Freshfields Now Partners With Anthropic

After announcing its undying love for all things Google, Freshfields has now decided to move into something of a ménage à trois by forming a very close partnership with Anthropic. Claude will be used daily on client matters by up to 5,700 staff and lawyers, they added, among other initiatives.

Whether Google has called a divorce lawyer, or whether they are rather laissez faire about it all, we don’t know.  

Freshfields said it ‘will collaborate with Anthropic’s legal team to deliver AI‑native legal services and co-innovate with Anthropic’s product teams to create novel legal agentic workflows’.

The collaboration includes a commitment to firmwide deployment of the Claude suite of products and frontier AI models globally across 33 offices, spanning all practice groups and business services, they added.

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Freshfields and Anthropic’s in-house legal teams plan to collaborate and define new AI workflows and processes leveraging Anthropic tools and solutions’ latest capabilities to deliver legal services for Anthropic, as well.

In parallel, Freshfields and Anthropic have established a unique co-development program to build legal-focused AI applications and design agentic workflows to enable faster and more efficient delivery of legal advice to clients. Freshfields plans to expand to Cowork, Anthropic’s agentic AI platform, in line with the firm’s security, compliance, and training frameworks, they added.

Key focus areas include:

• Legal, and market research
• Contract review, document drafting and due diligence
• Business services workflows automation
• Agentic workflows for multi-step legal tasks.

Freshfields is also an early adopter and tester of Thomson Reuters’ next generation of CoCounsel Legal – fully rebuilt using Anthropic’s latest technology, with Westlaw and Practical Law natively embedded, they added – see earlier AL story today about this.

Gil Perez, Chief Innovation Officer, at Freshfields, commented: ‘Partnering with Anthropic strengthens our ability to co-innovate at pace and to bring new capabilities into our work in a way that is secure, compliant and focused on client needs.’

Gerrit Beckhaus, Partner and Co-Head Freshfields Lab, said: ‘Our approach in the Freshfields Lab has always been to build on the best available technology. Claude’s capabilities have become an essential part of our proprietary AI-powered solutions. With this collaboration, we are going further: co-developing agentic workflows with Anthropic that can handle multi-step legal tasks end-to-end. For our clients, that translates into faster, more precise and more scalable legal services.’

And Kate Jensen, Head of Americas, Anthropic, concluded: ‘Freshfields operates at the highest levels of global law. Their decision to go wall-to-wall with Claude — across legal work, business services, and now agentic workflows — is the clearest signal yet that the enterprise AI moment in professional services has arrived.’

Is this a big deal?

Well…yes!

As noted, just a week ago Freshfields was telling the world that Google was its best buddy and using its Google Cloud and Gemini offerings across the business. Now, it’s all-in with Anthropic as well.

Of course, there is no reason why you cannot have both – in fact there is no reason why you can’t have these relationships and also one with a large legal AI platform as well.

The challenge is more around having to manage so many options and also bring all the lawyers and staff up to speed with all that they can now do.

Either way, what they are doing with the close working project with Anthropic ‘to build legal-focused AI applications and design agentic workflows to enable faster and more efficient delivery of legal advice to clients’, is really worthy of note.

I.e. they’re really going for the whole agentic play. Or at least they plan to. We shall have to see what comes out of this in terms of real change to the Freshfields / client relationships and what gets automated and what stays the same. But, with such an announcement comes expectations, so one can assume that clients will be eager to see what can be done and how things can change.

Overall, after being a bit quiet on legal AI, Freshfields is charging out into the market with all guns blazing.

And AL has to applaud. Well done to Gil and colleagues for pushing ahead with this.

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