Make Claude Cowork your claim clerk.
A practical system for the homeowner whose wind, hail or hurricane claim has gone quiet: one claim file, a correspondence log nobody can argue with, a deadline register computed from real dates, and every contract checked against the statute before you sign it.
You: the policyholder who signs and sendsCowork: the clerk that keeps the file
Since 19 May 2026, a South Carolina public adjuster may take no more than ten percent of any settlement, and no fee, retainer or deposit before settlement — SC Code § 38-92-120(E), added by Act 209 of 2026. The chapter it replaced had no cap. On 6 October 2026 the online Code still displayed that repealed chapter as current law, and did not show the new one at all.
The useful promise
Do the deciding. Delegate the file.
A storm claim that goes quiet is not one hard argument. It is a slow pile: a voicemail that promised an adjuster by Friday, an estimate that left out the gutters, a roofer’s contract signed on the driveway, a letter that denies part of the claim in its third paragraph.
Almost none of that is a fight. It is clerical work with deadlines attached, and the deadlines are not where you think they are. Some run from the day you reported the loss. One runs from the day you signed a contract. One runs from the day a denial letter reached you. And if water came in, there is a second policy with a second clock that is a third the length of the first.
Claude Cowork runs on your own laptop against a folder you choose. Point it at the pile. It reads the declarations page and the policy and quotes back every deductible and every deadline in the policy’s own words. It keeps a log of every call, email and inspection, append-only. It computes every date from a stated anchor and shows the arithmetic and the citation. It reads the contract the roofer or the public adjuster handed you and lays what it says beside what the statute requires.
What it cannot do is the part that carries weight. It cannot report the claim. It cannot sign a proof of loss, accept an offer, invoke appraisal, or tell you what the claim is worth. It cannot tell you the insurer broke the law. Those are your signature, your decision, and a regulator’s or a court’s finding, in that order.
The operating loop
Seven handoffs. One file that holds up.
You supply the facts, the judgment and the signature. Cowork converts those into a record on a cadence. Run it in manual-approval mode and read what it writes.
Read the rules
Pull the controlling statutes and federal rules from the live sources, record the URL and the date checked, and never state a rule without its citation again.
Read the policy
Carrier, agent, every deductible quoted, any named-storm deductible trigger quoted exactly, replacement cost or actual cash value, and every clause with a deadline in it, page by page.
Log it
Date, channel, who, what was said, what was promised and by when, and the file it came from. Append-only. A wrong row is corrected by a new row, never by an edit.
Chase the promises
Every promise whose date has passed with nothing in the log gets a short, factual follow-up draft. Two weeks of silence is reported as a fact about the file, not as a violation.
Check it
Roofer or public adjuster, the contract goes beside the statute before anything is signed, and the last day to cancel goes on the register.
Start the clocks
A denial in whole or in part starts the roofing cancellation window and, for flood, both the sixty-day appeal and the one-year suit line. Date them from the letter.
Audit
Recompute every deadline from its anchor. Report what is missing, where two documents disagree, and anything that has stopped being a clerk’s problem and become a lawyer’s.
The folder is the record
Give Cowork a narrow, legible workspace.
[Address] - Storm Claim/ claim.md policy facts, carriers, dates log.md every contact, append-only deadlines.md anchor, arithmetic, citation 01-policy/ declarations page, full policy 02-letters/ everything from the insurer 03-photos/ named by date 04-estimates/ theirs and yours 05-contracts/ roofer, public adjuster 06-drafts/ letters waiting on you 07-sent/ what you actually sent
Connect only this folder, never an entire home directory. Name every file YYYY-MM-DD-short-description so sorting by name sorts by date. Photos taken before any repair are worth more than any estimate; get them in on day one.
Keep the source register beside it. Every time Cowork relies on a rule it records the section, the URL and the date it was checked. This year proved why: the law on public adjusters changed in May, and the state’s own online Code was still showing the old chapter in October. A stale citation in a claim letter is worse than none, because the adjuster reading it will know.
Do not put Social Security numbers in this folder. No bank or card numbers, no insurer portal passwords, no payment credentials, and no unredacted driver’s license or passport images. Nothing in a property claim file needs them here.
Three prompts that install the clerk.
Use these as starting instructions and replace the bracketed fields. Keep everything that leaves the house in manual-approval mode, always.
“Use only this folder. The property is [ADDRESS]. The storm was [DATE] and I reported it to [CARRIER] on [DATE], claim number [NUMBER]. Read the policy and the letters, build claim.md with every deductible and deadline quoted with its page, and list what the file does not show.”
“Build deadlines.md. Show the anchor date, the arithmetic and the citation on every line. I received the denial letter dated [DATE] on [DATE]. I signed the [ROOFER / PUBLIC ADJUSTER] contract on [DATE]. Tell me which lines you could not compute and what document would fix that.”
“Read log.md. List every promise the adjuster or the insurer made whose date has passed with nothing in the log, and the last date we received anything. Draft one short follow-up per open item into 06-drafts with the claim number first. Do not send anything.”
The real automation
Make the record cheap to keep.
A good clerk does not win the claim. It makes the months that actually happened easy to see — so the homeowner on the phone can read a date instead of remembering one, and so the question becomes what the file shows rather than who recalls the call better.
Nobody else is keeping your count. The insurer keeps its own claim file for its own purposes, and there is no South Carolina statute that hands it to you. The log that shows four unanswered requests, the estimate comparison that finds the missing gutters, the date a cancellation window closes — those exist only if somebody builds them. That somebody has always been the homeowner, at the kitchen table, with a phone full of photos and a tarp on the roof.
Charleston AI teaches people in Charleston to put their own AI to work on jobs like this one — ai-chs.com. If the paperwork in front of you is an estate rather than a roof, the same approach runs probate: Make Claude Cowork your estate clerk.