DeepJudge’s CTO on Connecting to Claude Cowork

Legal search pioneer, DeepJudge, has hooked up an MCP extension to Claude Cowork and plenty of folks have gone wild. AL asked CTO, Yannic Kilcher, some more about their thinking on combining legal-specific tools with Cowork.

First, how it works:

• Claude uses MCP to call DeepJudge
• DeepJudge performs permission-aware search and synthesis across a firm’s own prior matters and work product
• Results are passed back to Claude for further reasoning and downstream workflow steps.
• (Claude’s legal plug-ins, e.g. for contract review, can then directly be deployed – see the video, it’s very cool, it has to be said.)

Plus, here is a five mins video with Yannic, explaining things in more detail:

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What is your overall perspective?

Our perspective closely echoes AL’s conclusion: LLM wrappers are rapidly becoming table stakes, and remain generic.

What differentiates legal AI tools is whether they are anchored in hard-to-replicate assets: proprietary legal data (like TR, Lexis, and WK), as well as an individual firm’s institutional knowledge, context, permissions, and provenance (DeepJudge).

(Note: See here AL’s thoughts on the Claude Crash last week, also a link to an AL piece that includes Pramata’s use of Claude’s Plugins. And one more Claude hook up is here with Midpage. In short, some legal tech companies are embracing the change…! Plus, also you may want to look at Antti Innanen’s piece in AL about using Cowork, as well – pls see here.)

Thanks, now can you take us through your thought processes here?

For a long time, we’ve seen a clear trend in AI: New models swallow old models. It used to be most relevant to fine-tuning: Organizations trained or fine-tuned their own LLMs, with the goal of getting that edge over the common models, but as soon as the next version of the common model got released, it was better out of the box than any of the specialized ones. Think of all the fine-tuned GPT-3.5 versions that were just obsolete the moment GPT-4 was released.

We see this same paradigm playing out today, but not just for models themselves, but for entire branches of software. There are many tools out there that are primarily built around LLM inference, and, at best, provide good UX and optimized custom prompts. These tools are traditionally called ‘GPT Wrappers’.

The hallmark of these products is that the LLM is doing most of the lifting, and this is exactly the class of software that is currently getting swallowed by the ‘common’ apps (i.e. Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT).

With Cowork, Anthropic has done a great job connecting their model directly to the users’ native desktop environment, and thereby delivers arguably an even better user experience than any tool where you have to upload your data first.

The forward-thinking software vendors are currently re-thinking their approach to delivering value: Instead of having the users always come to us, we (the software makers) can now deliver our capabilities straight into this unified experience, so that at least for simple tasks, users can stay right inside of Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini and naturally interact with all the intelligent tools that their organization has to offer. Protocols like MCP make the AI world more interconnected, and reward systems that are open and play nicely with others.

A note on MCP

It’s important to point out that MCP by itself does not create new capabilities. It’s not magic, it’s simply a protocol that allows two systems to talk to each other. Many people go ‘oooh we have MCP now’ and think it’s some AI fairy dust that makes everything better. It’s not: You are simply letting two systems talk, and by doing so (and if the MCP server is implemented well), they get to combine their existing capabilities.

Thanks, Yannic, more to come from Claude for sure.

More about DeepJudge here.

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NOTE: AL is in Sweden on Tues and Wed, so won’t be posting much until Thursday. But, speaking of Europe….

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If you would like to be a speaker, especially if you are at a law firm or inhouse legal team in Europe – from Alicante to Amsterdam and beyond…..then please contact Phoebe at Cosmonauts: phoebe@cosmonauts.biz

Note: if you are a legal tech company, please contact Robins: robins@cosmonauts.biz