Even as hallucinations show up in legal filings, Big Law goes all in on AI with new Anthropic release
Judges have been issuing sanctions. Bar associations have been issuing warnings. And in courtrooms across the country, lawyers have been caught submitting briefs containing citations to cases that never existed—ghost precedents conjured by AI tools that state falsehoods with quiet authority. None of it has slowed down Big Law’s AI bet. If anything, the industry is doubling down. On Tuesday, Anthropic announced its most expansive push yet into legal workflows, releasing more than 20 new integrations with the tools law firms already rely on. They include 12 role-specific AI plugins covering everything from M&A due diligence to employment handbook drafting, and a cross-app integration with Microsoft 365 that embeds Claude across Word, Outlook, Excel, and PowerPoint as a single context-carrying agent. The underlying model, Claude Opus 4.7, scored 90.9% on Harvey’s BigLaw Bench, the legal industry’s most closely watched AI benchmark that puts the tech through rigorous legal test uses with the ultimate goal of using LLMs to substitute for billable hours. Anthropic boasted many big-name adopters as it unveiled the tools. Freshfields, Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, Holland & Knight, and Crosby Legal are all using Claude on live matters, the firms jointly announced alongside Anthropic. And they said that a plethora of legal AI products—Harvey, Legora, Solve Intelligence, and Eve—are built on Claude’s underlying models. More than 20,000 legal professionals signed up for Anthropic’s most recent legal webinar, which the company described as the largest legal session it has ever held. Claude’s capabilities have become an “essential part” of Freshfields’ proprietary AI-powered solutions, said Gerrit Beckhaus, Partner and Co-Head, adding that the firm is co-developing agentic workflows with Anthropic that can handle multi-step legal tasks end-to-end. Christopher D. Kercher, Partner, Founder & Head of AI & Data Analytics at Quinn E