AL View: Claude For Legal Moves Centre Stage

Friday’s Claude for Legal webinar confirmed – without any doubt – what AL has believed since the first plugin arrived, namely that Anthropic intends to move centre stage in terms of legal AI and then expand outwards across multiple practice lines.

Although the webinar with Mark Pike, associate general counsel and product lead at Anthropic for the legal vertical (see earlier AL interview), and on the engineering side with Harry Liu, made mention of several legal tech companies and the MCP connectors, 95% of the presentation was about:

• Claude Legal Plugins, of which there are now 12 and there will be more for sure,
• Customising those Claude Legal Plugins, especially to fit your specific business needs to create even more value for you and your team,
• How they are excited to see what new things the industry will build via the customisable Plugins,
• That lawyers becoming ‘builders’ is just a natural progression and part of how the profession is evolving,
• Claude Cowork as a key part of this offering,
• Claude for Word (and Power Point and Excel) are central here,
• How Claude stays with you all the way through your legal work environment, in part because of this deep connection to Word, so you never really have to leave, i.e. it becomes centre stage in the legal world, alongside MS 365,
• And it was also about where Claude for Legal is heading and how far it has got in a very short time – hint: it’s gone from 1 to 12 legal plugins in a few months, and this game has only really just got started.

In short, if you really think that Anthropic is doing all of this because it wants to send traffic to your SaaS company, then you’d be mistaken. If you want to join in, then you are welcome to add in your carefully built workflows and curated data on top of Claude for Legal, but don’t kid yourself that Dario and team are doing this to help legal tech founders increase their valuations.

And of course, why should they lie awake at night worrying if they are cannibalising what some legal tech tools can do? Ultimately, Anthropic is a tech company that is seeking to take market share – as well as aspiring to change the world for the better.

Plus, you have to see the bigger economic picture here. Anthropic is heading towards one of the largest IPOs ever. It needs more revenue – and it’s building that up. It needs believable TAM – and that is indeed growing. It needs heavy users – and its business-user pool is growing. Legal enterprise, with its millions and millions of documents, and its relentless needs, fits very nicely into this AI engagement trajectory.

Moreover, coming at this from the other direction, the appetite for AI now among lawyers from all walks of legal life is expanding at incredible rates. Now is the time to ‘make legal AI hay’, one might say, and Claude for Legal is how Anthropic is going to do it.

In a moment we’ll look at what this means for the wider legal tech world, but first some key aspects of the presentation.

What You Can Do Now, And Where This Is Headed

Pike outlined what is possible today, such as the 12 legal plugins (see below) and the MCP connectors to a host of legal tech companies, including Thomson Reuters – which is very excited about how this helps them, given that they are a legal data giant and Anthropic cannot replace them – at least on this aspect.

He also mentioned how law firms are already using Claude for Legal and in particular noted NewMod Crosby and a comment by CEO, Ryan Daniels, about putting Claude ‘agents’ into their workflows so they can focus on higher value work.

In fact, that a NewMod was one of only three organisations mentioned on the customer slide, along with Freshfields and Accenture, is a sign of the times in itself. And if there was ever a legal business that can really tap Claude for Legal at scale and never worry about business model friction, then it’s a NewMod such as Crosby.

And on this point, Pike stayed with the general narrative that Claude is there to soak up process work, which then allows lawyers to handle more value-added input. He didn’t dwell on the reality that many law firms make a significant chunk of their income from not automating process work. But then, much of the discourse felt like it was referring to inhouse legal teams. And that makes sense, as Pike is an inhouse lawyer, plus inhouse teams have far less process friction here than law firms. Plus again, if the goal is to sell into every major company on the planet, then you want their legal teams to be part of this global uptake.

There was a demo of one part of one of the plugins, for M&A, and they showed off how tabular review works. And as others have already mentioned online, it may not be the smoothest workflow yet, but on face value AL would say that if you make money from selling a SaaS product primarily based on AI-driven due diligence then you have a very formidable competitor all of a sudden.

But, that was just one small slice of what’s possible. For AL, the more important point is about customisation.

That can happen in two main ways. First you can have a dialogue with Claude to help it better understand your legal needs and your business. That helps frame what Claude for Legal can do for you.

But, the most important part is the way you can customise what is there. You can tweak the vanilla plugins – which in a non-technical way are simply a bunch of instructions in natural language, e.g. imagine explaining to a junior associate how to do X or Y legal task as part of a wider matter.

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With customisation comes two things: first you can make Claude for Legal way more useful for your needs, and thus push up value creation; and second, it will become symbiotic with your daily work, because you’ve tailored it to address your specific needs.

And of course, this all then flows through to Word, Excel and more.

As AL said in this week’s earlier article, Claude for Legal becomes the legal AI fabric, the legal tech companies embroider in their curated data and specialist workflows (at least for now), and then all of this is woven through MS Word and Excel.

But the net result is that lawyers have a new companion to their Word experience: Claude for Legal.

And as noted, this is just the start. As Pike said: ‘There will be incremental progress along the way. There are so many areas of legal work [we could build for] …. environmental law, tax law…so much we can do to build out the taxonomy [of the legal plugins].’

Plus: ‘People in eDiscovery are excited about Claude.’

And fundamentally: ‘Claude works where you work – MS 365.’

And as to how they see what they can do now: ‘Tabular review [with Claude for Legal] – it feels magical!’

In short, this is not about to pause. This is the beginning. And they’re really loving where this is going.

Impact

AL has looked at plenty of GitHub pages over the years and it’s fair to say that although Claude for Legal is all about operating in natural language, to really customise what’s there and to get into the GitHub markdowns and really change things – see their page here – unless you are familiar with this type of environment then you will need some technical help to really achieve your goals.

But, many firms and inhouse teams will be able to get that help, or bring in consultants. Plus, AL would guess that eventually the whole customisation experience will become smoother. These are early days still.

Will it be cheaper than using a bunch of SaaS legal tech tools? AL has explored legal tech spend impact before and the reality is that all law firms will keep their data providers and most will keep the legal AI tools they already have, even if there is duplication here. So, maybe the cost point is moot, for today at least.

That said, as some have pointed out, token costs will mount up and you still need an enterprise Claude licence for everyone in the firm / team. So, not really ‘cheap’ in any case. But, if you are a large firm, will that stop you? Probably not.

The real challenge will probably be in the two or three years, when Claude for Legal is deeply embedded in how many lawyers work, spend there will have gone up, and at the same time many legal tech point solutions will be facing renewals. At that point will law firm CTOs decide to trim their budgets?

That said, some legal tech companies believe that Claude is just going to increase interest in legal AI – as they have a far wider reach and in turn trigger uptake of their products. And that is true for now as well. Claude reaches across the planet and stirs up the conversation. An indirect benefit is more interest in today’s incumbent legal AI tools.

One advantage legal tech has right now is that Claude for Legal does not have a massive dedicated sales and services team. You can still call up Spellbook, for example, and someone there will answer the phone. Can every law firm and legal team on the planet suddenly call up Anthropic and expect legal AI assistance…? Maybe Freshfields can. Many others probably cannot – yet. In short, Claude for Legal will need to build a far larger GTM / forward deployed engineering team for legal in the months and years to come.

If it does, then that could have a major impact, especially on the inhouse side where most teams won’t have a legal tech group of their own. If it doesn’t, then the growth trajectory of Claude for Legal is less clear.

For now, the buzz is with them and doing their marketing for them. But, like all things, the buzz eventually cools off. Then you have to do marketing just like everyone else. The battle for market share will redouble and possibly get quite bloody.

Maybe we will see more consolidation, and maybe some legal tech companies will turn into NewMods and stop trying to sell software in this new environment? We shall see.

Conclusion

Right now, Claude for Legal has everyone’s attention and it has a huge advantage in the fact that it is the leading frontier model. It combines with Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. It has natural language plugins that you can customise to meet more specific needs.

Legal tech companies are – at least most of them – willing to send their customers to Claude for Legal, in part because A) they have no choice but to go along with this, and B) they hope what they offer is unique and moated enough to survive the engagement.

However, it’s not all plain sailing for Anthropic’s expansion plans.

From what AL has seen, to really get the most value out of Claude for Legal, you will need some tech help to customise it and as Greg Lambert said to AL the other day, it’s in each lawyer’s individual needs that AI really becomes useful. I.e. customisation here is great, but that means taking the time and delivering the tech assistance to each lawyer to make that real, accurate and reliable. And doing that in a firm of several hundred lawyers, or even a few thousands, across many countries, will not be easy at all or quick.

Then you have all the privacy aspects, which Pike addressed head on and assured people. Although, all firms and inhouse teams will have to do those checks to reassure themselves.

And then you have all the incumbent relationships and workflows that lawyers use today. It’s not a slam dunk that they will abandon those for a plugin. And if there is a lot of duplication, then which way will the cookie crumble?

Finally, it really is a strange scenario when a long line of legal tech companies are waiting to announce how they are now working with a business that is eating – or promises to eat – part of their business.

But, Claude for Legal is here now, it’s real, it’s available, and it will only expand what it can do, and it will steadily win over more lawyers. The legal tech market – as noted – has rightly concluded that accommodation is the best strategy, especially as it’s Anthropic that is supplying this industry with its best LLMs at present. They also hope that such a massive player will actually drive up demand for legal AI tools overall, and despite some cannibalisation, that there is a net gain from all of this. We shall see…!

P.S. one last point. AL has on good authority that another major AI player is preparing to go large in legal. How that will manifest itself is not known yet, but it’s understood that key hires have taken place already. So, we must not get complacent here that Anthropic is the only LLM giant thinking about legal.

Legal tech as an industry is going through the most profound changes. And those changes have only really just started to be felt. There is a lot more to come.

Richard Tromans, Founder, Artificial Lawyer and Legal Innovators Conference Chair.

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To gain your complimentary pass for the two-day landmark legal AI event in San Francisco, please use the Express Registration here – only for those working within law firms or inhouse teams.