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On 12 May, Anthropic launched Claude for Legal, marking a shift in the AI company’s positioning, from primarily powering legal AI products such as Harvey and Legora, towards potentially becoming a legal platform in its own right.
Claude for Legal launched with 20 widely used platforms, the most significant being Thomson Reuters, with integrations including CoCounsel Legal, Westlaw and Practical Law. Slack, Docusign and Everlaw are other notable examples.
It also features a ‘cold-start interview process,’ meaning Claude gets to know lawyers’ workflows and domain knowledge before being deployed on any real-world work. In other words, it adapts to the profile and playbook of the lawyer using it.
Freshfields, Quinn Emanuel, Holland & Knight and AI-first law firm Crosby Legal have all confirmed they are using Claude on live work. In a statement on Claude’s blog Quinn Emannuel partner Christopher Kerchner said he had built the firm’s litigation platform using Claude with ‘virtually no coding background’.
Meanwhile, Freshfields announced a partnership with Anthropic last month, with internal innovation and legal tech development lab co-head Gerrit Beckhaus telling LB: ‘Anthropic stood out for its level of usage in the legal sector. A significant proportion of legal tech vendors are built on Claude and Anthropic’s models, which makes it clear that the company is seen as one of the leading providers of AI models for legal work.’
At the time, the firm’s chief innovation officer Gil Perez said: ‘Our legal team will be working directly with Anthropic’s legal team to explore how we could collaborate and set up workflows between a law firm and Anthropic, when both parties are proficient in AI,’ adding that the deal would give Freshfields ‘a glimpse into the future’.
From an in-house perspective, Anthropic’s legal team itself uses Claude for Legal, a process that the company refers to as ‘antfooding.’
And with reports stating that Anthropic was valued at $900bn in its most recent fundraising round this May, there is significant financial firepower behind the technology.
So what exactly is Claude for Legal, and how significant is the launch?
‘Instead of having 100 point tools and a thousand different integrations, you have one agent’
Jamie Tso a former senior associate at Clifford Chance who now concentrates full time on LegalQuants, a selective network of AI-proficient lawyers that was recognised by Anthropic as an early contributor in the Claude for Legal launch blog, describes Claude for Legal as a ‘use case’ of the recently launched Claude Cowork, a desktop platform that allows workers to use agentic AI across their files, apps and workflows.
Essentially, Cowork can carry out multi-step knowledge work, while the worker focuses on tasks that cannot be automated or checks work that has already been completed by Claude.
Claude for Legal takes Cowork and adapts it for lawyers by connecting it to 20 legal and general productivity platforms from which Claude can pull relevant documents, communications and records.
Ways lawyers can use Claude for Legal in practice include contract review, IP portfolio tracking, automating privacy assessments, drafting jurisdiction-specific employment policies, and reviewing vendor MSAs against a lawyer’s internal playbook.
The 20 platforms Claude for Legal connects to are:
- General productivity: Slack, Google Drive, Linear, Atlassian/Jira, Asana
- Document and matter management: iManage, Box
- Contract lifecycle: Ironclad, DocuSign/DocuSign CLM, Definely
- Legal research: CoCounsel Legal (Thomson Reuters), CourtListener, Trellis, Descrybe
- E-discovery and litigation: Everlaw, Aurora
- IP and patent: Solve Intelligence
- Self-represented litigants / access to justice: Courtroom5
- Matter routing and outside counsel: TopCounsel
- Community skills: Lawve AI
There are also 12 practice-area-specific plugins:
- Commercial
- Corporate
- Employment
- Privacy
- Product
- Regulatory
- AI governance
- IP
- Litigation
- Legal clinic
- Law student
- Legal builder hub
Claude for Legal also works inside Microsoft Word, Outlook, Excel and PowerPoint.
A key feature is the ‘cold-start interview’ system that sits underneath all of this.
Before any workflow agent runs, Claude conducts a structured onboarding interview with the lawyer or team. It asks how they work in practice, reads existing documents and creates a practice profile that includes the lawyer’s playbook, risk appetite, drafting style and internal house rules.
Every workflow agent, such as NDA Triager, Vendor Agreement Reviewer and Board Consent Drafter, reads from that profile before it acts, customising outputs to each lawyer or law firm’s preferences, whether they are a Magic Circle litigator, an in-house IP lawyer or anything in between.
Tso says this approach ‘lowers the barrier a lot,’ as lawyers and law firms can access customised legal tech without having to build their own tools from scratch. He also points to the value and versatility of Claude Cowork acting as a single orchestrator.
As Tso puts it: ‘Instead of having 100 point tools [a tool that solves one specific problem only] and a thousand different integrations, you have one agent — but with different plugins and different skills. One engine, configured a thousand different ways.’
‘Anthropic’s entire philosophy is built around AI safety and heavily guardrailed systems. That is exactly the kind of AI you want in legal and financial services’
When Anthropic announced its legal plugins in February, it triggered a sector-wide sell-off across legal tech and software companies.
Barry Scannell, technology partner and AI law expert at Irish firm William Fry explains that Anthropic’s reputation is a key factor behind the significance investors and market observers are attributing to the launch:
‘Anthropic’s entire philosophy is built around AI safety and heavily guardrailed systems. That is exactly the kind of AI you want in legal and financial services,’ he says.
Does the launch mean the writing is on the wall for Harvey and Legora? Not quite. In fact, the official launch included quotes from Harvey’s CEO and Legora’s CTO, both of whom praised Opus 4.7, Anthropic’s latest flagship model, which will sit under the hood of higher-tier users of Claude for Legal, and is an option as the engine for users of Harvey and Legora.
Tso says that, for now at least, ‘Claude for Legal is likely to appeal strongly to smaller legal teams and individual lawyers,’ with Harvey and Legora still competing for Big Law’s hearts and wallets.
But the launch is clearly significant, and with Anthropic allowing third-party builders to connect any platforms to Claude for Legal via Model Context Protocols (MCPs), it seems likely that Claude for Legal will continue to grow and be shaped by its users and the wider legal ecosystem.
And what does Claude itself think of the launch?
‘BigLaw’s most expensive resource — lawyer time — just got a co-pilot that never sleeps, never bills, and never makes a partner wait for a first draft.’
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