Anthropic announced Tuesday an expanded suite of AI features for lawyers and law firms, adding 12 new plugins and a collection of model context protocol connectors that tie its Claude assistant to widely used legal software and competing AI platforms.
Among the functions addressed by the new plugins are deposition preparation, document drafting, and case law research, TechCrunch reported. Two of the named tools are "commercial counsel," which targets tasks like vendor agreement reviews, and a separate tool aimed at bar exam study, Bloomberg reported. The tools span legal fields including employment, privacy, corporate, product, and AI governance, the company said. All new features are available to existing paying Claude customers.
Anthropic also released MCP connectors linking Claude to Thomson Reuters, AI legal startup Harvey, document management platform Box, electronic-discovery company Everlaw, and DocuSign. Through these connectors, users can draw on those external platforms from within Claude itself.
Separately, Thomson Reuters announced a new MCP integration connecting its Westlaw-enabled AI platform CoCounsel Legal with Claude. The integration allows Thomson Reuters customers working in Claude to access CoCounsel's legal research tools, which draw on 1.9 billion Westlaw and Practical Law documents and 1.4 billion KeyCite validity signals, the company said. In a statement, Thomson Reuters CTO Joel Hron described the arrangement as supplementary, saying it "doesn't replace the CoCounsel Legal platform or provide standalone access to that underlying content and workflow system."
The next generation of CoCounsel Legal is being rebuilt on Anthropic's Claude Agent SDK, Thomson Reuters said, with general availability expected this summer.
Mark Pike, Anthropic's associate general counsel, told Bloomberg that, outside of software developers, lawyers have become the single most active professional group on Claude, describing their usage as "at basically the highest rate of any other profession." Pike also noted that a webcast the company held on Claude's legal applications attracted upward of 20,000 sign-ups.
The features released Tuesday extend an effort Anthropic started earlier this year; a prior round of Claude Cowork plugins unveiled in late January sent investors fleeing from U.S. and European data analytics and professional services stocks, according to Reuters.
The legal AI sector has attracted significant investment in recent months. Harvey, which applies agentic AI to legal workflow automation, secured a $200 million funding round in March that valued the company at $11 billion, according to TechCrunch. Rival startup Legora raised $600 million in a series D the following month.
AI adoption in the legal sector has also produced court-documented failures. Courts have documented a wave of problems tied to AI use, including sanctions against numerous attorneys whose AI-generated filings contained errors or invented citations; California went further last year, levying what TechCrunch described as a first-of-its-kind financial penalty against a lawyer after ChatGPT-drafted appellate documents were found to contain fabricated quotations.