Drafting a demand letter from scratch on Mac: a step-by-step plan for lawyers in 2026

A blank page feels like freedom. For a demand letter, it mostly feels like delay. Before you type a sentence you need the parties, the facts in order, the legal basis you rely on, the amount or action you want, a deadline, and the tone your client expects. Miss one of those and the draft stalls halfway through.

What a blank page costs you

The clearest number is your time. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics puts median lawyer pay at $159,670 a year, or $76.76 an hour, based on May 2025 data. That is a salary figure, not a billing rate. Still, it gives you a floor. Every hour spent staring at an empty document is an hour of expensive thinking. Some of that time gets billed and some does not, depending on your client and fee arrangement.

A legal-education vendor, CEB, makes the same point from the practice side. Its guidance says that starting from a blank page 'may seem appealing, but it is often inefficient.' It recommends starting from vetted precedent and working out what the document must do before you draft. That means the blank page is a habit you can change.

Here is the honest gap. No source I checked times how long demand-letter drafting takes. Vendor blogs give time-saving percentages, but those figures were not verified, so this page leaves them out. The only reliable number is the one you measure in your own practice. Treat any unsourced figure as a guess.

How to time your own drafts for a few weeks

Open Apple Notes and start a new note with File > New Note (⌘N). Each time you draft a demand, log the matter type, the date, when you started the outline, when you had a first draft, and when the letter was ready to send. Add one line for each review round.

• Matter type and jurisdiction, so you compare like with like.
• Minutes spent on the outline before you open the draft.
• Minutes spent on the first draft, including any copying from precedent.
• Minutes on fact checking against the file, the step people skip most often.
• Number of review rounds and what changed in each one.

After a few weeks, you will see where the time goes. For most people, the outline and the fact check are the steps that either save time or get dropped. Do not drop either one to look faster on paper.

A worked example: from an unpaid invoice to a sendable letter

Say a client has an unpaid invoice. The invoice is past due, the other side has ignored two emails, and your client wants a letter that sets a deadline and states the next step. Here is the path from blank page to sendable draft.

1. Write the facts list first. Use dates from the invoice, the emails and the engagement letter. Copy amounts exactly as they appear in the file.
2. Write the demand in one sentence. For example: payment of the amount due by a set date, or the action you will take next.
3. Pull one precedent from a closed matter with a similar demand. Copy the structure, not the names or numbers.
4. Replace each fact with a bracketed placeholder first, then fill them from the file one at a time.
5. Check each legal statement against the source you rely on. Do not trust the precedent's citations without reading them.
6. Send the draft to a reviewer with the fact list attached, so they check facts before they read the prose.

That last step matters most. A demand letter is mostly facts and claims. Each sentence that states a fact needs a document behind it. Drafting from memory or from an old letter is where dates, names and amounts go wrong. A wrong date can cost you credibility with the other side.

Mistakes that make a blank-page draft worse

• Writing the opening line first. Write the demand and the deadline first, then the story that supports them.
• Writing the legal theory before the timeline is in order. Theory reads well but checks badly against the file.
• Starting in a fresh untitled file. Formatting drifts, and the next letter looks different.
• Copying a precedent without changing the jurisdiction, the parties or the dates. Old names survive in new letters.
• Sending the first draft because it reads well. Good prose can hide a wrong fact.
• Pasting client details into a public AI chat window without checking your firm's rules first.

The last mistake deserves more room. Many firms limit which tools can see client information, and some limit AI entirely. Follow your employer's rules on client data before you paste, dictate or screenshot anything. That applies to Lazur, Word with Copilot, and any other tool.

Where AI helps a first draft, and where it does not

The evidence is mixed. The ABA's 2024 survey found AI use among private-practice attorneys rose to 30% from 11%. A 2026 randomized trial by Schwarcz and colleagues gave law students a legal AI tool, a general model, or no AI across six tasks. The abstract reports productivity gains of 50% to 130% in five of six tasks. It also says the tools perform well on drafting persuasive letters.

Those participants were law students, not practicing lawyers. The numbers do not transfer to your desk directly. One summary of the trial gives a different range, so read the paper before you quote it. The same pattern shows up in consulting. A BCG and Harvard study of 758 consultants using GPT-4 found 25% faster work and 40% higher quality on tasks inside the tool's capability, as reported by VentureBeat.

The same study found a warning. People who used AI on tasks outside its capability made more mistakes, because they trusted it when they should not have. Demand letters have plenty of tasks like that, such as interest calculations and local procedural rules.

Legal research tools need caution too. A study by Magesh and colleagues on arXiv found that three legal research tools hallucinated between 17% and 33% of the time. That study covers research tools, not drafting tools, so it does not give a demand-letter error rate. It does tell you to verify every case you cite.

A sensible rule is this. Let the tool produce structure and a rough first pass. You verify every fact, date, citation and legal statement against your own file and sources. If you cannot check a sentence, cut it.

Set up a Word template for demand letters on Mac

Build one template and reuse it. Start with File > New Blank Document (⌘N) in Word. Add your letterhead, the addressee block, a reference line and bracketed placeholders such as [CLIENT NAME], [INVOICE DATE], [AMOUNT DUE] and [RESPONSE DEADLINE]. Placeholders make empty spots easy to see.

1. Set body text and headings once with Home > Styles, so every letter uses the same fonts and spacing.
2. Add the paragraphs in order: facts, demand, deadline, consequence, and a reservation of rights if your firm uses one.
3. Add a bracketed note at the top that says to delete it before sending. Reviewers see it first.
4. Save with File > Save As (⇧⌘S). In the File Format list, choose Word Template (.dotx).
5. Store the template in a shared folder, and put the year in the file name so old versions are easy to spot.

When a partner edits the draft, turn on Track Changes from the Review tab or with ⌘⇧E. Track Changes keeps each edit visible, so you can see what moved and who moved it. Your firm may have its own rules for returning edited letters to a client file, so follow those.

Word also offers Draft with Copilot. Microsoft's support page describes the flow. You open a blank document, describe the content, submit, then keep, discard, regenerate or refine the result. The feature requires an eligible Microsoft 365 subscription or Microsoft 365 Copilot license. The page does not clearly say which platforms get each drafting feature, so check your Mac version and license first.

Where to find a starting point without a form bank

Not every firm has a document bank, but you can still find precedent. Search your sent mail with the search box at the top of Outlook. Look at letters you sent on closed matters. Ask a colleague which letter they used last time. If your firm allows it, Finder search (⌘F) can help on a shared drive.

CEB's advice is to start from vetted precedent and work out the document's purpose first. The word vetted matters. A letter someone sent last year may have been weak and still got a reply. Ask a senior colleague which precedent they would trust today.

Where Lazur fits into this workflow

Lazur is a voice assistant for the Mac that lives in the notch. Hold ⌥⌘ to ask about anything on screen. Lazur sees your screen, points at things, and answers out loud. It helps with finding things, explaining screens, and getting text into a document by voice.

Hold fn to dictate clean, formatted text at the cursor in any app. That helps with the fact list. Speak the timeline while you read the file, then edit the text in Word. Dictation does not check your facts. You still do that part.

Snippets, a personal dictionary and clipboard slots help with repeated material. Save a standard reservation of rights paragraph as a snippet, if your firm uses one. Use clipboard slots to hold the amount, the invoice date and the deadline while you move between Word and your case file.

Here is what Lazur does not do. It does not write the letter in Word for you, click buttons, edit files or send email. Ask where a button is, and Lazur circles it. Ask how to do a step, and Lazur guides you one click at a time, waiting for each click.

Research works differently. Lazur runs research in its own Chrome tabs through the Lazur for Chrome extension, then returns a summary and a report. Use that to gather public sources on a rule or a case. Then read the primary text yourself before you rely on any of it.

Edge cases that need extra care

Some demand letters break the template. Multiple defendants need one section per party, with the facts for each. Insurance demands often follow a carrier's rules on what the letter must include. Time-sensitive claims need a deadline check against the rules in your jurisdiction. That check belongs to you, not to a tool.

Be careful with interest, fees and penalty figures. Calculate them from the contract and the file, show the arithmetic in the fact table, and have a second person check it. A tool can explain a formula. It should not be the only check on a number that goes out under your name.

Tone is an edge case too. A letter to a repeat client may need a softer opening than a letter to a party who has stopped answering. Decide that with your client before you draft. A blank page does not tell you what the client wants.

What to do next

Start small. This week, time one draft with the log. Next, build one template with placeholders and save it as a Word template. Then pick the precedent you trust most and rewrite its facts from your current file. Keep the outline step even when you are in a hurry.

Before you use any AI tool on a live matter, ask your firm whether it is allowed and what it may see. Only 41% of legal organizations had an AI policy in April 2025, according to Thomson Reuters. If your firm is in the other group, raise the question with the people who set the rules.

Lazur runs on macOS, on Apple silicon and Intel Macs. Windows is planned, not available. The 3-day Pro trial starts when you first open the app and needs no credit card. Pro is $18 a month, or $15 a month billed annually, with 150 AI actions. Dictation is unlimited on both plans.