Anthropic wants Claude to be your lawyer, launches plugins for legal work

Anthropic is making Claude better at doing a lot of different things. Now, the company wants its AI to be a lawyer with new plugins designed to do legal work. Here is everything you need to know.

In Short

• Anthropic expands legal plugins for Claude
• The AI can now go through contracts, review documents and more
• Anthropic says lawyers show strong interest in Claude

Anthropic is making Claude more useful. After raising fears of a SaaSpocalypse with Claude Cowork, the AI startup has now released new plugins that allow Claude to do legal work. As per Anthropic, these plugins are designed for lawyers, students and law firms.

The new plugins expand upon Anthropic’s legal push for Claude, having launched Claude for Legal in February this year. At the time, the release had led to a steep decline in shares of publishing and legal software companies such as Pearson, Thomas Reuters, and Relx (owner of LexisNexis).

What can Claude for Legal do now?

Anthropic says that the new plugins are designed to let legal users carry out more work inside Claude, including document search and review, legal research, deposition preparation, drafting and contract-related tasks.

Among the new plug-ins are tools such as commercial counsel, employment counsel, litigation associate and "law student". Anthropic said the tools are built for areas including commercial, privacy, corporate, employment, product and AI governance work.

The vendor agreement reviewer plugin, for example, automatically tweaks supplier agreements based on your firm's contract templates. There’s also an NDA triager that can sort incoming NDAs automatically into colour-based tiers – green light for approval, red light to send an NDA to a lawyer for handling.

Link Claude to legal platforms

Anthropic is also making it easier for you to use Claude in your existing legal framework. The company is adding connectors that link Claude to software already used across the legal sector.

Users will be able to connect directly with platforms including DocuSign, Box, Everlaw and Thomson Reuters, as well as Harvey, a rival AI legal service.

Anthropic's move comes as competition in legal AI heats up. In March, AI startup Harvey raised $200 million at a valuation of $11 billion. Last month Legora, another legal AI startup, raised $600 million in a Series D round.

Anthropic and rival OpenAI have spent much of the past year building AI products for professional work in sectors such as finance, healthcare and law as they seek more business customers. And now it seems that Anthropic is looking to get a share of the pie in the legal sector too.

Lawyers are using AI

Anthropic claims to have seen strong interest from legal users, according to Mark Pike, the company's associate general counsel. Pike told Bloomberg that lawyers are using Claude "at basically the highest rate of any other profession", excluding software developers.

More than 20,000 legal professionals registered for a recent Anthropic webinar on legal use cases.

On X, users have started claiming that Claude may actually be their lawyer soon. One person wrote, “Anthropic has just launched the world's cheapest lawyer.” Another user added, “99 per cent of lawyers and law firms are going to get replaced by AI, and they don't even realise it.”

At the same time, AI use in law has raised concerns in courts. Dozens of lawyers have been found using AI-generated legal documents containing errors, and California last year fined an attorney who used ChatGPT to draft an appeal that included fake quotes.

Can I use Claude’s legal plugins?

Anthropic has stated that the new features will be available to paying Claude customers and can also be embedded into firms' own systems or offered through third-party services built on Claude.

Do note that the company has also shared the plugins on the developer platform Github.

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