As a lawyer, I'm excited about this, but there are two roadblocks that I'm not sure how Anthropic will navigate:
(1) For non-lawyers who use these skills/connectors/whatchamacallits to try to get legal advice, their communications are not protected by attorney-client privilege. This will absolutely bite some people in the ass.
(2) If a lawyer uses this with confidential client information (which, to the uninitiated, doesn't just mean SSNs and bank account numbers, but "all information relating to the representation of a client") and forgets to toggle off "Help improve Claude" in their settings, they have possibly (maybe even likely) committed malpractice.[1]
Just remember that your AI chat history is not protected like attorney client privilege and can be used as evidence against you in court. If you talk to a lawyer and they use AI, those chats are privileged.
As someone who has represented themselves in tribunal before I'm definitely interested in this.
The only issue is that in some jurisdictions, like the UK, you can't just offer someone legal advice without being SRA accredited or FCA regulated.
I.e. this would effectively make Anthropic a claims management firm under the UK law.
> Under article 89I of Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 (Regulated Activities) Order 2001 ("The Order"), advising a claimant or potential claimant, investigating a claim and representing a claimant, in relation to a financial services or financial product claim is a defined regulated activity.
I'm a bit bothered by this line. Does it mean this is based on customer's sessions? Are they entitled to build knowledge bases for every profession, topic and workflow in the world using customer data?
TrackerFFyesterday at 10:57 PM
This is why I think many of the current application-layer AI startup valuations are a bit iffy. When the big AI companies like Anthropic start expanding their vertical products, the calculus changes.
I'm just wondering how committed they'll be - I guess the edge some startups still have, is the fear that product suites from OpenAI / Anthropic / etc. will go the way of Google products, a year or two then straight to the morgue.
lostathomeyesterday at 11:28 PM
I wonder what clients would think if they discovered their lawyer uses a chatbot with their confidential story. Even with redaction, patterns still emerge. Certainly I wouldn't be happy in any case.
I see this as a strong case for private AI, or an in-house stack.
Or I have to be missing something.
vb-8448yesterday at 9:49 PM
I guess at some point we will have lawyers, attorneys and judges using this stuff ... at the point lawyers will become kinda "seo"/"copywriter" experts on how to better trick the others LLM.
ameliustoday at 9:40 AM
Great, this will finally help people in online forums write legal comments that make sense.
This is only for PR. No one checks what's in those docs, or if these are real, valid or ethical. The goal here is for all news outlets to pick them up. You're not the audience.
Given the amount of free PR they can get from some AI-generated .md files, I'd probably do the same if I was on their boat.
Right now, I don't think any other AI company generates as much as slop as Anthropic does.
DeathArrowtoday at 9:08 AM
Is this usable just for US law?
IceHegelyesterday at 10:36 PM
This seems like a shot across the bow for all large Claude API customers, which I'm sure they saw coming.
But still, a TSMC style pure play model provider would win huge business in the space given how many application companies are being eaten by model companies.
awonghyesterday at 10:11 PM
How does this compare to the other legal tech ai startup products?
Harvey is valued at $11b
pawelkomarnickiyesterday at 9:58 PM
It will be hilarious to see this one play out because ChatGPT and Perplexity already do wonders for small-claim issues like tenancy laws, various personal letters, etc.
ares623yesterday at 9:57 PM
Does anyone find it weird that Anthropic's Github org is `anthropics` (with an 's') and the `anthropic` username is owned by some random dude in Australia? Imagine the shenanigans someone can achieve with that user.