Claude for Legal: I think the vendor pitch is about to get annoying
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This might be a bit long because i’m still thinking it through, but i’ll try to keep it tight.
i’ve been watching the Claude for Legal launch and wanted to sanity check my read here.
Everyone is understandably comparing it to Harvey, CoCounsel, Legora, Westlaw, etc. makes sense. that’s the obvious legaltech angle.
but i’m not sure the important part is “Claude is now for lawyers.”
Feels more like legal is just the latest vertical Anthropic is plugging into a bigger infrastructure strategy.
a week before the legal launch, they pushed a similar thing into finance. agents/templates/workflows for pitchbooks, audits, credit memos, financial analysis, all that kind of stuff.
Then small business. QuickBooks, PayPal, HubSpot, Canva, DocuSign, Google Workspace, Microsoft 365.
Now legal. Westlaw, CoCounsel, Harvey, DocuSign, Box, Everlaw, Microsoft 365, legal plugins, MCP connectors.
and at the same time you have Notion turning the workspace into a place where agents, data, workers and humans can operate together. Microsoft putting Copilot where work already happens. Salesforce pushing agents into the customer operating system.
So to me the pattern is less “AI company launches legal tool” and more “get the model closer to the actual workflow.”
the boring historical comparison in my head is Word.
Lawyers didn’t stay in Word because Word is beautiful. they stayed because the work lived there. drafts, comments, redlines, templates, partner edits, client versions, final\_final\_v7, all of it.
once the work lives somewhere, everything around the work adapts to that place.
That’s why i think people sometimes underestimate these connector/MCP moves. not because MCP-ready is magic. it’s not. but if models can call tools, pull context, trigger actions and sit inside the systems where the work already happens, then the model is only part of the story.
the real question becomes: who owns the workflow layer before the lawyer even sees the work?
For legal, that means Word, Outlook, DMS, CLM, DocuSign, intake, research, matter updates, e-discovery, billing, client systems, whatever people already live in.
and this is where i think the next vendor wave gets annoying.
A year ago everything was AI-powered. then everything was a copilot. then everything was an agent. now i think we’re going to get the same thing with Claude/MCP/connectors.
built on Claude. MCP-ready. agent-native. workflow orchestration. connects to every model. plugs into your existing tools.
Some of that will be legit. some of it will be reheated wrapper language.
the questions i’d ask are way more boring:
* what workflow does this actually improve?
* where does human review happen?
* what does the audit trail show?
* what system of record does it touch?
* what happens when it’s wrong?
* what breaks if the vendor disappears?
* does the connector actually change the workflow, or is it just a nicer entry point into the same product?
i’m not anti-vendor (maybe i am). some vendors are going to be very valuable here, especially if they own real workflow, review, implementation, auditability, or domain-specific data.
but i do think Claude-powered or MCP-ready is a bad starting point for buying anything.
better starting point is probably: what work are we trying to make easier, safer, faster, or more auditable?
then figure out if the answer is a vendor, an internal workflow, a connector, a model, or some boring mix of all of it.
am i overreading this?
are firms actually starting to think in terms of workflow ownership, or is the buying conversation still mostly “which AI tool should we get?”
btw i did a waaay longer version of this for the blue social media but waay too long for here, can share it in comments if wanted.
Top comments · 5
- 26↑u/neverspeakawordagainI'm a lawyer who does not use AI. I have to tell you; this entire post reads as pure gibberish to me. I do not have even the *slightest clue* what point you're trying to get across here. For example: >"That’s why i think people sometimes underestimate these connector/MCP moves. not because MCP-ready is magic. it’s not. but if models can call tools, pull context, trigger actions and sit inside the systems where the work already happens, then the model is only part of the story. >the real question becomes: who owns the workflow layer before the lawyer even sees the work?" I have no idea what basically any of the words in that first paragraph mean. It is utterly inscrutable. I've read it over and over trying to figure out what it is trying to talk about, but even granting that I'm unfamiliar with the acronym "MCP" no part of that makes even the tiniest whiff of sense. And then the second line... what in the world do you mean by "workflow" in this context? What "layer"? What does any of this mean? I gotta tell you, if you're trying to sell somebody on any of this stuff you really need to cut down the jargon by like 99% and explain what it is you're actually talking about.
- 27↑u/no1ukn0w“Lawyers didn’t stay in Word because Word is beautiful. they stayed because the work lived there. drafts, comments, redlines, templates, partner edits, client versions, final_final_v7, all of it.” New to the industry or was unaware about the big ordeal in the late 90’s early 2000’s? Because this is absolutely wrong. I swear this sub is full of people that have worked in the legal world for 6 months and now understand it. You all do realize attorneys have been around using technology for decades…. Right?
- 8↑u/almostbatmannFirstly, well written (for engineers, and not lawyers). Secondly, claude is great if you set it up right. But it has shortcomings which you experience when you scale. Unless they build a lawyer app, i don’t see it getting solved anytime soon. For lawyers who want to save money and has time/curiosity, I’ve seen them setting up claude very well for their work. And when they hit a ceiling, they reach out to people like me. And claude makes great sense for them. You can get most of the work done on it - highest ROI. But you can’t get everything done on it due to restrictions built in by design (since it’s a general chat app, not a legal chat). Claude has 1M context token length. For lawyers, it gets exhausted pretty soon (due to multiple documents). But claude is designed to summarise old chat and keep the chat going. As a lawyer, you can’t afford summarised context of a document. It is hallucination. Legal chat apps (i dont know about all, I’m talking about the one i use), they do not summarise the documents, because it is build for lawyers. Now this might get solved when they have a 5mn or 10mn context length model (which one company claims is already undergoing live testing of a 12mn model). But that’s not all, MCPs have downsides too (if you install too many MCPs, it bloats your model). That’s why skills were introduced. But how many lawyers do understand these?? I’m sure, less than 50% here in this subreddit and less than 5% overall. And there are many more issues i can “cite” (but this comment will get longer than your post). In short, claude “app” isn’t the ultimate best choice for legal work as of today, but surely gives the highest value on investment. But I’m sure anthropic also understands these issues and that’s exactly why they are investing heavily on FDEs. But let’s see what happens in the future. Curious to see what happens when every law firm uses the same LLM and the same tool and heavily relies on it for everything. What will be the differentiator?
- 7↑u/dmonsterativeActually, legal was forced off of WordPerfect and onto Word and Office through Microsoft's Windows (and Windows Server) monopoly. At a time that Word was largely an inferior product for legal work. (And some think it still is.)
- 5↑u/Sumofabatch2Isn’t all of this adding another third party layer into the mix? Another thing for a legal IT (or lawyer for solo) to analyze for security, contractual service terms etc? Unless Claude operates fully locally, you’re not only picking yourself into another service provider, but you’re entering into questionable ethical territory on multiple fronts. And that’s assuming you even understand the technical jargon…