Anthropic Increases Legal Vertical Push With ‘Artifacts’

After the initial launch of Claude for Legal, and as it prepares for its IPO, Anthropic is now pushing deeper into this vertical with Artifacts – essentially pre-made workflows. They’ve also started a Legal Quants-style group for builders, called the Legal Ambassadors Program, which of course has a wait list.

P.S. Thanks, yes, Boston was great. Many thanks to all the team at Clio for an awesome event – more on ClioCon, Malcolm Gladwell and Ethan Mollick, later. Back in office tomorrow, but some details on Artifacts below.

Here are some examples of what Anthropic is now offering à la carte – and you can edit / add new data to / customise these to suit your needs, which now form part of a ‘Gallery’. Plus many of which also have a distinctly inhouse tilt to the use cases:

‘[With] Artifacts a legal professional brings their own documents and sources, Claude completes the first pass, and a lawyer applies their judgment to the results. They cover the work legal teams raised with us most often. [Here are some examples]

• Cite check compares a legal document with its sources and flags quotes that don’t match, wrong page numbers, and sources that don’t support the claim.
• Jurisdiction survey matrix compares a legal topic, such as data breach notice rules, across states or countries in one table, with links to the underlying law.
• Matter board turns engagement letters, emails, or spreadsheets into one board of open matters, showing the owner, next step, and next deadline.
• Playbook deviation board compares contracts with your company’s standard terms, flags each clause that differs, and sends it to the person who approves exceptions.
• Regulatory horizon scan maps upcoming regulations on a timeline, based on your  company’s business and where it operates, and ranks them by impact with links to the sources.
• Tabular review builds a table from a set of contracts, showing the terms you ask about, such as severance or non-competes, with links to the exact language.

And there are Artifacts that they’ve built with law firms and legal AI companies as well – including Harvey. See some examples here:

• AI Governance Benchmark built by Goodwin benchmarks a company’s approach to AI governance to surface potential gaps.
• Harvey Intake built by Harvey gives business users one place in Claude to send legal questions and requests, answering routine ones from Legal’s own guidance in Harvey and routing the rest to a lawyer, whose reply comes back in Claude.
• Subpoena Response Tool built by PwC turns your team’s precedents, standard objections and templates into automated, audit-ready first drafts so lawyers can focus on the complex issues while responding faster.
• Obligations Checker built by Foley & Lardner reviews agreements for the obligations of both parties and helps validate expectations pre-closing and track expectations post-closing.

And there are a swathe of things for access to justice as well and a program to help with A2J more broadly.

Is this a big deal?

Well, even with jet lag AL can say: it’s a clear effort to maintain momentum with Claude for Legal at a time of rapidly increasing competition among the ‘legal vertical blueprint’ players, i.e. ‘here’s an LLM, here’s some skills, agents, pre-built workflows….etc, and here are a load of connectors to data and other things you will need, and all of which we hope produces a strong centrality that keeps you with us and keeps you using our AI models….because that’s what we need most of all: your token use’.

OpenAI is doing this, Google too – so is Microsoft in their own, albeit different, way.

And of course – Anthropic is playing the old supply and compete game with Harvey, Legora, TR and Lexis and everyone else. I.e. ‘Please use our models, and also don’t worry about us targeting exactly the same customers that you are.’

Are the artifacts a major deal? Probably not so massive, given that a good legal engineer using what Anthropic already offers by way of workflows and agent development could have done all of the above – some really quickly.

But, what they have done is just make it easier for lawyers to use Claude for Legal – which is really just Claude.……..with some legal skills, and some connectors to legal tech companies. I.e. there is no actual Claude for Legal ….not really in the sense that there is an entirely separate LLM that is just there for legal work. It’s just Claude and then what lawyers can build with it, formalised into packaged goods that you can tap.

Any road, I need more sleep.

More here.

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Plus ! Legal Innovators UK is in 1 week on Nov 4 and 5 at the Minster Building near the Tower of London, and then Legal Innovators New York is on Nov 17 and 18 in Midtown at a great new venue – Quorum by Convene. Looking forward to chairing both. Going to be lots to explore together, that’s for sure!

Here are the express ticket registrations so you can get your complimentary passes super-fast.

To pick up your UK tickets, please follow the link below. Complimentary passes are for those working inside law firms and within corporate legal teams.

And for your New York tickets, please see here:

Legal Innovators New York Conference – Nov 17 + 18