A Legal Connector That Gets Out of the AI's Way.
DingDuff provides a surprising answer to an empirical question: Is it better to have a custom designed legal AI (like Westlaw's AI) or a tool that gives a frontier AI model (like Claude Opus) direct access to primary legal sources? As it turns out, connecting an AI LLM to a legal database is most powerful when you don't program a bunch of guardrails into the AI's response.
To this end, DingDuff connects your existing Claude account to a database of legal opinions, state and federal statutes, and millions of court filings from around the country. We don't try to tell the AI how to do its job, because we don't need to. We simply get out of its way, and we've found that it works better when we do so.
Who Is DingDuff For?
DingDuff is a tool built by and for practicing lawyers who are capable of serving as their own guardrail. It was never designed to be a commercial product — it is a tool that two lawyers (Kyle Dingman and Stephanie Duff-O'Bryan) built for themselves to be able to use in their day jobs.
Because we get out of the AI's way, the AI with DingDuff will occasionally get things wrong, although we have never seen it hallucinate fake cases. That's why having a lawyer-user is essential, and the reason we're making DingDuff available only to lawyers. In the same way many of the tools that allow craftsmen to express themselves fully, like a table saw, can be used improperly in unskilled hands, DingDuff is no different. But DingDuff is very useful to a skilled lawyer who can do more with a raw feed of cases than with a system held back by guardrails intended to make sure the tool is never wrong.
Get DingDuff
We've tried to make DingDuff as simple, accessible, and cheap as possible. You need two components to make DingDuff work for you: (1) your own Claude plan and (2) a username/password for the DingDuff “connector.”
Sign up for DingDuff
Create your DingDuff account to get your connector credentials.
Install DingDuff on your Claude Account
Follow the steps below to connect DingDuff to your Claude account.
Begin Researching
Ask Claude your legal questions. DingDuff connects Claude directly to primary legal sources so you can research with confidence.
How to ResearchInstall DingDuff on your Claude Account
Once you have your DingDuff username and password, follow these steps to connect it to Claude:
Go to the web version of your Claude account and navigate to Settings → Connectors. Click Add custom connector.
Fill in the name and URL as shown and click Add.
After you're redirected, enter your DingDuff username (email) and password.
DingDuff should now be available as a connector. It will look like this:
Researching with DingDuff
This is where it gets fun. To research with DingDuff, you simply open a “new chat” window in your web version of Claude. Make sure that DingDuff is “active” as a connector by hitting the “+” symbol in the chat screen and verifying that DingDuff is toggled “on.” It will look like this:
Now you just type your legal question into the chat window. To get the best results, you'll have to direct Claude to do at least three things when answering your legal question: (1) "access only the DingDuff database" (this keeps it from reaching out to the wider internet); (2) tell it which jurisdiction you want it to pull cases from; and (3) ask it to provide citations in its response.
You have to be a little patient while Claude does its thing. You know DingDuff is working if it shows the little dog to the left as you see it thinking in real time (which is kind of fun). And in just a few minutes (although more complex questions can take up to ten or more minutes) you'll get a pretty good answer that (in our opinion!) rivals the leading AI databases for lawyers.
Skills
We highly recommend downloading the case-law-research skill file (a markdown file) and then uploading it to your "skills" in your Claude account. It will then just live there, and Claude will use it while you're conducting legal research via the DingDuff database connector. Even though DingDuff will work without the skill, the skill renders a higher quality answer.
First download the md file to your computer:
↓ Download Skill FileDo not try to open it. Upload it from your computer to the skills section of your Claude account:
Preferences
We also recommend adding custom instructions to your personal preferences that direct Claude to (a) always access DingDuff when conducting legal research and (b) implement the skill when answering a legal research question. This is what it looks like in our Claude accounts.
Meet the Team
Like most lawyers these days, we (Kyle and Stephanie) felt acutely the twin fears that (a) the robots would eventually replace us, and (b) in the meantime, the other lawyers would get a better robot and use it against us. So before Westlaw AI even existed, and anticipating that other lawyers would soon have some sort of AI death star we'd have to confront, we began developing our own tool for our own use.
For a year, we've made small iterative improvements. DingDuff began as a scrappy interface to a database we had compiled locally, running on a Rasberry Pi tucked away in Kyle's closet. But it has since grown into something far more capable—a powerful legal tool that runs through several databases, including CourtListener and state and federal statutes. And after two years of dreading the inevitable Westlaw death star, we discovered a happy accident: our homegrown tool works comparably well, and often better in our opinion.
Finding ourselves unexpectedly in possession of an incredibly useful legal tool with significant potential, we wanted to share it with our lawyer friends. To help turn DingDuff from a personal project into a shareable product, we brought on two software developers: Jeremy, a longtime friend from our undergraduate philosophy days at UT Austin, and Julia, a recent computer science graduate from Texas A&M.
Kyle is a mass torts lawyer with a passion for history, philosophy, the law, and everything Reddit. Kyle is the brain behind this entire project.
Stephanie is an ex-financial regulator now in private practice.
Julia is a software developer with a love for art and design.