Foreword

The legal profession is at an inflection point. The work is getting more demanding: matters are more complex, clients expect faster turnaround, and hiring is harder than it used to be. At the same time, AI has matured from a curiosity into a practical tool that can help with all three. Firms and legal departments that adopt it thoughtfully now will be better positioned for what comes next.

A 2026 FTI Consulting / Relativity General Counsel Report (opens in new tab) found that 87% of general counsel now report genAI use within their teams, compared with 44% the prior year. The longer-term trajectory is even sharper: CLO gen AI use has climbed from 20% in 2023 to 87% in this year's report. Across drafting, research, diligence, and matter management, the industry has historically been fast to adopt any technology that drives productivity by accelerating repetitive workflows. Today, that's agentic AI: systems that act on the work, not just answer questions about it. The same research found summarization (83%), contract clause identification (63%), and transcription (53%) are the top gen AI use cases inside legal departments today.

At Anthropic, we are seeing this in action (opens in new tab). Legal teams are using Claude for contract review and redlining, legal research, M&A diligence, privacy impact assessments, matter management, regulatory monitoring, and outside counsel oversight. Multiple Claude products can be used by legal teams and law firms: Claude for chat and research, Claude Cowork for matter-level work across files and apps, and Claude for Microsoft 365 for the hours spent in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook.

Legal work runs on a broad stack—contract lifecycle systems, research platforms, document management, e-discovery, data rooms, and the firm-specific precedents and house style that sit on top. Claude connects to all of it through three building blocks: MCP connectors (opens in new tab) bring matter data into Claude, practice-area plugins (opens in new tab) bundle the workflows lawyers run most often, and an open-source ecosystem lets in-house teams and firms extend Claude to match how they practice.

Beyond pure legal work, Claude is being used by businesses to manage the day-to-day knowledge work that fills the rest of the workweek, such as triaging email, prepping for meetings, drafting status updates, and other administrative work. Cowork is well suited to this kind of multi-app, multi-step overhead, so the same tool that redlines an NDA in the morning can clear an inbox and prep tomorrow's deposition in the afternoon.

This guide walks through each product, offers customer examples from across the legal industry, and shares tips on how to roll out Claude inside your organization.