Anthropic on Tuesday announced the launch of a number of new chatbot features designed to provide automated assistance to law firms. This new feature expands on Claude for Legal, a law-specific plugin released earlier this year, providing users with a new set of legal plugins and MCP connectors designed for specific legal areas.
The new tool comes amid intense competition in the legal AI space. In March, Harvey, an AI legal startup that uses agent AI to automate legal workflows, raised $200 million at a valuation of $11 billion. Last month, rival startup Legora raised $600 million in Series D funding and launched a high-profile ad campaign starring Jude Law. Legora offers similar services to Harvey. It’s an automated solution built to simplify complex legal processes that traditionally involved entire teams of humans.
Anthropic’s new tools are designed to help law firms automate specific administrative functions such as document search and review, case law resources, deposition preparation, document preparation, and other related areas. Anthropic said the plugins are bundles of functionality and automation tools designed to work across legal areas, including commercial, privacy, enterprise, employment, product, and AI governance.
Anthropic also offers a number of model context protocol connectors. MCP connects specific data sources and third-party systems to AI models, allowing the models to interact directly with them. In this case, the new MCP connector integrates Claude into a variety of software applications that law firms already use on a daily basis, such as document management applications such as Docusign and file search platforms such as Box. You can also connect to legal research sites like Thomson Reuters (which runs Westlaw).
The new connectors and plugins will be available to all Claude paying customers, the company said. These new features also build on other plugins designed for the legal industry that the company launched in February.
“The legal field is facing increasing pressure to implement AI, and companies and in-house teams working on AI are making rapid progress,” a company spokesperson said. “Claude is furthering his commitment to knowledge work, and the legal field is emerging as one of the most important and fastest-growing industries.”
AI-related failures are causing major problems in court as AI companies seek to sue law firms. Dozens of lawyers, as well as at least one major law firm, were caught using AI to create error-filled legal documents. Last year, the state of California imposed a first-of-its-kind fine against a lawyer who used ChatGPT to craft an appeal full of false citations. Federal judges have also been caught using it to draft decisions, a trend that came under intense scrutiny from Congressional leaders last year. Meanwhile, AI-generated lawsuits are said to be clogging the arteries of the judiciary, overwhelming courts with a litany of bizarrely debated legal “pitfalls.”
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