AL Interview: Mark Pike, Anthropic Associate General Counsel

As you have seen, (AL article), Anthropic has today formally launched Claude for Legal. Here is the full Artificial Lawyer interview with Mark Pike, Anthropic Associate General Counsel and product lead for Claude for the legal industry.

Why develop a specific offering for legal?

The first legal Plugin launch in February clearly demonstrated the industry’s appetite for AI solutions. Legal became the number one power-user job function in Claude Cowork, with over three times the usage of any other function.

But another reason we’re developing a legal-specific offering is because legal work requires in-depth document comprehension — from tracking defined terms across exhibits and schedules to understanding how the document holds together. Claude is really good at that, and by partnering with the leading companies across the legal industry, and keeping a human in the loop on decision making, we can help bring AI to legal professionals in a new way.

For example, a paralegal who was part of a four-person pro bono team went up against an AmLaw 200 firm in an elder abuse case. He built a tool on our API that sat at the counsel’s table during trial, pulling in lines of cross-examination as the trial unfolded and helping counsel react to what was happening in real time. They ended up walking out with a large jury verdict — this shows what Claude is making possible, giving a small team capabilities that would typically require more funding and a much larger team.

How important to Anthropic is it to have direct customers in this vertical? And how many lawyers do you hope to eventually engage with?

The legal sector is complex, high-stakes, and has historically been resistant to new technology, but we’ve recently seen widespread demand to learn about and adopt AI. In fact, over 20,000 people registered for our How Legal Teams Put Claude to Work webinar in April. It was the largest legal session we’ve ever held. This tells me that the demand is there and lawyers are no longer asking if they should use AI, but how to use it.

With this in mind, it’s critical that we work with legal customers and partners to inform how we build the best products for the legal industry. We recently partnered with Freshfields to deploy Claude to thousands of its lawyers across 33 offices. Through the partnership, we saw ~500% growth in Claude usage within the first six weeks alone. This partnership has laid the foundation for Anthropic’s future industry partnerships and has proven what Claude is capable of when embedded into a major firm’s workflows.

Can you please tell Artificial Lawyer’s audience some more about the feedback you are getting from legal customers?

Christopher Kercher, Partner, who leads AI & Data Analytics at Quinn Emanuel, built his firm’s litigation platform on Claude with virtually no coding background and treated Claude like a member of the case team — onboarding it with chronology, key excerpts, and themes the way you’d onboard a partner joining mid-case. He said the work product is far beyond what he would have done on his own, probably ever.

We’ve also heard from Harvey’s Head of AI Research that Claude Opus 4.7 scored 90.9% on BigLaw Bench — the highest score of any Claude model. And Eve’s CEO told us Claude wins every time on the metrics that matter for legal work, particularly grounding and citation faithfulness, which is why their highest-stakes pipeline runs on Anthropic.

I also recently polled my LinkedIn network and asked what people are building. Solo practitioners told me they’re building their own contract and matter management systems, in-house legal ops teams are open-sourcing outside counsel management tools on GitHub so peers can fork them, and our own legal team is synthesizing regulatory enforcement news in less time. Across the board, the feedback I’m hearing is really exciting, and these new tools amplify those experiences with even better Plugins and Connectors.

Who is leading this project at Anthropic and will you be expanding the team / support team that looks after the legal sector?

I’m the product lead for Claude for the legal industry and I’ve been here nearly three years. Our Applied AI team works directly with legal customers on implementation and adoption. There are many people across Anthropic whose work directly influences our legal sector offerings.

Will Claude for Legal have a separate ‘area’ within the application (in addition to the plug-ins), and will it be charged differently?

When we first launched the legal Plugin in February, I would often tell customers “don’t use it out of the box… it’s at its best when you customize it with your own legal playbooks.” These new Plugins make that a major focus, and we feel confident that people are going to really like building with them. We also added a brief onboarding interview to understand users better and how their legal practice operates, so Claude can better tailor the experience.

All of these legal tools live inside the surfaces where lawyers already work: Word, Outlook, Cowork for long-running matter tasks, and Projects for persistent matter workspaces. The twelve practice-area Plugins install in one click and bundle the connectors, skills, and templates for specific roles, like commercial counsel, litigation, privacy, and so on. The Connectors and practice-area Plugins are available to all paid Claude customers. Enterprise admins can enable them in their workspace settings.

Thanks, Mark, exciting times.

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