Claude Cowork has introduced a legal plug-in threatening to upend the traditional legal industry. The plug-in automates contract review, and provides NDA triage, compliance workflows, legal briefings, and templated responses. It claims to be able to reproduce work similar to that routinely provided by lawyers. In the AI race to see which company can dominate first, Claude has made a name for itself and is one of the frontrunners.
Brian Boyle writes in the Daily Upside that the introduction of the Claude AI plug-in has caused shares of predominant Software as a Service firms such as Adobe, HubSpot and Salesforce to fall 1.1%, 1.6% and 2%, respectively, in January 2026. Mallika Mitra further reports in another Daily Upside article that shares of legal data service provider Thomson Reuters fell around 16% and shares of LexisNexis’s parent company fell around 14% in January as well.
AI programs like Claude Cowork will transform the legal industry. It will change how lawyers deliver services and eventually how judgments will be rendered in our courts. However, at this time, these programs require lawyers’ review of its products to ensure completeness and correctness. There have been known instances of hallucinated cases. For example, in Zhang v Chen, 2024 BCSC 285, the Honourable Justice D.M. Masuhara writes at para 29: “Citing fake cases in court filings and other materials handed up to the court is an abuse of process and is tantamount to making a false statement to the court. Unchecked, it can lead to a miscarriage of justice”. He concludes by saying that “AI is still no substitute for the professional expertise that the justice system requires of lawyers”.
(Opinions are my own and do not represent the views of any organization.)
The post The Rise of Claude Cowork Platform and the Potential to Shake Up the Legal Industry appeared first on Slaw.