Bob Ambrogi reported today on Anthropic’s biggest step yet into the legal market, releasing more than 20 new MCP connectors linking Claude to the software lawyers run on, plus 12 plugins built around specific practice areas.
A Claude YouTube video Bob shared was titled “Claude works where lawyers work.”
I was struck by how much legal is wired into the AI ecosystem. Document and contract platforms, e-discovery, research, and even Thomson Reuters’ CoCounsel, which Bob singled out as perhaps the most significant.
The access-to-justice piece caught my eye too. Anthropic is partnering with the Free Law Project, the Justice Technology Association, and other organizations to extend Claude to people who can’t afford legal help.
Seems there’s a layer missing. What’s not wired into Claude through any of these connectors is the way lawyers actually think about situations and subjects in the law.
For more than twenty years, good lawyers have been publishing their insight and commentary on digital platforms. Blogs, websites, alerts, white papers and all sorts of lawyer publishing. That body of work is where the practitioner perspective on the law lives.
Right now, an LLM looking for that perspective has to scrape it from the open web. And then it has to figure out what’s authoritative and what isn’t. Who actually practices in this area? Who’s writing because they handle these cases and subjects, versus who’s writing because they’re chasing search rankings?
We’re looking to fill this gap with the LexBlog Library. Authoritative practitioner commentary, identified by author, structured for citation, delivered as a feed to legal research platforms. Open access for submission.
Anthropic is wiring Claude into the legal market. The practitioner commentary piece remains open.