Tech • IA • Crypto
Working Like a Lawyer with Claude
TL;DR
Law firms and in-house teams are rapidly adopting AI tools to transform legal work, but balancing innovation with risk management remains a central challenge.
KEY POINTS
AI Integration in Legal Practice
Legal teams are increasingly embedding AI into daily workflows, particularly in enterprise environments. Product lawyers supporting advanced AI platforms are now routinely involved in reviewing features, assessing compliance risks, and guiding product development. This reflects a broader shift where legal professionals are no longer just advisors but active participants in shaping AI-enabled products.
Rise of AI-Assisted Knowledge Work
Beyond simple chat-based use, more advanced applications are emerging through AI systems capable of interacting with local environments to generate documents such as Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files. This capability allows legal professionals to automate routine outputs and focus on higher-level analysis, significantly expanding productivity in knowledge-heavy roles.
Handling Large-Scale Information
AI systems are proving particularly effective at synthesizing vast volumes of information. Legal teams are leveraging tools to analyze memos, product roadmaps, and regulatory updates simultaneously, enabling faster identification of patterns and insights. This ability to unify disparate data sources is becoming a key competitive advantage for firms managing complex, fast-changing legal landscapes.
The “Context Gap” Challenge
One of the most difficult issues remains the “context gap,” where legal frameworks struggle to keep pace with rapidly evolving technology. Product specifications and capabilities can change quickly, creating uncertainty for compliance and risk assessment. Lawyers must continuously adapt to shifting technical realities while maintaining consistent legal standards.
Strategic Value of Legal Expertise
As AI adoption accelerates, top law firms are reevaluating how they deliver value. The focus is shifting toward deeply understanding client operations and providing highly contextual, integrated advice. Legal expertise is increasingly defined not just by knowledge of the law but by fluency in clients’ technological and business environments.
Institutional Coordination of AI Efforts
Large organizations are exploring ways to centralize their AI initiatives rather than operating in silos. Bringing together disparate experiments and use cases into a unified strategy is seen as critical for maximizing impact and ensuring consistent governance across teams.
Generational Perspectives on AI
Junior professionals are often leading the way in understanding both the benefits and limitations of AI tools. Their familiarity with iterative workflows and human-in-the-loop processes is helping shape best practices, particularly in maintaining accuracy and accountability when using AI-generated outputs.
Balancing Risk and Opportunity
The legal sector is navigating a dual reality: AI presents significant risks, including errors, compliance challenges, and ethical concerns, but also offers substantial opportunities for efficiency and innovation. Legal advisors increasingly describe their role as guiding clients through uncertainty, maintaining steady judgment amid rapid change.
CONCLUSION
AI is reshaping legal work at every level, requiring firms to balance technological adoption with careful risk management while redefining the value of legal expertise in a rapidly evolving landscape.
Full transcript
I'm excited to chat with you today Anna. I know me too, Mark. I help lead a team of product lawyers who focus on Anthropic enterprise product offerings. That includes the platform things like Claude code and other enterprise verticals. And so we're often reviewing new features and products that are coming out, from Anthropic and sometimes I need advice and counsel from trusted experts. And so I call Anna, I am the global co-head of AI at Freshfields, which means I help head up our AI practice globally. And my own personal practice. I do a lot of what you might call as AI product counseling. We have, I think, 5700, staff and lawyers worldwide who are using AI. And usually one of the stickiest and kind of trickiest areas for us to navigate is the context gap. And understanding, like what does the spec look like today? And the fact that it might look different tomorrow and your engineering teams are moving at the speed of light? A lot of lawyers, when they first start using Claude, are just using it for these sort of chat based question and answer experiences. But the more powerful stuff to be unlocked is by leveraging code, which is, the ability for Claude to use your local computer to create the types of files that you would typically be using as a knowledge worker. So that could be, Microsoft Word document or an Excel spreadsheet or even a PowerPoint. If there's one thing that I feel like AI is very good at, it's making sense of large bodies of information and spotting themes across them. And so being able to upload a lot of existing memos and docs and product roadmaps and new legislation that's coming out and just putting that all in one place and then be able to have a conversation with Claude to create that new artifact that's based on all the things it's seeing across those different surfaces. Everyone's asking this question, how does I make us different in the future? What does the future bring to knowledge, work or otherwise? And from my perspective, you know, one of the core questions in that is how do we add value if we are, you know, one of the top global law firms? What does it mean to be the most, you know, fluent in our clients? Enterprises and their kinds of, you know, hopes and dreams? How do we actually deliver on advice in the most seamless, contextual way possible? We as an institution are doing all these great things. But what if we took everything we were separately doing with AI and then brought it to the center of the conversation? I really appreciate sometimes our junior associates. Sometimes they have such an inherent understanding of, you know, the benefits, but also the limitations and the right process for checking and being in the loop. The role that we play, ideally for our clients, is to help them sail a ship. Sometimes they're sailing through a really rocky, strait and there might be, you know, rocks to the left and rocks to the right. And they're being slammed by, you know, hail and all of these things. But at the end of the day, our judgment is the thing that keeps the rudder straight. At Anthropic, we have this saying of, holding light and shade. And that's one of our values. And for me, that can represent that. I feel like there's so much risks in this technology and that as lawyers, we often help our clients navigate that risk. But there's also a lot of promise.