We asked three legal tech founders what they think of Anthropic's legal AI move

The context

Anthropic moved further into the legal tech market last week with the release of a legal AI plugin for Claude Cowork, its enterprise platform.

The plugin is designed to support tasks including contract review, NDA triage, compliance workflows, legal briefings and templated responses.

The move unsettled investors in established legal data and technology providers. Following the announcement, shares in RELX, owner of LexisNexis, and Thomson Reuters fell sharply, reflecting concerns that large AI developers could begin to erode the value of specialist legal research and workflow tools.

The reaction underlined how closely watched the legal AI market has become as generalist model providers expand into regulated professional services.‍

For a deeper look at Anthropic’s legal plugin and why it rattled the legal tech market, read our full article.

The conversation

Following the launch, we caught up with a group of legal tech founders and operators to unpack what Anthropic’s move means in practice for companies already operating in this space.

The discussion explored whether tools like Anthropic’s plugin represent competition, infrastructure or opportunity, and how founders are thinking about defensibility, distribution and product focus as Big AI moves further into legal.

Featured contributors

Scott Stevenson is the co-founder and CEO of Spellbook, the AI tool focused on contract drafting and review for transactional lawyers.

‍Read our interview with Stevenson on Spellbook’s direction following the startup's $50 million raise.‍

‍Alexander Samuel Kardos-Nyheim is the founder and CEO of Safe Sign Technologies, a developer of legal-specific LLMs acquired by Thomson Reuters in 2024.

‍🎧 Listen to our interview with Kardos-Nyheim about his story from A&O trainee to tech founder.‍

‍Ruben Miessen is the co-founder and CEO of LegalFly, which builds AI tools aimed at automating legal workstreams for in-house teams.

‍Read our interview with Miessen on LegalFly’s all-in approach for enterprise legal teams.