Anthropic’s sustained aim for the legal industry shows the AI lab’s recognition of the field as an easy entry point that can be used to prove the success of its technology.
On Tuesday, the vendor expanded Claude for Legal with 20 new connectors that enable lawyers and legal professionals to use Claude with legal software such as Thomson Reuters CoCounsel, DocuSign, iManage, Box and EverLaw. With these connectors, legal teams can access deep expertise and manage complex work without switching between Claude and software from those providers.
Anthropic also released 12 practice-area plugins tailored to specific legal roles, such as a commercial legal plugin that reviews NDAs and vendor agreements. Anthropic said it is also partnering with organizations such as Free Law Project, the Justice Technology Association and others to help those who have trouble accessing legal help.
The new plugins and connectors are part of Anthropic’s continued push to use the legal industry as an example of how professionals can benefit from the use of its Claude model, with the right connectors. While the vendor has dabbled in other verticals, such as cybersecurity, it targets the legal field more than any other AI lab. Earlier this year, it introduced Claude Cowork, which sent the legal industry into a panic because it offered specialized plugins and enterprise integrations. Anthropic is specifically creating AI tools and partnering with SaaS vendors in an industry that has been slow to adopt technology.
The latest move is part of Anthropic’s overall strategy to show enterprises that, if it succeeds in law, it can also succeed in gaining mass adoption in other fields, said Michael Bennett, associate vice chancellor for data science and AI strategy at the University of Illinois Chicago. Anthropic has also targeted finance and graphic design.
“For an industry that has this cultural bias against adopting technologies early on, if you can overcome those hurdles, then you can turn to other industries and say, ‘hey, even the legal industry…is doing this now,’ and seeing it benefit them,” said Michael Bennett, associate vice chancellor for data science and AI strategy at the University of Illinois Chicago.
The Right Collaboration
However, to succeed, Anthropic needs the right partners. The introduction of connectors to the software that legal professionals use is a way for the AI Lab to acknowledge that it still needs the expertise of legal SaaS vendors like Thomson Reuters.
“There is still a gap between what a foundation model can do versus what a specialized SaaS company that focuses on the vertical market can offer,” said Lian Jye Su, an analyst at Omdia, a division of Informa TechTarget.
SaaS vendors are not relying solely on AI expertise, but also on the data pipelines they have built to store and manage enterprise data, he said. For example, in legal, there is a focus on document processing, understanding legal context and making legal recommendations, all of which are not the strengths of LLMs but are strengths of the specialized connectors tied to legal partners. Those connectors could sway legal professionals who have been considering Anthropic but have not yet made the move.
“This is probably going to reduce the anxiety a bit because these connectors are to be implemented inside the cyber secure domain of the firm,” Bennett said. He added that this approach also reduces implementation costs, so there is no need to worry about building bespoke software to connect Claude to a legal firm’s own database.
Moreover, it reduces the risk of shadow AI, Bennett added.
“There are fewer reasons for practitioners, lawyers, folks on the business side of law firms, to go outside of the cyber, secure domain of a firm and access some AI and then unintentionally reveal and expose the confidential or proprietary information,” he said.
Some Problems
However, challenges remain, especially hallucinations, which the legal industry has been plagued with since the introduction of large language models.
Bennett said that if an AI connector makes a slight modification to a legal document when it shouldn’t, it can be problematic and lead to serious legal problems.
“That known risk may be amplified in situations where we’ve got a culture of moving slowly with respect to the technology, a history of fumbling the ball when it comes to hallucinations,” he said. He added that there is a need for “meaningful, substantive guardrails ” to avoid that kind of potential risk.
Moreover, with Claude sitting on the cloud, some legal companies might still not like that Su said.
“Different legal firms may have different appetites when it comes to where the data sits, and some will still prefer to sit on-prem or maybe have a hybrid type of setup,” he said.
