Anthropic has hired Robert Mahari to be its first official ‘Head of Claude for Legal’. He’s a Fellow of Stanford’s CodeX legal tech group and recently finished a Doctorate in legal AI at MIT. He also has his own small legal AI startup, Akiva.
He joins Mark Pike as part of the team developing Claude for Legal. And as you know, Pike, an Associate General Counsel and product lead for ‘Claude for the legal industry’, has been instrumental in getting things up and running for the legal vertical at the LLM giant.
The move comes as rival OpenAI gets closer to revealing what its legal offering will look like, following its recent hire of Ironclad founder, Jason Boehmig.
The new hire underlines Anthropic’s intention to build out its talent base for Claude for Legal, a step that is certainly needed if it’s going to scale. After all, one cannot easily service the vast market that is the legal world with just a handful of staff. AL would assume that more hires are to follow. But, we shall see.
In a statement on social media, Mahari said:
‘I’m joining Anthropic to shape how Claude serves law firms, in-house teams, and legal tech companies, from product to GTM.
For almost a decade, I’ve been weaving AI into the study and practice of law. A surprising amount of my energy went into being convincing: convincing MIT Media Lab and Harvard Law School that the intersection of AI and law merits a JD-PhD program, convincing lawyers that this technology will have a profound impact on practice sooner than later, and convincing my computer science colleagues that law is not as boring as it sounds.
No one at Anthropic needed to be convinced. This first became clear to me when Mark Pike, Eleanor Dorfman, and their team launched Claude for Legal. Since then, everyone I met at Anthropic sees that AI will change legal practice at its core. That lawyers deserve tools built with real care for privilege, confidentiality, and getting things right. And that legal education and access to justice belong at the center of this transformation. I can’t wait to work with these incredible people to reimagine the legal profession.
The expertise that matters most for creating impactful legal technology sits with practitioners. At its core, Claude for Legal is a set of building blocks that we are co-designing with the legal community so that lawyers can augment how they work. The results speak for themselves: Lawyers are highly engaged users of Claude Cowork, with enterprises seeing immense value from AI-powered use cases across their legal functions. Meanwhile, Anthropic’s models lead the field on Legora’s recent benchmark for agentic legal reasoning.
I think of my role as communicating this art of the possible to the legal community, and learning from practitioners so that we can continue to push the frontier of legal AI.’
Congrats to Robert on the move at what is a pivotal time for the general LLM-makers and their plans to go deep into legal AI.
—
Two Major Legal Innovators Conferences this November
Come and join us in New York and London this November at Legal Innovators!
Legal Innovators UK – London, Nov 4 and 5
And, then Legal Innovators New York – Nov 17 and 18.
After another fantastic Legal Innovators California, where we had speakers from OpenAI, Y Combinator, Google, Meta, and many more pioneering organisations; and our stellar inaugural event in Paris this June, we are now looking forward to the landmark conferences in London and New York, both in November, and both across two days: Law Firm Day, and Inhouse Day.
Discover more from Artificial Lawyer
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.