In February, a small release from Anthropic set the legal world abuzz. Now, AI Lab is expanding its legal ambitions even further.
Anthropic on Tuesday released a suite of new legal tools for Claude Cowork. This allows law firms to incorporate their go-to software into AI tools to more easily automate work at scale.
Anthropic’s advance announcement of legal tools in February led to a drop in stock prices and fears of a “SaaSpocalypse” as investors worried about the impact of AI on the software industry.
Anthropic’s latest release allows you to handle a wider range of legal tasks.
If these tools become widespread, this tactic could serve as a strategy for Anthropic and OpenAI to use in other industries, such as finance and healthcare. When companies connect industry-specific tools to AI models, their products can mimic software veterans.
“We found that just giving these generic models access to the same tools that lawyers use is like giving an engineer a law degree,” Mark Pike, associate general counsel at Anthropic, told Business Insider.
Integration of new releases spans a range of legal software.
With Cowork, Anthropic’s knowledge work tool, lawyers can now access a corpus of case law texts, manage contracts, and conduct complex research. It also works with other tools commonly used in the legal industry, including CourtListener, Definely, Thomson Reuters’ Westlaw, Courtroom5, and Box. OpenAI-backed legal startup Harvey also joined Cowork’s list of connections.
Anthropic has bundled some of these partnerships with pre-built AI skills. These tools can handle specialized legal work. It includes topics such as employment, privacy, and product law, as well as features to assist law clinics and law students.
The February launch served as general legal aid. Pike said the difference between that release and this new release is “like buying an off-the-shelf product versus getting something that you can customize and make changes to.”
Pike said more than 20,000 people registered for a recent Anthropic webinar on legal matters as part of the industry’s growing interest in leveraging AI. That interest has propelled startups like Harvey and its rival Legora to multibillion-dollar valuations. Long-standing legal tech companies like Thomson Reuters and RELX also have their own AI tools.
Today, Anthropic is steadily improving its model and asserting its place at the center of its vast and important ecosystem.
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