A 2026 FTI Consulting / Relativity General Counsel Report found that 87% of general counsel now report generative AI use within their teams, up from 44% the prior year and just 20% in 2023. The work is getting more demanding: matters are more complex and clients expect faster turnaround times. The firms and legal departments pulling ahead are the ones embedding agentic AI into how their lawyers actually practice.

Across the industry, legal teams are running Claude in contract review and redlining, M&A diligence, privacy impact assessments, regulatory monitoring, litigation prep, and outside counsel oversight. Most are running more than one Claude product to do it:

• Chat for chat and research;
• Claude Cowork for matter-level work that spans files and apps;
• Claude for Microsoft 365 for the hours spent in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook;
• Claude Platform for building and deploying custom legal applications.

To help leaders chart their rollout, we put together a practical deployment guide for the legal industry. It covers each Claude product, the connectors and practice-area plugins purpose-built for legal work, and a three-phase adoption plan teams can run today.

In this guide, we share:

• A product matrix for when to use Chat, Claude Cowork, the Claude Microsoft 365 add-ins, and Claude Platform
• The connectors, skills, subagents, and plugins that customize Claude to a firm or in-house team’s playbooks, precedent, and house style
• 12 pre-built practice-area plugins spanning Commercial, Corporate, Employment, Privacy, Product, Regulatory, AI Governance, IP, and Litigation work
• Use cases organized across in-house departments, transactional practice, litigation and disputes, and compliance and regulatory
• How Anthropic's own legal team uses Claude to accelerate their most tedious processes, like contract redlining and marketing content reviews
• Answers to the questions CIOs and IT leaders ask about hosting, retention, privilege protection, SSO, and audit

Check it out, here.

Get started with Claude for the legal industry.