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. New features expand the scope of Claude for Legal – our law-focused add-on Launched earlier this year – Offers users a new set of legal plug-ins and MCP connectors designed for specific legal areas.

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 With a value of $11 billion. Last month, a rival startup, Legora, Raised $600 million Series D launched High-profile advertising 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 Launched by the company 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 They were arrested Using artificial intelligence to create legal documents full of errors, as happened in at least one Major law firm. California last year It issued the first fine of its kind Against the lawyer who used ChatGPT to draft an appeal full of fake quotes. Federal judges They were also arrested Using it to formulate judgments, which is the trend in which He drew scrutiny Of congressional leaders last year. Meanwhile, Lawsuits generated by artificial intelligence They are said to clog the arteries of justice – flooding the courts with heaps of bizarre legal “filth”.