work; some do not. Decide before rollout, not case by case.
• Use Incognito Conversations for one-off sensitive questions you do not need to keep. To start one: click New chat, then look for the Incognito toggle. These chats are not saved and are not used for memory features.

A note on custom retention windows: Anthropic offers configurable retention periods, but that feature is currently part of Enterprise plans. On Team, you are working with the standard retention model plus the user-controlled delete behavior described above.

Step 2.5: Note on PHI and HIPAA

Several practice areas routinely handle protected health information: workers' compensation, personal injury, med-mal, social security disability, healthcare regulatory work, and parts of employment, family law, and elder law.

Do not assume Claude Team is the right vehicle for PHI-heavy work without confirming the contractual posture. Anthropic offers HIPAA-readiness and a Business Associate Agreement (BAA) through sales-assisted Enterprise arrangements. If your work creates a meaningful possibility of PHI ending up in Claude, talk to Anthropic Sales about whether you need an Enterprise plan with a BAA, or whether you should keep PHI out of Claude entirely and use it only for non-PHI tasks.

This is exactly the kind of question to take to firm counsel and Anthropic together, not to figure out as you go.

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Part 3: Three firm decisions before you invite users

Before you bring people into the workspace, write down where the firm lands on three things. Doing this in advance saves you a hundred small arguments later.

1. What data may go into Claude? Be specific. Are pleadings allowed? Discovery? Medical records? Privileged communications? Trust account information? Document this as a one-page firm policy, not a verbal understanding.
2. Who may create matter projects? Your two practical options are: anyone may create projects, or only lead attorneys and a designated admin may create them. The latter is slower but produces cleaner project hygiene. Pick one and tell the team.
3. What must be verified before Claude output leaves the firm? Adopt a written verification protocol covering citations, statutes, procedural rules, calculations, deadlines, factual assertions, and quotations. Part 8 of this guide gives you a starting protocol you can adapt. This is non-negotiable; courts have already sanctioned attorneys for unverified AI output.

Get these three answers in writing, signed off by the partner group, before you send a single invitation.

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Part 4: Invite your team

Step 4.1: Set your allowed email domains

Claude needs to know which email addresses belong to your firm.

1. Go to Organization settings
2. Click Organization and access (or similar; the label may vary)
3. Find Allowed email domains
4. Add your firm domain (for example, smithlawllp.com)

You can add more than one domain if your firm uses multiple. Public domains like @gmail.com or @yahoo.com cannot be the primary domain, but you can add them as permitted secondary domains if a contractor needs access.

Step 4.2: Decide how people join

You have three options:

For most small firms, manual invite is the right choice. You see who is asking, you assign their seat type, and you have a paper trail.

Step 4.3: Run a test before firm-wide rollout

Before you invite everyone, invite one attorney and one staff member as a pilot pair. Have them complete the full setup: log in, install the desktop app, install one Office add-in, create a test project, ask Claude a real-but-non-sensitive question. Get their feedback before you scale up.

This catches the obvious problems (for example, Office add-ins that won't install in your Microsoft 365 environment) before you have to debug them across the entire firm.

Step 4.4: Add members

1. Go to Organization settings > Members
2. Click Add member
3. Enter the person's email address
4. Select the seat type (covered next)
5. Click Send invite

To add several at once, click Bulk add and paste a list of emails separated by commas or new lines.

A note on seats: when you send an invite, the seat is occupied immediately. The person does not have to accept for the seat to count against your total. If you change your mind on an invite, cancel the pending invitation in the Members panel to free the seat.

Step 4.5: Choose Standard or Premium seats

Team plans offer two seat types:

• Standard seats give about 1.25 times the usage of a personal Pro account per session. Good for occasional users: paralegals, support staff, partners who use Claude a few hours a week.
• Premium seats give about 6.25 times the usage and include an additional weekly limit specific to Sonnet models. Designed for power users who run Claude all day.

Recommendation for a small firm: start everyone on Standard. Upgrade individuals to Premium only when you see them hitting limits regularly. You can mix and match within one organization.

If a user regularly hits limits but does not need a permanent Premium seat, check whether extra usage is available for your plan before restructuring seats. Team plans support purchasing extra usage so members can keep working past their included limits without a seat-type change.

Step 4.6: Assign roles

Claude has a hierarchy of roles. You will see options like:

• Primary Owner: only one per org. Manages billing and the most sensitive settings. Can be a real person or a firm-controlled service account.
• Owner: same access as Primary Owner except cannot transfer ownership.
• Admin: manages members and settings, but not billing.
• Member: uses Claude, creates projects, no admin access.

Recommendation for a small firm: the managing partner is often Primary Owner, but a firm-controlled operations leader or a service account (something like claude-admin@firmname.com) can also be a sensible Primary Owner. The advantage of a service account is continuity; the account does not depart with a partner. Whichever you pick, make sure at least one other trusted person has Owner-level access for day-to-day redundancy, and document how the firm would transfer Primary Ownership if needed (death, departure, dispute). A Team or Enterprise org has only one Primary Owner at a time, so transfer mechanics are worth thinking through before you need them.

One operations or IT person should be Admin. Everyone else is a Member. Resist the urge to make everyone an Admin. The fewer people who can change firm-wide settings, the cleaner your governance story is when a client asks how you control AI.

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Part 5: Configure your settings

Two tabs in Organization settings do most of the work here:

• Capabilities: what Claude can do (web search, code execution, Cowork, connectors)
• Data and Privacy: how data flows in and out of your account (public projects, user feedback, location metadata, data exports)

Walk through both. The order below groups by tab.

Capabilities tab

Step 5.1: Turn web search on (and confirm your team can see it)

Web search is what lets Claude find current statutes, recent rulings, and updated rules rather than relying on stale training data. For a law firm, this is essential.

There is a known wrinkle: at many firms, users cannot see the web search option in their chats until an Owner has enabled it at the organization level. If your associates report they can't find a "Web search" toggle in the chat input, this is almost always the cause.

To confirm or enable:

1. Go to Organization settings > Capabilities
2. Find the Web search toggle
3. Switch it ON
4. Tell users they also need to toggle web search on in their individual chat: click the slider icon at the lower-left of the chat input and enable it there

Web search also enables image results in Claude's responses; no separate setting needed.

Step 5.2: Decide on Artifacts, Code Execution, and File Creation

In the same Capabilities panel, you will see one or more related settings, often labeled some combination of Artifacts, Analysis, Code Execution, and File Creation. Exact labels vary by account state. The goal is the same across all of them: enable Claude to work with uploaded files, run small calculations, and generate downloadable documents (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF) where available.

For a law firm, turn these on. They are the difference between Claude saying "here is the structure of a motion" and Claude handing you a formatted .docx draft to edit. They are also what lets Claude work numerically with damages tables, settlement calculations, or attorneys' fees.

The output runs in a sandboxed environment. Claude does not get persistent access to your computer through these features.

Step 5.3: Cowork and connectors

Claude Cowork is the agentic feature that lets Claude take multi-step actions on your computer and inside connected apps. It is powerful and it is also higher risk.

For a small law firm, my recommendation is:

• Cowork: leave OFF for now. Turn it on only after a controlled pilot with one or two attorneys and a clear governance posture. On Team plans, Cowork is all-or-nothing across the organization, so once you flip it on, every member has access.
• Connectors: review what is offered in Capabilities. Common options include Google Drive, Gmail, Google Calendar, OneDrive, SharePoint, and Slack. For each, ask: do we actively use this, and are we comfortable with Claude reading data on behalf of any team member who connects it?

A reasonable starting posture for most small firms is to enable Google Drive or OneDrive only, leave the rest disabled, and add connectors as concrete needs come up.

Step 5.4: Set organization instructions

Organization instructions are a system message that Claude sees at the start of every conversation in your account. This is one of the highest-impact settings most firms skip.

Find it under Organization settings > Organization instructions (sometimes labeled Organization preferences).

A workable starter set for a small law firm:

You are working for [Firm Name], a [practice area] law firm. Treat all uploaded documents and conversation content as confidential client information. When asked legal questions, default to citing primary sources (statutes, cases, court rules) rather than secondary commentary. When generating drafts, flag any sentence where you are guessing rather than working from cited authority. Use Bluebook citation format unless the user specifies otherwise. Do not produce content that constitutes legal advice to a client; produce work product that an attorney will review and adopt.

Edit to your firm's voice and practice. The point is to set a baseline so every chat starts from the same posture.

Data and Privacy tab

Step 5.5: Disable public projects

Go to Organization settings > Data and privacy and find Public projects.

A public project is one that can be shared organization-wide inside your Claude Team account. (The label is a little confusing; "public" here means firm-wide, not internet-public.) Recommendation: turn this off. When you do, existing public projects convert to private, and users cannot create new organization-wide projects. They can still share private projects with specific colleagues by email, so internal collaboration still works.

You can re-enable public projects later if your team gets comfortable with the boundary. You can also create a single firm-managed public project for things like style guides, citation conventions, or template prompts, and keep everything else invite-only.

Step 5.6: Manage user feedback settings

Also under Data and privacy, look for the setting that controls rating Claude responses (sometimes called "Rate chats" or user feedback). When this is on, the thumbs-up and thumbs-down buttons in the chat send user feedback to Anthropic, which can include the conversation content for the rated message.

For a law firm, this creates a real risk: an associate frustrated with a draft about a real client matter clicks thumbs-down and sends that conversation to Anthropic as feedback, possibly without thinking.

Two reasonable postures:

• Off for most small firms. You lose the ability to give Anthropic feedback, but you eliminate a quiet path for client content to leave the firm.
• On with training. If you want users to be able to flag issues, train them clearly: feedback should describe the issue in general terms without revealing client confidences. ("This response invented a citation" is fine. "This response invented a citation about Smith v. Jones, our client Acme Corp's matter" is not.)

Pick one and document it.

Step 5.7: Review other Data and Privacy toggles

While you are in the Data and Privacy tab, scan the other settings. Common toggles you may see (exact labels vary by account state):

• Location metadata: whether Claude uses coarse location to tailor responses. Many firms turn this off.
• Share chats: whether users can share chats with colleagues, and separately whether they can share chats that have used connectors.
• Export Data: the button Owners use to export organizational conversations and files. You don't change a setting here; just know where it lives.

Take a screenshot of your final settings for your AI governance file.

Step 5.8: Find your usage analytics

Owners and Primary Owners should locate whatever Usage or Analytics view is available in their account. Availability and the level of detail may vary by plan and account state, so confirm what you actually see.

1. Go to Organization settings
2. Look for Usage or Analytics in the sidebar
3. Bookmark whatever you find

Where available, this view typically shows active users, who is using which seat type, and rough usage levels. You will use whatever it provides for the 30-day review in Part 9.

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Part 6: Install the apps your team will actually use

Most attorneys end up using Claude in three places: a browser, the desktop app, and inside Microsoft Office. Walk your team through this once and they will not have to think about it again.

Step 6.1: The desktop app

The browser version of Claude works fine, but the desktop app is meaningfully better for daily use. It is faster, sits in your dock or system tray for quick access, and is required if you ever decide to enable Cowork.

1. Go to claude.com/download
2. Choose Mac or Windows
3. Install like any other app
4. Sign in with your firm email address
5. If prompted, select your Team organization (not a personal account)

Each member of your firm should do this on their work computer.

Step 6.2: The mobile app

For partners who want to think out loud during a commute, or paralegals checking something between hearings, the mobile app is genuinely useful.

1. On iPhone or iPad, go to the App Store; on Android, go to the Play Store
2. Search for Claude by Anthropic
3. Install and sign in with your firm email
4. Confirm you are in your Team organization, not a personal account

A reminder for your team: voice mode and dictation can capture more than people intend. Treat the mobile app the same way you would treat any device that records, especially around clients and opposing counsel.

Step 6.3: The Microsoft Office add-ins (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook)

This is where Claude becomes part of your daily document workflow rather than a separate browser tab. As of mid-2026, Anthropic offers add-ins for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, with Outlook available or rolling out in beta depending on your account and Microsoft 365 tenant. All are intended to be available with Team and Enterprise plans at no extra cost.

An important honesty caveat: availability and behavior of these add-ins can vary depending on your Microsoft 365 tenant, your individual Microsoft account type, your IT admin's add-in policies, and which specific app version you are running. Some firms find the add-ins install in five minutes; others discover their Microsoft 365 admin has restricted Office Store add-ins and a custom deployment is required. Install them on one test machine first (this is what your pilot pair from Step 4.3 is for) and confirm what works in your environment before training the firm.

The simplest install path, for individual users:

1. Open Word, Excel, or PowerPoint
2. Go to the Home ribbon, find Add-ins, then Get Add-ins
3. Search for Claude
4. Install the official Anthropic add-in
5. Look for the Claude pane that opens on the side of your document
6. Sign in with your firm Claude account

Repeat for each Office app.

If individual install does not work (the add-in does not appear, or sign-in fails), your firm likely has a managed Microsoft 365 environment. Your IT admin or Microsoft 365 admin can deploy the add-in centrally through the Microsoft 365 Admin Center under Settings > Integrated apps. This is a brief task for someone who manages your Microsoft tenant.

What this can get you in practice (subject to current product behavior):

• In Word, Claude can help draft and revise inside the document. Depending on the version, edits may appear in a way that integrates with tracked-change workflows; confirm in your environment.
• In Excel, Claude can analyze a spreadsheet and explain or build formulas, with the ability to point you at referenced cells.
• In PowerPoint, Claude can help build slides from source material in other documents.
• Across the suite, the add-ins are designed to share context so you can reference a Word document while working in PowerPoint without copy and paste.

For a litigation practice, the practical payoff is moving between deposition summary, exhibit table, and argument outline without leaving your usual tools.

Step 6.4: Optional, the Chrome extension

Anthropic offers Claude in Chrome, a browser extension that lets Claude read and act on the page you are looking at. For attorneys, this can help with summarizing long opinions on Westlaw or Lexis, or pulling key terms from a court's online docket.

For a small firm, this is optional. The org-level toggle is in Organization settings > Claude in Chrome (or under Capabilities, depending on your account state). Like Cowork, the agentic browser tool has a non-trivial risk surface, so review it carefully before enabling firm-wide.

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Part 7: Build your starter projects

Projects are the single most useful feature for a law firm on Team. Each project is a self-contained workspace with its own knowledge base, custom instructions, and chat history. Think of them as matter folders or practice area folders.

Step 7.1: Create your first project

1. Go to claude.ai/projects or click Projects in the left sidebar
2. Click + New project
3. Give it a clear name and description
4. Set visibility to private by default, then add specific people as needed
5. Add your knowledge base: documents, templates, prior work product
6. Add custom instructions specific to that project's purpose

Step 7.2: Suggested starter projects for a small firm

These four projects will cover most of what a small firm needs:

1. Firm Style and Templates: can be shared organization-wide if you wish (where public projects are enabled). Houses engagement letter templates, citation conventions, brief formatting standards, and the firm style guide. Custom instructions: "When asked to draft, follow the firm style guide in this knowledge base. Use the templates as starting points."
2. Practice Area Reference (per area): one project per practice area. Knowledge base: governing statutes, key cases you cite often, common motions, jurisdiction-specific rules. Custom instructions: "Answer questions about [practice area] using the materials in this knowledge base as the authoritative source. If the answer is not in the knowledge base, say so."
3. Client Intake Helper: private. Knowledge base: your intake form, conflict-check procedure, fee schedule, sample conflict waivers. Useful for paralegals processing new client inquiries.
4. Matter-Specific Project: one per active matter, private, shared only with the attorneys and staff working it. This is where deposition transcripts, pleadings, and discovery responses go. Archive when the matter closes, in line with your firm's retention rules.

Step 7.3: Sharing inside a project

When you share a project with another team member:

• Can use: they can chat with the project and see the knowledge base, but cannot edit instructions or add documents
• Can edit: they can modify everything

For client matters, "Can use" is the right default for everyone except the lead attorney. For templates and reference projects, "Can edit" is fine for partners.

Important: chats inside a shared project are still private to the person who created them, unless that person explicitly shares the chat. Two associates can each work the same matter project without seeing each other's draft questions to Claude.

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Part 8: Verification protocol before anyone uses Claude on live matters

This is the bridge between "we installed Claude" and "we can safely use Claude." Configuration sets the rails. Verification keeps the firm out of trouble.

The minimum rule

Claude output is never final legal work product. Before any AI-assisted material is filed with a court, sent to a client, served on opposing counsel, or shared with a third party, an attorney must independently verify it. The duty of competence (ABA Model Rule 1.1) and the duty of candor (Rule 3.3) belong to the lawyer, not to the tool.

Adopt this verbatim or in your own words. Get it signed by the partner group and circulate it to every user.

The minimum checklist

Every AI-assisted deliverable goes through this before it leaves the firm:

1. Citations: confirm every case, statute, regulation, and rule against the primary authority. AI tools have invented citations, and courts have sanctioned attorneys who relied on them.
2. Quotations: verify any quoted language against the original source.
3. Procedural rules and deadlines: confirm in the relevant jurisdiction's current rules. Federal, state, and local rules differ; rules change.
4. Calculations: independently recompute damages, dates, deadlines, interest, fee totals, and any other math.
5. Factual assertions: confirm any factual claim against the source documents.
6. Privilege and confidentiality: confirm nothing client-confidential or privileged appears in a place it should not.

Labeling and audit trail

Until an attorney has reviewed AI-assisted work product, label it as draft. A simple convention: every Claude-generated document starts with a header like "DRAFT, AI-assisted, attorney review required" and that header gets removed only when an attorney has signed off.

Decide whether your firm wants to keep an internal record of AI-assisted work for audit, training, or risk purposes. Both answers are defensible; the wrong answer is "we never thought about it."

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Part 9: Roll out to your team

Step 9.1: A 30-minute orientation for every new user

Cover five things:

1. How to log in and find their Team account (not their personal one)
2. Confidentiality and admin visibility rules from Part 2
3. The verification protocol from Part 8 (this is non-optional)
4. How to use a project rather than starting fresh chats every time
5. How to give feedback to the firm (not Anthropic) when Claude is wrong, so the firm can decide whether to refine instructions, change projects, or escalate

Step 9.2: Designate an internal champion

Pick one person, ideally not a senior partner, who is the go-to for "how do I do X with Claude" questions. This person does not need to be technical. They need to be curious and willing to experiment. They will save you a remarkable amount of time as the firm scales up.

Step 9.3: Schedule a 30-day review using your usage analytics

Put a recurring 30-day check on your calendar. Open the usage analytics dashboard you bookmarked in Step 5.8 and review:

• Active vs. inactive seats. Reassign Premium seats from low users to power users. Cancel or reassign seats that are not being used at all.
• Project hygiene. Are projects being created without instructions or knowledge bases? Coach those users.
• Confidentiality fidelity. If the firm decides to review usage data or exports for governance reasons, do so under a written internal policy, for a defined reason, and with appropriate partner or ethics oversight. The point is not to surveil lawyers; it is to confirm that firm confidentiality rules are being followed and to catch problems before they become incidents.
• Reusable patterns. When two or more attorneys have built similar templates or prompts independently, promote them to firm-level projects.

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Quick reference: where things live

Where to get help

• Claude Help Center: support.claude.com
• Claude Status: status.claude.com (when something seems broken)
• Anthropic Trust Center: for compliance and security documentation you can share with risk committees
• Anthropic Sales: for HIPAA-readiness and BAA discussions, or if your firm is approaching the Team plan's 150-seat cap

If your firm needs single sign-on through Okta or Microsoft Entra, custom data retention windows, audit logs through a Compliance API, or a BAA, Team is not enough. Contact Anthropic Sales about an Enterprise plan.

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Configuration is one piece of responsible AI use in a law firm. The bigger piece is judgment: deciding what to put into Claude, how to verify what comes out, and how to disclose AI use to clients. The setup above gives you the guardrails. The verification protocol in Part 8 keeps you out of trouble. The rest is on you and your team.