Transcription
The man who said this, he runs the legal department at Anthropic. And yesterday, his company shipped the proverbial kill switch. 12 practice areas, 22 integrations into the software that firms are commonly using, the biggest legal AI of the release, arguably. And it dropped with not a whole lot of fanfare. So, I've been inside it since last night, the last 24, 36 hours. And so, in this video, here's everything that you need to know about it in about 20 minutes. Plus, I'm going to do two live demos of different skills in different practice areas using different tools.
If you've never used Claude for legal work, the short version is this. Anthropic makes Claude. Claude has a desktop app that includes a feature called Co-work that lets you connect to your firm's tools and your folders and files. And essentially, you can run workflows in plain English with not too much technical competence. This year, they shipped their first legal plug-in. I covered it in another video. I'll leave a link to that in the description below. It was certainly useful and a bit of a game changer, but it was just one plugin with a bunch of different skills, SOPs if you like, but they were general purpose. You had to teach it everything about your practice for them to be of any real value. But yesterday, they shipped what that one was warming up for, I guess, not a version bump. It was really a rebuild. And I think they were responding to a lot of the feedback they got, and it's really putting a stake in the ground that Entropic is taking the legal industry and its legal skills and capabilities very, very seriously.
So, just to recap, there was 12 different plugins, one for each major practice area. There's still plenty of practice areas that are not included, but litigation has 19 skills from memory. Uh, employment has 20, IP has 12, and so on. Every plug-in ships with its own setup interview, its own preference file, and its own connection points into the software that you're already paying for. And so, that setup is what allows it to be customized to your firm, your practice area, your specific workflows, and your tools. And that's what the first legal plugin really missed. I'm going to show you all of it. What's in each plugin, how the structure works, how to install it, and then two demos that tell you different sides of the same story. So firstly, litigation legal wired into Cleo through Zapia and an MCP. And essentially, that's a story of how you bridge a system that Anthropic didn't build a connector for. Unfortunately, they built connectors for a lot of common legal tech, but not Cleo. So I'll show you how you can connect to Cleo in two different ways. Then IP legal running a live trademark clearance through the native court listener connector. And that is the story of what Anthropic actually built for. That's a native connector that's super easy to get started. But both are real. Both ending and outputs you could actually send to a client after a partner review.
Okay, so quick context on how we got here because I think it explains why this release looks the way it did. I'm sure they got a lot of good feedback since they've run this webinar, but back in April, Enthropic ran a webinar on how legal teams are using Claude. 20,000 people registered. It was the largest legal session they had obviously ever held. And I think that tells you something. It's telling you that lawyers, in-house council, legal ops, parallegals, law clerks that they showed up presumably in very high numbers. And I guess Entropic wasn't expecting it to be that popular because reportedly they were really really surprised. In the time since that webinar or around that time, there's been a few pretty critical things that have taken place that I've taken notice of. And I think Freshfield signing a co-inovation deal with Enthropic was a big one. That's a blue chip firm betting on Claude as a foundation partner, not just a tool. Quinn Emanuel built their own internal litigation platform on top of Claude. Um, the partner who led it actually said that they didn't have any coding background. So, think about that. That's probably a $1,500 partner building and shipping software because it got more approachable. Thompson Reuters, the company that obviously owns Code Counsel, one of the biggest legal AI products in the world, rebuilt Code Counsel on top of the Claude agent SDK. And then finally, I saw a quote from Crosby Legal. They said that they were using Claude and that that it was freeing up their team to focus on what matters. Lawyers were applying expert judgment. And this is just me reading between the lines. But I think this release today is probably what Claude has been learning through these conversations and these partnerships with these types of firms. A complete legal product line built around real practice areas ready to install in, you know, 15 20 seconds. And I'll show you exactly how you can do that.
Now, in just a moment, I'll jump over to the Claude interface and show you all the skills by practice area, but I thought it would be just useful just to give you an idea depending on your situation what skills you have at your disposal. And so, if you're inhouse council, general council, I think you've probably got seven really good ones to choose from. So commercial for contract reviews, NDAs, MSAs, escalations, corporate, you've got M&A due diligence, board minutes, entity compliance, uh, employment for hiring, terminations, investigations, leave tracking, and so on and so forth. Now, if you're at a firm, I think there's two that really stood out. Litigation legal has 19 skills inside of it. Matter intake, chronology building, demand drafting, privilege log review, deposition preparation, brief section drafting. It's the deepest plug-in uh in the pack bar none. IP legal has 12 skills. Trademark clearance, freedom to operate, cease and desist, drafting in both directions, and invention disclosure screening. Now, if you are a law student or you run a clinic, there's three that are particularly useful for you. I think law student skill, the law student skill handles bar prep, IRA, among other things. Legal clinic handles client intake, deadlines, supervisor review cues, and so on and so forth. And finally, the legal builder hub is the plugin that installs other plugins, community built out skills, vetted um install. I guess one way to think about it is the app store for legal skills.
Okay, now I'm going to show you how to install them. And so what I've got here, and I'll leave the link to this in the description below, but this is an anthropic GitHub repository. Don't really need to know what that means except you just want to copy that URL. Come over to co-work and customize. come over to personal plugins and you're going to go create plugin and then go to add marketplace and then what you're going to do is just come up here, paste the URL, hit return or enter and then sync and then you'll see they install really really quickly. Now you don't need to install all of them and they don't all install at this stage. You need to go into each one that you want to install and just click the little plus button and then you'll see in the left hand side of my screen you can see that they're all adding and I'll just I'll add them all now for just demonstration purposes. Now, when I click up, you'll see that when I click into each one, uh, these are the skills. Okay. Now, if you click see all, you'll probably see a few more as we do there. Law student, it's got quite a lot. Look at corporate legal. And so, these can now all be used inside of your Claude instance. And I'll show you some examples of exactly how you can use them.
Now, let's let me also show you the connectors. Okay. So again, come over to customize, come over to connectors, and then I think a really good way to do it is just come up here, browse connectors, and then just sort by, sorry, filter by legal, and then you'll see all that are there. And so there's some, you know, widely used platforms. Ironclad, court listener, box, docuign, Harvey's there, I manage. So you know, there's a there's a whole bunch that they didn't have previously. 22 in all. Now this is a key difference from legal plug-in 1.0 for example. 2.0 is set up in such a way where as I said you can customize it to your firm, your legal team. And so every plug-in works the same way. Three steps essentially. You only do the first one the first time you use it. And so step one is that cold start interview. You install the plugin, you type something like cold start interview. And Claude asks you about your practice, what jurisdiction, what types of matters, what output formats your firm uses, who reviews everything at the end. takes 10 to 15 minutes to go through it. And so don't skip it because that is the customization that makes the output so much better. Step two is the customization. And so Chord takes the answers, writes them into a preference file, something called a preference file. Every skill in the plug-in reads that file before it does anything else. Your firm's voice, your firm's checklist, your firm's rules. Step three is the skills themselves. Now that you've done that setup, they're going to produce a high quality output. Each one is invoked or started with natural language or a slash command. SLN NDA review/matter intake/clarance. You run the command. You point claude at the document or the facts and you get the output.
Now, one safety thing worth saying up front. I know it's obvious, but it does shape everything that comes after. Every output is a draft for attorney review. Anthropic says it. The plug-in says it. I'm saying it. The thing that makes a great lawyer great is that judgment, right? AI doesn't replace your great judgment. And that stays with you. But what it does account for is the thing that eats up most of your week, the operations and production work. And that's what these plugins do really really well. And so I'll just come back over to Claude right now and I'll show you how you can invoke one. So let's just go back to a uh let's just start a new session here and let's invoke a skill. And so if you just hit slash command and you scroll down, you'll see them all grouped by the practice areas that we just installed, right? And so let's do the cold start interview for commercial legal. And so this is going to take me through that process, that setup process. It'll take about 10 minutes.
Okay, so demo one, we're going to use the litigation legal plugin and skills [music] that sit beneath that and we're going to wire that into Cleo. But before we run it, one word about the wiring because this is where it can become difficult for law firms. [music] Cleo is not in anthropics 22 connector launch list if you will. Neither is centerbased practice p my case [music] smokeball. There's a lot. So if you run into any of those, you are left with a a few ways to connect them. But you have to do that without that native bridge. So there's two ways I'm going to show you right now. Now the first way is using a tool called Zapia or a tool comparable to Zapia like make.com. But Zapia has a fantastic MCP. Now here I am on the Zapia homepage. If you just come down here to MCP servers, you're going to see Claude pop up straight away. Just come over here to new MCP server. Now just make sure you select Claude, not Claude code. You click on that. It's going to give you a prompt. You copy that prompt. You come over, you open a new session, and you paste that in and it's going to show you what to do. The other option is you can do it from within itself. [music] And so go to customize, go to connectors, and then come up here, browse connectors. You'll see I already have Zapia connected. You just type in Zapia, and then it's basically just the reverse. It's going to connect you to [music] your two environments together. You're just going to have to log in. And then once connected, you can come into Zapia or [music] any tool that you connect and you can change the permissions, right? So in Zapia, there's a whole lot of different things that they can do. court listener you can see here and you can change whether you [music] want things to uh proceed without approval whether you want to approve or whether actions are not allowed now Zapier is great cuz it's extremely easy as you just saw but when you use a tool like Zapia [music] or any connector there's certain things you can and cannot do also you need to have an account for [music] every single lawyer yes there are enterprise solutions where they can be set up at the admin level but you still need to authenticate at the individual lawyers machine [music] and so that's a setup process that's an additional cost. The other option is to use something called [music] MCPs. Now, you can build your own or you can use MCPs that are available. And it just so happens that there are a few Cleo MCPS available right now. And they all have different capabilities. Some can create matters, some [music] can't. Some can add task, some can't. Some can just read things from your Cleo environment. And so when you get to a GitHub repository like this, you want to have a look, take your time, [music] see what it can do. So you want to find something called the readme. You see it here. And that basically tells you what it can do, what its restrictions are, what it can't do. Now, there are a [music] few other things you want to consider when you're using any connector. But when it's not an official connector, i.e. through clawed code, then you're essentially the one who's doing the endorsement and determining whether it's right to be connected to your tools. And so doing a cyber security scan is is really useful. Setting it up in a sandbox environment, running some tests can be good as well. Now, it's it's more complicated to set up. If you have an IT person, they'll be able to do it no problem. you know, it takes 5 to 10 minutes, but you still have that issue of distributing it to all of your team. And so, you need an IT person, particularly with MCPs like this to distribute the MCP connection to lawyers, but they'll still need to authenticate on their own machines. And of the two, Zapier is much easier for for a legal team. But, you know, it's good to have both options because, as I said, the capabilities and what you can do is different. And so, sometimes [music] you may be forced into an MCP if the functionality is not native inside of this API connection. And so let's just go back to Zapia because it's the easier version to demo. And so you [music] need to add the tools now that you want to connect that there's not a native connector for, right? So think of Zapia as that bridge to connect Claude to your tools that don't have that native connector. And so you can see I've got Cleo here, but there's there's thousands. There's literally thousands. And so um as you can see, ironclad is there, but there is a native connector for that. And then I'll come over here and I'll show you. So for Cleo, for example, you can see the different functionality, right? find a matter, find a user, find contact by custom field, find company, contact. Depending on the tool, there's going to be different functionality. So, you're going to make sure that what you need to do is available and possible to do. If it's not, as I said, you might need to look at an MCP. And if you do decide that you want to use an MCP or a non-native connector, there's six things that I want you to look at and think about. And you should think about these things anytime that you put a non-native connector, official or community, tween claude or codeex or whatever it is that you're using, and a system that holds your firm's data. And so, number one is data residency. And so where does that data actually move through? Some MCPs, roundtrip data through a third party server. Some run locally on your machine. Now number two is credential storage. So how things like your API keys stored? Are they stored in plain text in a config file? [music] Are they encrypted when they're at rest? Are they rotated automatically? Zapia certainly handles this for you. But a community MCP may not. And number three is the audit trail. Can you point to a log that shows an audit log of every call that was made by who, when, with what payload? essentially a lot information was passed through. The ABA's new opinion from memory I think 512 I'm not aware um on AI makes use case of this close to mandatory I would say. Now number four is what we would term supply chain and code review and particularly you're wondering things like [music] is the source of the code open. When was it last updated? Was it done by a reputable developer? I mean you wouldn't install a Word plugin or a Chrome extension from a complete stranger without any reviews. And essentially the same rule applies here. Now number five is scope minimization. Only grant the permissions the workflow actually needs. Don't give Claude right access to entire [music] Cleo account if all it needs is just a right to matters or right task. Sixth is liability allocation. If something goes wrong, a leak, [music] wrong write, a corrupt update. Who's responsible? Zapia has a contract that answers that. Unfortunately, a random [music] git repo does not. Now for me, Zapia ticks five of those boxes by default. That's why it's more often than not my recommendation. But sometimes law firms don't want to go with Zapier and that's their choice. But a vetted community MCP can take all six if you do the work to verify it. Now building your own gives you full control, but you also own everything that breaks. So I guess pick the part that matches your risk tolerance and [music] your in-house capabilities. If you have an engineer or I know that's unlikely, but if you have an IT team that can do some development work for you or is attuned to MCPS, then that might [music] be the way to go.
Okay, now let's get on with the demo. I actually just started it because it takes a little bit of time. And so I'm over here in cowwork. I just ran a new task, not in a project because it's just [music] a demo, but I always will almost always recommend that you have one matter folder per project. So what I did is I ran / matter intake and then I gave it the what complaint as an attached folder and then I gave it the account of what the client said happened. And so that's what's happening here. And so it's going through the process now of finding the files. It's going to extract the parties, the claims, the jurisdiction, all the key facts, and then it's going to create that matter in Cleo automatically. Okay. So now it's finished analyzing all that information. So now what I'm going to do is just say please create this as a matter in Cleo. And you'll see here it's asking for permission to allow the matter creation. And so you'll see here it said good matter number is ready. I'll populate it now [music] with full intake notes and all critical tasks in parallel. And so I go over here. Here is the matter and it's automatically just going to start [music] adding all the information that it's just extracted from the complaint. So you can see there the matter type is set. All the parties are filled in. It's got detailed notes and I didn't copy anything, right? I didn't come over to Cleo and type it in. It was all done automatically just based on that simple prompt and that simple command that I entered into Claude. Okay. [music] Now the last thing I just want to point your attention to is you'll see here it says that it used the Cleo MCP. And so if you do decide to connect both a ZPU connection and an MCP, then you just need to specify which connector you want [music] cloud to use, but you know, most firms are probably going to use one or the other. And so you won't need to specify which connector you want to perform that action. And then anytime you ask it to do something inside of PO, it'll naturally invoke the connector that you have.
Okay. Now, let's do another demo. And let's this time run chronology. So we'll come over here and we'll do chronology. [music] We'll hit enter. It's just going to begin work now. Now Claude will pull every dated fact from the [music] complaint and the client narrative, order them, flag gaps, mark limitation, periods, etc. [music] And what we're going to get is a structured chronology output on the screen. I ran this earlier and it was pretty impressive. Now consider this for just a moment before I show you the results. The chronology that we just ran there [music] probably takes a junior associate about 2 hours. Now multiply that by 200 active matters a year. Multiply that by an associates blended rate of let's say $400 an hour and you're looking at a $160,000 of [music] junior time per year that largely got automated and that's per attorney and that's just one skill from this cla 2.0 plugin. Now just back to the chronology you can see there's a bunch of different options that you can select to build it out the [music] way that you want. I won't do that in the interest of time and then just to demonstrate what you could do next. If you came in, typed demand draft, then you're essentially going to be feeding Claude the matter intake, the chronology, the claim amount, and then it would be drafting the letter in the firm's format, flagging sections that need a partner review and noting every jurisdictional assumption that was made. And so, it's a first draft. It's not a template. It's not a fill-in- thelank. It's a draft. You'd read it, I guess, mark it up, send it to a partner, same as you would with an associates first attempt. And so, this one was done in, you know, just a few minutes.
Okay. So, now for demo two. And this is the contrast that I want you to really be aware of and hold on to. Demo one was the workaround, right? Cleo isn't in the launch list. So, we bridged it. Demo two is what Anthropic actually built a native MCP connector shipped on launch day out of the box. Specifically, we're going to show the free law project connector. That's the team behind court listener. And so, it's the largest free legal research database in the US. millions of federal and state opinions, every pacer docket that they've collected, oral arguments, judge profiles, citation networks, all of it's queryable inside of Claude with one click of consent. And you enable it in the same way you would enable Slack, Google Drive, Microsoft 365. You just come over to connectors over here. So come over to customize connectors and you see I've got it here. But again, all you do is just browse, select it, authorize it, and then again you've got the permissions. You can reject, you can approve, you can ask for approval.
Okay, so this scenario, let me set the scene. It's a startup client. They've picked a brand name for a new product launch. Partner asks, "Can we use this without getting sued?" That's a trademark clearance question. It's the kind of question that potentially, I guess, eats up half the day of an associates's time on every new launch. So, I'm going to come over here into codework again. Now, remember, all of the all of those plugins and skills were installed. So, all I need to do is just invoke it with clearance. And now I'm going to give Claude the proposed brand name, the goods and service category, plus a bunch of other information. I'm just going to paste it there. You can see Northwind. Okay, I'm going to hit go. So, just to really hammer this home how it works, Claude doesn't just look at its training data, right? The plugin is calling out to court listener live. It's happening right now, searching for prior trademark dispute opinions on phonetically and visually similar marks. It's pulling federal case law. It's pulling the citation network around those cases. It's checking which courts decided them. That's not retrieval from a fixed data set that is out of date. You know, like these models are 3 9 12 months old in terms of their trading data. So this is a live API call into a research database happening inside the workflow in real time.
Okay. So you can see here it say good court listener returned its results. Now I have enough to draft the full memo and now it's going to write the memo. Okay. Now the memo has completed. So you can either scroll down or I could click this. As you can see it's given us a first pass uh proposed mark it talks about that knockout issues uh similar mark checks that have come up uh client identified marks what else got adjacent families confusing factors. Anyway, so very detailed and this took all of three or four minutes, maybe a little bit longer. And that was only possible because we were using an API, one of the APIs, one of the connectors that Claude shipped with this release of the legal plug-in 2.0. I don't know what they're calling it, but we'll go with that name for now. Now, on the other hand, if you want to connect Cleo specifically, then I've built a guide that shows you exactly how you can connect it to Claude, and I've got that available at legali.com. I'll leave a link for that in the description. It's a free guide that you can download and will certainly help you get set up inside of your own law firm.
Now, here's what I want you to walk away with. The first Claude Legal plugin proved this could work. What launched yesterday proved well, it does work and works at a higher degree. As I said, we've got 12 plugins, 22 integrations or connectors. every major practice area. Well, 12 major practice areas, not every major practice area, and safety rails that are built in from the very start and customizations that you're forced to go through so that the output is customized to your firm, your legal team. The judgment obviously stays with you as a lawyer. The production work doesn't have to, at least not to the degree that it used to. Finally, if this was useful, subscribe, like, comment. That'd be great. I'll try and keep getting videos like this out. And if you want help running this inside of your team, building out workflows, uh, coaching for your team, or one-on-one consulting, we do that here at Cyberactive.