Anthropic and Legal: What You Need to Know About Claude AI

What is Anthropic?

Founded in 2021 by former OpenAI researchers Dario and Daniela Amodei, Anthropic is an AI company that prioritizes building systems that are reliable, interpretable, and steerable. Its flagship product is Claude AI, a large language model named after Claude Shannon, the father of information theory.

Anthropic’s distinguishing feature is its focus on constitutional AI—a method for training models to be more helpful and less harmful through a set of guiding principles. This results in some notable differences from other models: Claude tends to be more cautious about generating potentially problematic content, more willing to acknowledge uncertainty, and generally tries to provide more nuanced responses to complex questions.

Understanding Claude AI: Anthropic’s flagship model

What are Claude AI’s key characteristics for legal applications? Consider the qualities you’d look for in a colleague: good memory, solid reasoning skills, and alignment with professional values. The AI assistant embodies these traits, distinguishing itself from other models in several ways:

• Strong memory: Claude has a large context window—meaning it can process and maintain awareness of significantly more information simultaneously than most competitors. With a paid plan, Claude can process up to 500 pages of text in a single session. This capability can be useful when working with complex legal documents and case files that require understanding relationships between multiple pieces of information.
• Reasoning capabilities: Claude demonstrates strong reasoning capabilities and training aligned with human values. It’s designed to be cautious and thorough, which may make it less prone to confident-sounding but incorrect responses (known as “hallucinations”).
• Flexible options: Anthropic offers multiple Claude models to suit different needs and budgets. Claude Opus 4.1, their premium offering, handles complex, long-running tasks, while Claude Sonnet 4 provides strong reasoning and precise responses at a lower price point. This tiered pricing allows legal professionals to balance capability with cost based on their specific requirements.

For legal professionals working with sensitive information and complex documents, these characteristics can be beneficial. However, like all general-purpose AI tools, Claude has limitations—it wasn’t designed specifically for legal work and lacks the features that purpose-built legal AI solutions provide.

How is Anthropic’s Claude being used in legal?

Anthropic provides API access to Claude, allowing companies to purchase and integrate its language models into their own tools and services. This has led several technology providers to build Claude into their platforms as a foundational AI component. Here are a few examples.

Notion AI

Notion AI integrates Claude’s capabilities to help legal teams organize and analyze information more effectively, providing a seamless workflow for document management and collaboration.

CoCounsel

Thomson Reuters chose to integrate Claude into CoCounsel, its AI legal assistant, specifically because of its reliability with research and document review. This integration brings enterprise-grade AI capabilities directly to legal professionals who need dependable assistance with their most critical tasks.

SuperLawyer

Law&Company’s SuperLawyer assistant uses Claude to provide comprehensive legal support, helping lawyers streamline their research and document analysis processes.

Robin AI

Robin AI selected Claude to power their contract intelligence platform, recognizing its document analysis capabilities for helping lawyers process and understand complex agreements more efficiently.

Beyond these integrations, individual firms are testing Claude for contract review, memo drafting, legal research, and more. Meanwhile, legal AI startup Harvey recently pivoted to a multi-model architecture—adding Claude into their platform to further meet client demands for flexibility and reliability. 

Key considerations for lawyers using Anthropic’s Claude AI

Before diving into Claude, lawyers need to understand several considerations about using the AI tool in their firm.

• Data privacy and confidentiality: This is critical in law. Anthropic states that it doesn’t train Claude on user prompts by default. This means client communications and sensitive documents aren’t used to improve the model, which is important for maintaining confidentiality and regulatory compliance.
• Access options: Lawyers can access Claude through claude.ai for direct interaction, or through API access and integrations with other platforms available. Many firms find it practical when AI capabilities are embedded directly into their existing software, which eliminates the need to switch between applications. For example, Manage AI is built right into Clio Manage, bringing AI assistance into the practice management workflows lawyers already use daily.
• Professional obligations: Like other AI tools, Claude can experience occasional pitfalls. In May 2025, Anthropic’s own legal team used Claude to generate legal citations—only to discover that it had hallucinated fake author names and titles. The incident served as a reminder that even advanced models require human oversight. Understanding AI legal issues is essential for responsible adoption.

The future of Anthropic and Claude in legal 

With 79% of legal professionals now using artificial intelligence in some way, firms are navigating an expanding ecosystem that includes everything from general-purpose language models to specialized legal platforms. For law firms, success increasingly depends on identifying which tools—or combination of tools—best serve their needs, rather than just adopting technology for the sake of it.

Looking for AI built specifically for legal professionals? Manage AI combines the power of legal-specific AI with seamless integration into Clio Manage, transforming how your firm handles everything from client intake to case management.

Check out Manage AI

And with Clio’s definitive agreement to acquire vLex, we’re further enhancing how law firms work with AI to deliver better outcomes for their clients. Learn more about how this partnership will help transform legal practice.