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Claude for Legal

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Re: Claude for Legal

#111

Post by zero_shift »

bryant wrote: post #11
droidjj wrote: post #7

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,…

Citation for #1 - https://harvardlawreview.org/blog/2026/03/united-states-v-he... > Judge Rakoff of the Southern District of New York — addressing “a question of first impression nationwide” — ruled that written exchanges between a criminal defendant and generative AI platform Claude were not protected by attorney-client privilege or the work product doctrine. Much more to it than this one-liner that I pulled out, bu…

> Much more to it than this one-liner that I pulled out, but safe to say, don't rely on or put your legal defense etc. (or elements of it) into AI unless you want it discovered.

"You are an expert defense counsel with experience in Murder 1. Do not hallucinate. Let's say tomorrow my spouse is found strangled..."

Re: Claude for Legal

#112

Post by froindt »

john01dav wrote: post #52
engineer_22 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to be admitted to the bar to practice law. Which is to say, other lawyers must recognize you as a lawyer, and this recognition can be taken away.

More practically, this means (in America) that you need a JD degree (4 year grad school), to pass an exam, and pass a(n oftrn horrifically thorough) character background check.

Minor point, but law school is only 3 years long.

Re: Claude for Legal

#114

Post by DannyBee »

awongh wrote: post #16

How does this compare to the other legal tech ai startup products? Harvey is valued at $11b

Lawyer here:

Harvey was never very good, or useful. It mostly exists so large law firms can say they do AI. AFAICT. I hope it dies and something useful takes over, but i doubt it :)

Keep in mind harvey starts at like 50-100k, and is well out of the cost range of the vast majority of law firms.

This will help random people dealing with small claims, people cosplaying lawyers to avoid costs, etc.

It will have no effect on the legal startups that are actually good (Eve, et al), because what this stuff does is nowhere close to what most lawyers outside of commercial contract legal counsel spend their time on. I considered doing some AI legal consulting/startups myself, and so have spent tons of time literally sitting down with lawyers in various areas outside of my own and seeing where they spend their time for real.

Let's take one area: personal injury attorneys who aren't in the volume game (which is owned by a fairly small number of large national firms) spend lots of time on case valuation, getting data, and exhibit prep.

None of this is going to help deal with getting missing medical records from places that require that you literally fax random stuff to them, and then call to followup 18 times. I wish i was kidding. Even getting electronic medical records is still a serious pain in the ass, human wise.

Or analyze the past 1000 cases you have (100-1000 documents per case), including what county, what opposing lawyer, counsel, plus the 1000 documents in this case, and give you a sense of how valuable this case is or not.

Or if you are a family lawyer, actually mediating a divorce.

Things like this are what actually useful specialized AI legal products do or at least help with.

Claude is very far away from being able to handle most of these things. It is a jack of all trades tool. Will it be able to do this someday? Maybe.

Additionally, keep in mind most legal startups i've run into are based on caricatures of what lawyers do (IE startups who think that most personal injury lawyers are running around after auto cases and trying to be high volume, etc).

Any lawyer who has deal with legal startups could very quickly tell you which will make it or not, because it's pretty consistent which solve real problems that will be hard to commoditize through things like claude for legal.

Re: Claude for Legal

#115

Post by DannyBee »

romanovcode wrote: post #82
awongh wrote: post #16

How does this compare to the other legal tech ai startup products? Harvey is valued at $11b

Same as it compared against "Build your website without any code" startups 2 months ago. Now they are dropping like flies. A life of every thin wrapper company will be the same. Anthropic/OpenAI will just cut the middle-man as soon as they see potential.

While i agree for the most part, they can only cut the middle man so many times before they get themselves in antitrust trouble.

I suspect that will happen faster than they'd like, because regulators (at least outside the US) are not interested in a repeat of Google/Amazon/Facebook/etc.

Re: Claude for Legal

#116

Post by jackb4040 »

OkWing99 wrote: post #8

Anthropics New Playbook: `/loop 2days /create-new-{insert-industry}-md-files` 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 com…

Fake verticals created for no other purpose than to pad out a page in the IPO prospectus. That is literally their purpose, there is no technical or business content here worth discussing, but HackerNews is so pilled it can't help but discuss. Maybe after the 100th "Claude for dog walkers" announcement we'll catch on.

Re: Claude for Legal

#117

Post by petra »

teeray wrote: post #101
droidjj wrote: post #7

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,…

Can’t #1 be solved with the stroke of a pen? “Legal queries to LLMs shall be subject to the same attorney-client privilege”

Why? The social environment the judge probably includes lots of lawyers.

He needs to take care of them. Snitches get stitches.

Re: Claude for Legal

#118

Post by nerdsniper »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #70
singleshot_ wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think this would be less discoverable than hosting your own email server?

Because nobody would know about it unless you told them for some reason

That might fall under the “unethical” part of my question. Could “probably” get away with it if done carefully, but I’d rather be fully in compliance.

Re: Claude for Legal

#119

Post by jongguk »

dbbk wrote: post #84
ricardobeat wrote: post #23

> for the legal workflows we see most 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?

And in what country? They know that the law is different in every country right?

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