In February, a small release from Anthropic set the legal industry abuzz. Now, the AI lab is supersizing its lawyerly ambitions.
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Anthropic on Tuesday released a spate of new legal tools for Claude Cowork, which will let law firms plug their go-to software into the AI tool and more easily automate large chunks of work.
Anthropic’s earlier legal tool launch in February sparked a stock sell-off and wider fears of a “SaaSpocalypse,” as investors worried about AI’s impact on the software industry.
Anthropic’s newest release can handle a larger range of legal work.
If these tools take off, the tactic could serve as a playbook for Anthropic and OpenAI to use in other industries, such as finance and healthcare. As companies connect industry-specific tools to their AI models, their products can mimic software veterans.
“It turns out that simply giving these general-purpose models access to the same tools that lawyers use — it’s sort of like giving an engineer a legal degree,” Mark Pike, Anthropic’s associate general counsel, told Business Insider.
The integrations in the new release span the gamut of legal software.
In Cowork, Anthropic’s tool for knowledge work, lawyers can now access corpora of case law text, manage contracts, and run complex research. It works with other tools commonly used in the legal industry, such as CourtListener, Definely, Thomson Reuters’ Westlaw, Courtroom5, and Box. The OpenAI-backed legal startup Harvey also joined Cowork’s connections list.
Anthropic has bundled some of these partnerships together with pre-built AI skills. These tools can handle legal work in specialized topics like employment, privacy, and product law, as well as features meant to help a legal clinic or a law student.
The February launch acted as a general legal aid. Pike said the difference between that release and this new one is “like buying something off the rack versus getting something custom-tailored and altered.”
More than 20,000 people registered for a recent Anthropic webinar on legal work, Pike said, as part of a wave of interest in harnessing AI in the industry. That interest has buoyed startups like Harvey and its competitor Legora to multi-billion-dollar valuations. Longtime legal tech companies like Thomson Reuters and RELX also have their own AI tools.
Now Anthropic, with its steadily improving models, is staking its claim for the center of that huge, important ecosystem.
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