For Economist (Private Sector / Consulting)s ·
What you'll accomplish
A first draft from a chatbot usually sounds like a chatbot, and you spend the next hour pulling it toward your firm's voice. In a Claude Project you store your style notes, a short methods glossary and two of your own public memos once. Every chat inside the project then starts from that material, so the draft arrives closer to your house style and you spend your review time on the numbers instead of the tone.
The project instructions also hold the guardrails: Claude uses only the figures you paste, tags each sentence that states a number with its table cell, and lists every claim it cannot support. The memo stays a draft. You and your project lead own every opinion, method choice and figure in it.
What you'll need
Data caution. Client data, documents produced in litigation, anything under a protective order or NDA, and non-public company data stay in your firm's approved systems. This setup works on public memos, your own style notes, synthetic tables and coded placeholders such as "[Client]", "[Matter code]" and "Company A". Before you put anything non-public into Claude, confirm that your firm and the engagement (and counsel, on litigation matters) approve the tool for that data. Then check your account's data settings: whether chats and uploads are used for model training, and how long they are kept. A free consumer plan can differ from a work plan on both points.
You are building four small files before you touch Claude. Keep each one short, because Claude reads all of them at the start of every chat in the project.
style-notes. Write 10 to 20 lines on your voice: sentence length, how you open a memo, how you phrase a caveat, and the words your firm avoids.methods-glossary. For each term you use often, write one or two lines in your own words. Leave out any client-specific detail.public-memo-1 and public-memo-2. Use memos you wrote, or public documents you have the right to use.What you should see: Four small files on your computer, none of them with a client name in it. Troubleshooting: If a public memo contains a table of real figures, either keep it (they are already public) or delete the table before you upload. Claude will copy the style of whatever you load, and it can also repeat the figures.
House-style memos. Add a short description.What you should see: An empty project page with a place for chats, a project knowledge area on the right side, and a link to set project instructions. Troubleshooting: Anthropic's page notes that a newer version of projects is rolling out in stages, starting with some Pro and Max accounts. If your screen looks different from these steps, look for the same ideas under other labels: files or knowledge, and instructions.
What you should see: style-notes, methods-glossary, public-memo-1 and public-memo-2 listed as project knowledge.
Troubleshooting: Anthropic's upload page lists PDF, DOCX, CSV, TXT, HTML, RTF and several other types. Project files are limited to 30MB each, and Claude extracts text only, so a chart pasted into a memo as an image is not read.
Anthropic's page says each project has its own memory, and that Claude uses it alongside your memory from chats outside projects.
What you should see: A memory setting on the project page, set the way you chose. Troubleshooting: If you cannot find the setting, your plan or screen version may place it elsewhere. Check Anthropic's page on memory, or ask your IT team.
What you should see: A short draft in your house voice, with a bracketed cell after each sentence that states a number, a "Claims with no support" section, and the last line "Draft for project lead review". Troubleshooting: If a sentence states a number with no bracketed cell, treat it as unsupported and delete it or find its source yourself.
This step is the point of the whole setup. Claude's tags are claims, so check them.
What you should see: Every number in the draft matched to a cell, and every unsupported claim either cut or sourced. Troubleshooting: If a number matches no cell, delete that sentence. Do not ask Claude to supply the figure.
Memo from a results table (use inside the project)
Draft a [word count]-word memo for [audience] from the table below. Main messages: [message 1], [message 2], [message 3]. Use only the pasted cells. Tag each sentence with a number with its cell. End with "Claims with no support" and the line "Draft for project lead review".
[Paste the table with cell labels]
Tighten an existing draft in your voice
Here is my draft. Rewrite it in the style of style-notes without changing any number, unit, caveat or cell tag. List every change you made to a sentence that contains a number.
[Paste the draft]
Caveats paragraph
You help an applied economist draft memos. Follow these rules in every chat.
SOURCES OF NUMBERS
- Use only numbers that appear in the table or text pasted in the current chat.
- Never compute, estimate, round or infer a number. If a difference is needed and the table does not give it, write: "difference not stated in the table".
- Never write a forecast, an elasticity, a multiplier or any figure that is not in the pasted table.
TAGGING
- After every sentence that states a number, add the table cell in square brackets, for example [Table 1, B2].
WHAT YOU NEVER WRITE
- No expert opinion, no legal conclusion, no statement of what a court, agency or rule requires, and no statement of what a central bank or government will do.
- No causal claim unless the pasted text states it.
- Never call a result proof or conclusive.
STYLE
- Follow style-notes and the two public memos for voice, structure and caveat wording. Use methods-glossary for term definitions.
- Do not copy any figure from the public memos.
END OF EVERY DRAFT
- Add a section called "Claims with no support" that lists every sentence not tied to a pasted cell or text. Write "none" if there are none.
- Last line of every output: "Draft for project lead review".
What you should see: The instructions saved on the project page. Troubleshooting: Anthropic's page notes that context is not shared across chats in a project unless it is in the project knowledge. If Claude ignores a rule in one chat, say so in that chat and fix the instruction text so the rule is stated more plainly.
Using only the pasted text, write a caveats paragraph in the wording style of my public memos. Do not add a caveat that the pasted text does not support. Mark any caveat you think is missing as a question for me, not as a statement.
[Paste the text]
Glossary check
Read the paragraph below against methods-glossary. List every term used differently from my glossary entry, and every term with no entry. Do not define a term from your own knowledge.
[Paste the paragraph]