When Claude for Legal announced its formal launch most of the focus was on the 12 main plugins and the MCP connectors to legal tech tools, but right now there are over 90 legal AI agents that you can use and adapt, all listed on its GitHub page.
Or as Anthropic states, these are ‘named agents – end-to-end workflow agents (e.g. Vendor Agreement Reviewer, DSAR Responder, Termination Reviewer, and Claim Chart Builder) with job-style names and a single command to run each one.
‘Each agent is named for the workflow it runs. They’re the most common surface, start with the ones that match your work, then tune the underlying skill, the practice profile, and the connectors to how your team does it.’
In short, this is the more granular – and in reality the more useful aspect – to a lot of what is now on offer via Claude for Legal. (See more details below.)
Meanwhile, Mark Pike, associate general counsel at Anthropic and the lawyer leading the Claude for Legal roll out, noted that the new ‘Opus 4.8 continues our work to make Claude more helpful, harmless, and honest. You can feel it in practice as the model flags uncertainty instead of papering over it.
‘The Claude for Legal plugins are built the same way: source attribution on citations, jurisdiction established during an onboarding interview, and explicit gates before anything is filed, sent, or relied on. The lawyer reviews and verifies; the tooling is designed to make that review easier, never to skip it. Honest model, honest tooling.’
Claude for Legal Agents
As noted, there are now over 90 Claude for Legal agents that you can deploy inside your law firm, inhouse team, or even at law school. Each can be modified in natural language – and that’s really generative AI’s superpower, i.e. you can customise code to do exactly what you want, in this case on an agentic basis, without having to be an engineer. That said, some engineering skills will still be useful when it comes to tying the whole thing together in the complex environment of an enterprise tech stack.
Here’s just some of the agents you can tap and the key point here is that many of these agents are ‘active’, i.e. they can be set to run all the time on certain streams of information / documents / emails coming into your team.
As you can see, there are plenty of agents here that provide on-going capabilities. e.g. the deal debrief – which provides a ‘weekly sweep of signed agreements with playbook deviations’.
And here are some more, covering litigation, as well as the legal clinic and law student needs. The one that ‘predicts professor’s questions and drills them before class’ is sure to be a popular!
Is this a big deal?
As noted, the market has tended to focus on the larger elements of Claude for Legal, but it’s only when AI tools get granular that they become truly useful. E.g. a tool that ‘reviews contracts’ in general sounds cool, but its value to a lawyer who is focused on very specific aspects of their clients’ needs won’t be that great.
The more granular and customised you can get to each lawyer’s specific needs, the more useful – and likely more accurate – the outputs. Then with agents you can add the ability to set such tasks to run continuously, in some cases – and which can still be refined as you go along. That increases their value even more.
Can you build and customise agents and workflows with Harvey, Legora, Lexis and TR, and other legal tech companies? Yes, 100% already as well. But, what this offers is a very high level of customisation via a direct interface with a major LLM. Of course, the flip side is that you have to use Claude here. The legal tech platforms can pick and choose whichever model, or mix of models, they want for every single need, which some would argue gives them an edge. Although, others might argue the difference between all the leading models is not so massive.
Either way, the ability for lawyers to tap agents and deploy such powerful tools with relatively little tech know-how is a sign of the times. AI is truly empowering lawyers – and wannabe lawyers as well.
More on their GitHub page here.
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