Anthropic Pushes Deeper Into Legal Work With Claude Updates

Anthropic PBC is angling to be a major direct provider of legal technology with its latest rollout of legal tools, extending beyond its original role as a maker of frontier large language models.

The company, valued at $380 billion, unveiled this week 12 new AI tools, or plugins, for specific practice areas including corporate, regulatory, and employment law. Those plugins are bundles of various skills for the company’s AI model Claude and connections to other legal software, it said.

General purpose tools like Claude, OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini are racing to define what the future of legal work looks like, versus tailored tech solutions built for lawyers by smaller companies. Claude was the favored AI powering legal tech companies behind the scenes even before Anthropic announced its updates. But now legal technology consultants and analysts said the new products could change Anthropic’s role in the legal industry.

The question is whether the bigger platforms can be all-in-one tools for legal professionals—including in-house teams—or if attorneys need AI built by niche vendors. Legal tech companies have pitched themselves as sensitive to the needs of lawyers, and Anthropic has begun making a similar case to the legal market.

“This represents a major transition for Claude from backroom to front room,” Rudy DeFelice, who consults with corporate legal teams at Harbor, said in an email. “Rather than being the model that vertical tools rely on, Claude is positioning itself as the infrastructure through which work gets done.”

Room for Others

The new tools are significant for under-resourced teams looking for technology that can help with many different tasks, said Tommie Tavares-Ferreira, chief strategy officer at Lawtrades.

“For cash-constrained in-house teams, this is a clear win,” Tavares-Ferreira said in an email. “Twenty-plus connectors, twelve practice-area plugins, and Claude carrying context across Word, Outlook, Excel and PowerPoint—that’s a Swiss army knife in a market crowded with point solutions.”

At the same time, Claude can’t do everything—which is why she said point solutions still have a role: “A Swiss army knife is great until you need to slice a steak.”

Specialized players continue to make research and development investments to push further into their niches, Tavares-Ferreira said.

There’s room for big tech players and specialized tools, especially with Anthropic partnering more directly with prominent legal tech vendors, Gartner analyst Chris Audet said.

“Gartner continues to assert that foundational models and application layers are necessary,” Audet said in an email.

A Turn Toward Specificity

Anthropic says it’s not backing away from its work alongside tech vendors. Mark Pike, associate general counsel with the company, pointed to more than 20 links between outside legal tech software and Claude, or connectors, the company also rolled out at the same time this week.

“This is a better together story,” he said.

Pike said other companies developing legal tech will benefit from the new plugins, and the company is creating an open ecosystem where others can build on Claude.

“We see this step as in furtherance of building an ecosystem that partners have told us they enjoy seeing built on top of Claude,” Pike said.

Last week’s announcement builds on Anthropic’s earlier rollout of a contract redlining tool for Claude Cowork, a general-purpose AI agent for office work. The build-out of more legal capabilities is based on feedback from attorneys, Anthropic’s Pike said, and follows a Claude for legal webinar that had 20,000 people sign up.

“Lawyers have just really sort of exploded in their use of Claude with the advent of Cowork,” Pike said.

The previous announcement sent legal tech stocks tumbling in February because it sparked anxiety that Anthropic would take over legal tech. It also caught the attention of buyers trying to decide between enterprise subscriptions to Claude, GPT, or Gemini and more legal-specific tools.

“Many clients have come to us as they balance enterprise LLM tools with domain-specific legal AI tools, questioning which is worth their next best investment,” Audet said.

Though the previous product launch made waves, this one is bigger, he said.

Cowork’s new capabilities include hiring review and handbook updates for employment counsel; NDA triage and software subscription review for commercial counsel; and tools for M&A and public company governance for corporate counsel.

“I’m struck that the tools and skills are focused around specific legal practice areas,” Jason Winmill, who advises legal teams on tech use, said in a text message. “This kind of domain specific AI is what most in-house attorneys are seeking.”

Where Legal Tech Still Matters

Niche vendors can separate themselves by being easy to use, said Zach Posner, co-founder of The LegalTech Fund.

“We are still strong believers that whoever provides the best user experience will end up winning over time, because that’s where the attorney will feel familiar with the software,” Posner said.

Anthropic, as a large horizontal player, was inevitably going to have interest in the legal industry, just as it has moved into other industries, Posner said. Anthropic might get 80% of the way to being a proper legal tech provider, but the last piece is hard to master, he said.

“I’m not positive that anybody trying to solve multiple verticals, multiple practices, is going to be able to take the time and the attention to get that last 20% right,” he said.

Where companies like Anthropic stop and smaller vendors can build further is increasingly a moving target. New functions put Anthropic in greater competition with legal tech companies it’s partnering with, and that’s unlikely to change because Anthropic has identified legal as a key industry for its products, Harbor’s DeFelice said.

“Several legal-AI companies are built on Claude, but the overlap of features now that plug-ins are legal workflow specific is obvious,” DeFelice said. “And it’s hard not to think this is just a first step.”

Bloomberg Law is a legal technology provider.