Five years of messy files. One buried contract.
A client wants to take you to court. You know the contract exists. It is somewhere in a folder on your computer, or your drive, or an email from two years ago. Below is the exact instruction I handed Claude CoWork to find it, plus everything else it dragged out of the mess on the way.
The situation
Maple Row is a cleaning business. Nadia has run it for five years. One client is about to sue.
Maple Row and every file you see in the video are made up, to keep the real company anonymous. The mess is not. Twelve cleaners, five years of quotes, checklists, agreements, training notes, and price sheets scattered across a Drive folder and a Documents folder on a laptop. Then a client named Ray Delgado has his lawyer send a claim.
Nadia knows the paperwork exists. She just cannot put her hands on it, and neither can she prove which version of her pricing was in force the month the job went wrong. So the job was never really "find one contract." It was: read everything, tell me what I own, pull the dispute into one place, and show me where my own documents contradict each other.
Here is the part worth noticing. In the instruction below, I ask for dispute paperwork, but I never tell it a dispute exists, and I never say the name Delgado. It has to find that on its own.
A master index
Everything reusable the business already owns, grouped by type, each item traced back to its source file.
The dispute file
Every contract, complaint, and legal letter tied to any client claim, pulled into one place with a timeline.
The contradictions
Where two documents disagree. The old price sheet against the new one, the checklist against the agreement.
Four rebuilt documents
Training, pricing, job checklist, and complaint process, rewritten around how the business actually runs.
How to run it yourself
Four steps. The whole thing is one instruction and a bit of patience.
Let Claude see your workspace
A Connector lets Claude read an app directly, your Gmail, your Drive, instead of you copy-pasting things in one message at a time. Every source you plug in is one more corner of the mess it can actually see.
Open a new chat and toggle from Chat to CoWork in the input bar.
Press the plus button, choose Connectors, search Gmail, and authenticate.
Do the same for Google Drive, since that is where the folder lives. If you use a call recorder, connect that too.
Click the folder icon below the text box and add your local Documents folder, so it goes through your computer as well.
My rule of thumb on permissions: read-only can always be allowed. Anything that writes or deletes should ask you every time. This job only pulls old work out, so read-only carries the whole thing.
Stop being the agent
In Chat you send messages and get answers back, which means for a job this size you become the agent, feeding it files one at a time. CoWork is where you hand over the entire job. It opens the folder, reads the files, reads the email, and works across your whole workspace while you go do something else.
That difference is the reason this works at all. Nobody is going to paste five years of documents into a chat box one by one.
Hand over the whole job
This is the exact instruction from the video, word for word. Swap the folder names for yours and swap the four documents at the end for the ones your trade actually runs on.
The full file audit
Read every file in the Maple Row folder in my Google Drive and the My Documents folder on my computer, and every relevant email. Do not move, rename, or change anything in the originals. Build me one index of everything reusable this business already owns, grouped by type, and next to each item, name the exact file or email it came from. Pull everything tied to any client dispute, contracts, complaints, legal letters, into one place. Tell me where two documents disagree. Then rebuild four documents, the training, the pricing, the job checklist, and the complaint process, around how the business operates.
Before you press send, pick your mode. CoWork offers ask before acting or act without asking. I run auto mode because I have done this enough times to trust it. If this is your first run, let it ask.
Then it goes to work: into the Drive, through the files, into the email. Partway through it stopped and asked me two questions, and the answers matter more than they look:
How do you want the deliverables? Answer: new Google Docs, in the folder.
For the rebuilt pricing, which source wins where the sheets disagree? Answer: Nadia's 2024 sheet, plus Maria's field logic.
Why that second question is the whole game: it found two pricing sheets that contradict each other and refused to guess which one is true. That is exactly the kind of thing that quietly costs you an argument with a client, and nobody ever goes looking for it.
What came back
The master index, the dispute file, the contracts, and the contradictions. Nadia only cares about one of them, so we open the Delgado dispute and there it is: the timeline of events with every source file named next to it.
Then one more instruction: put every Delgado file into its own folder. It copies them across, leaves the originals alone, and adds a few suggestions at the end. Now she can walk into her lawyer's office with the whole story in one place instead of a shrug and a laptop.
And the four rebuilt documents are sitting there too. Open the complaint and damage process and you can see it has lessons from the Delgado dispute baked into it. The thing that nearly cost her a lawsuit is now written into how the business handles the next one.
Worth saying plainly: this organizes your paperwork. It does not tell you what your case is worth. That part is still your lawyer's job, they will just have a much better afternoon.
Schedule it, so the mess never comes back
The mess you just cleaned is coming back. Every week there are new quotes, new clients, new files. So instead of doing this again in six months, schedule it: click the arrow next to the task title, select schedule, and tell CoWork to run the same instruction on the first of every month, add anything new to the index, and flag anything that looks like a dispute.
Scheduled tasks can run on Claude's servers now. Whether yours runs with the laptop closed depends on what the task touches. This one reads files from your computer, so it stays local and your machine needs to be open when it fires. A task that only touches email moves to the cloud fully, and runs whether your laptop is open, closed, or in a bag in the truck. That is the difference between a cleanup and a system.
Your files aren't Maple Row's. Get your version.
Tell me what your business does and where your files actually live. I'll write the file-audit instruction for your business, name the documents your trade runs on, and tell you which piece of paper you probably cannot find today.
- Your own CoWork instruction, ready to paste, no editing
- The three things it will most likely surface in your files
- The one document you'd be missing if a client came after you
- Three bonus prompts: the dispute folder, the monthly schedule, and my permission rule
The document you probably cannot find
Your file audit, ready to paste into CoWork
The bonus prompts from the video
Run these after the audit finishes. The first is what turned five years of scattered paperwork into one folder Nadia could hand a lawyer. The second is what stops the mess coming back. The third is the permission rule I use on every job like this.
Bonus 1: pull the dispute into its own folder
Take the client dispute you just surfaced and create a separate folder for it. Copy every file tied to that client into it, contracts, quotes, checklists, complaints, emails, and legal letters, and leave the originals exactly where they are. Inside the folder, add one document: a timeline of events, in order, with the exact source file named next to each entry, and a short note at the end on what is missing or contradictory. Write it so I can hand the whole folder to my lawyer without explaining anything.
Bonus 2: make it run every month without you
Run this same instruction on the first of every month. Add anything new to the index instead of rebuilding it from scratch, and tell me what changed since last time. Flag anything that looks like a client dispute, a complaint, or a legal letter, and flag any new document that contradicts one I already have. If nothing new turned up, say so in one line.
Bonus 3: my permission rule, in one instruction
For this job, you can read anything in my connected Drive, my computer folders, and my email without asking me each time. Do not move, rename, delete, or overwrite anything in the originals. If a step would write, change, or send something, stop and ask me first, and tell me exactly what it would change before I answer.
Files sorted. Want to know what else is eating your week?
The free AI Audit takes 2 minutes and shows you which tasks are quietly costing you ten hours a week, and what to hand over first. No call, no pitch, just the readout.