Midpage, the startup focused on legal research, has launched an MCP connection with Claude, to fuse a general LLM with a legal-specific product. (See AL interview with CEO Otto von Zastrow below.) The news comes as Anthropic has just announced it’s moving into offering distinct legal tech skills via plugins – the first major LLM company to do so – see AL article here.
Midpage, which is based in New York told Artificial Lawyer, that by connecting the two they were ‘unlocking seamless, powerful legal research and drafting workflows right inside Claude desktop or web. In short, this means you can give Claude access to a dataset of case law and a citator.’
They said that the move was largely driven by customers as ‘law firms have been leaning heavily on general purpose AI tools’, and so the move made sense.
Midpage MCP in Claude will allow its users to:
- ‘Answer simple and complex legal research questions
- Generate first drafts of memos and briefs
- Connect the facts that live within their Claude projects to case law
- Review and cite check briefs (e.g., from opposing counsel)
- Brainstorm legal strategies and red-team arguments.’
They added that they obviously don’t want to lose their customers to Claude, instead it’s seen as a ‘best of both worlds’ scenario.
‘Claude can handle some legal queries by running web searches to collect sources. While this approach can yield decent answers, it is inherently limited because Claude’s internet searches will only uncover and be able to access to a fraction of the relevant case law. And the data it can find and access will be messy’, they explained – hence it needs to be connected to Midpage to do factually secure legal research.
Or, put another way: ‘The MCP gives Claude the tools it needs to run complex search queries directly over our comprehensive, up-to-date case law dataset. These tools are purpose-built for legal research, and the dataset is enriched with proprietary metadata like our AI-powered citator so you can ensure cases are still good law.’
(Note: to make this work you need 1) a Midpage subscription and 2) an active Claude Pro, Claude Team, or Claude Enterprise subscription. )
Also – Anthropic wanted to point out that ‘this isn’t an official partnership’, i.e. they’re connected together here, but this is not an Anthropic project, as is the case with the above mentioned plugins news.
AL Interview with, CEO, Otto von Zastrow:
Why now?
Claude and ChatGPT are becoming increasingly useful and more common among law firms. Legal tech vendors are often falling behind in terms of versatility. Claude has such a great ecosystem of integrations and features—from web search to SharePoint to local files—all through one simple interface. We want to help law firms avoid juggling dozens of different tools. We think most law firms will end up adopting Claude or ChatGPT eventually, and we want to be there when they do.
Is there a risk customers will cannibalise your offering, ie will they use Claude and connected tools to do what Midpage can do?
Currently when users want to read a case they will open the links in Claude, which brings them back to Midpage. But even this may change over time. We would rather be the best complement to the chat platforms than a full replacement. This allows us to scale faster and be more helpful to users.
How does Midpage and Claude combined handle data security? And also hallucinations?
On hallucinations: One of the key advantages of adding our database to claude is that instead of hallucinating cases, it has access to cases that are real, citable, hyperlinked, and comprehensive. That being said, like with any human work product, you should still review the results.
Both Claude and Midpage are SOC 2 compliant and already used by enterprise law firms. When using Midpage in Claude, we cannot access the documents you upload or the full questions and answers you discuss with Claude. Midpage does see which cases and searches are made, but this data is not used for training or any other purposes—we do not store it.
Would you do this with other genAI providers?
Yes, chatGPT is coming soon, and we intend to bring this to all platforms.
And last, what’s your view on vibecoding?
Even though most senior infrastructure engineers are now posting on x how they are generating most of their code. I believe people are still dramatically underestimating the trend.
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More here.
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