The AI-based legal services industry is seeing increasing activity, and Anthropic is getting in on the action

Anthropic announced Tuesday that it will launch a suite of new chatbot features designed to provide automated assistance to law firms. The new features expand the scope of Claude for Legal – the law-focused plugin launched earlier this year – offering users a new set of legal plugins and MCP connectors designed for specific areas of law.

The new tools come amid heated competition in the field of legal AI. In March, AI law startup Harvey, which uses agentic AI to automate legal workflows, raised $200 million at a valuation of $11 billion. Last month, a rival startup, Legora, raised a $600 million Series D and launched a high-profile ad campaign featuring Jude Law. Legora offers services similar to Harvey’s – automated solutions designed to simplify often complex legal processes that traditionally involved entire teams of humans.

Anthropic’s new tools are designed to help law firms automate specific clerkship functions – things like document search and review, case law resources, deposition preparation, document drafting, and other related areas. Anthropic says the plugins — which represent a set of automated functions and tools — are designed to work across legal domains such as commerce, privacy, corporate, employment, products, and AI governance.

Anthropic also offers a number of sample context protocol connectors. MCPs connect specific data sources and external systems to AI models, allowing the models to interact with them directly. In this case, the new MCP connectors integrate Claude into a variety of software applications that law firms already routinely use – document management applications like Docusign and file search platforms like Box. Legal research sites such as Thomson Reuters (which runs Westlaw) can also be linked.

The new connectors and plug-ins are now available to all paying Claude customers, the company said. The new features also build on other plugins designed for the legal industry that the company launched in February.

“The legal sector is facing increasing pressure to embrace AI, and the firms and in-house teams that are moving forward are moving forward quickly,” a company spokesperson said. “Claude is making a deeper push into knowledge work, with the legal sector emerging as one of the most important and fastest-growing industries.”

While AI companies have sought to sue law firms, AI-related failures have caused real problems in court. Dozens of lawyers have been caught using artificial intelligence to create error-ridden legal documents, as has at least one major law firm. Last year, the state of California issued a first-of-its-kind fine against a lawyer who used ChatGPT to draft an appeal full of fake quotes. Federal judges have also been caught using it to craft rulings, a trend that drew scrutiny from congressional leaders last year. Meanwhile, AI-generated lawsuits are said to be clogging the arteries of justice, flooding courts with piles of bizarre legal “filth.”