The fear that gripped the legal publishing business this week, triggered by the release of Anthropic Claude Cowork with plugins, appeared to herald a new era in which AI threatens to diminish the influence or even replace software providers that serve specific professions such as law, sales and finance.
The generative AI vendor on Jan. 30 introduced several plugins for Cowork, an AI agent originally introduced on Jan. 12. Claude Cowork enables users to give Claude access to a folder on their computer. The agent then reads, edits, or creates files in that folder. Cowork with plugins lets users customize the agentic tool for specific industries. For example, a sales plugin can connect Claude to a sales team’s CRM and teach it the sales process; the legal plugin can help legal teams review documents, flag risks, and track compliance.
The dramatic plunge earlier this week in the value of stocks of legal technology and publishing firms such as LegalZoom, Thomson Reuters and RELX, owner of LexisNexis, was widely attributed to the Anthropic product releases.
Fear of ripple effects across the broader SaaS industry gripped the tech world, driving a sell-off of many software stocks and heightening concern that AI technology could displace entry-level professionals and other workers.
An Upset
While Cowork with plugins works across different domains, the legal sector felt the biggest effect when major legal and professional services saw huge stock declines on Feb. 3 and Feb. 4. For example, Thomson Reuters saw a 16% decrease in its stock’s value, while that of Dutch professional firm Wolters Kluwer saw a 10% drop.
The immediate stock market response to the new Anthropic tools underscores how easy it is for a general-purpose model provider to create domain-specific agents that can automate repetitive tasks across the sales, legal, and finance industries, among others. It also shows the rapid maturation of the AI market to the point at which it is now possible and becoming more common to use AI agents to accomplish tasks in many professional settings.
“This is not a matter of people fooling around with ChatGPT or asking queries; this is actual agentic AI built specifically for law and built specifically for certain tasks,” according to Michael McCready, owner of law firm McCready Law in Chicago. He noted that while some independent legal information providers, such as LexisNexis, are also rolling out agents that assist lawyers, Anthropic’s ability to develop and release agents at scale makes it a direct competitor.
Removing the Entry Point
The concern about an AI disruption of the legal profession is understandable because Cowork with plugins aids seasoned professionals and helps cut costs, said Michael Bennett, associate vice chancellor for data science and AI strategy at University of Illinois Chicago.
“The most expert legal practitioners and advisors who have deep skill are going to benefit from this in the short term,” Bennett said. “These are the folks who have incredible expertise and will now be able to reduce the cost of doing the drudgery.”
However, the human cost of reducing tedious work and using AI agents to support seasoned professionals is that it might lead to the loss of lower-level positions such as recent law school graduates, McCready said.
“If this mundane, routine stuff can now be [done] by agentic AI, know, it eliminates that lower level, and it’s going to be more difficult for entry-level attorneys to find positions that historically have been open to them,” McCready said. “Likewise, why would clients who are paying by the hour want to pay an associate’s hourly rate to do work that can be done through AI?”
The new reality being created by AI highlights how many white-collar workers’ jobs will evolve over the next few years.
“We are only at the very beginning of that,” Bennett said.
