7 ms·

Claude for Legal

225 points by Einenlum 5mo ago

inopinatus 5mo ago
I’m excited about the upcoming Claude for Surgery, Claude for Autonomous War Robots, Claude for Soufflé, and Claude for Nuclear Waste Reprocessing.
vb-8448 5mo ago
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.
- forshaper 5mo ago
  Almost makes me want to get a law degree.
- nozzlegear 5mo ago
  I mean, the laws are written down somewhere though. A human can still look at the actual law and surmise that the AI is feeding them bullshit.
  - macintux 5mo ago
    I think the problem is that laws overlap, with decades of case law clarifying their interactions. Looking at one law probably isn't enough to determine whether an LLM is lying to you.
    - dyauspitr 5mo ago
      In that situation I would trust an LLM over a person. It’s a digest and review problem.
  - einpoklum 5mo ago
    Human judges today often don't bother to look at "the actual law" and surmise that the human is feeding them bullshit.
- gnerd00 5mo ago
  the look on the face of the Court administrator upon hearing someone describe the "paperclip maximizer" problem.. ominous!
- giobox 5mo ago
  > I guess at some point we will have lawyers, attorneys and judges using this stuff We are already well beyond this point. Look already at the number of cases around the world where lawyers have provided documents to the court with hallucinated case citations.
Shank 5mo ago
It seems like they ripped out Lexis, which is probably one of the most important tools for lawyers: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-for-legal/pull/5 https://github.com/anthropics/claude-for-legal/pull/5.
- dolebirchwood 5mo ago
  > at partner request Curious if Thomson Reuters (Westlaw) felt threatened if they were this compelled to moan about it. All it does is make me wonder how well these skills perform when paired with Lexis (if possible?) instead of Westlaw.
  - deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
- nisegami 5mo ago
  Can't we just use the version of the codebase from before that change?
  - darkstar999 5mo ago
    Yes, they are just text-based "skills" that you are free to change to your liking.
- stopyellingatme 5mo ago
  as someone who's worked with legal entities in the past, this is likely a deal breaker for many firms. LexisNexis is an integral part of the legal system for many states.
ares623 5mo ago
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.
- dawie 5mo ago
  It made me double check if it was a fake repo.
- dsr_ 5mo ago
  One would think that they could spontaneously offer him a hundred million dollars for it and solve the problem. I half-suspect they threatened him and he stuck to his guns.
  - nerdsniper 5mo ago
    It's possible they wanted to offer that person convincing amounts of money and couldn't get ahold of them.
  - macintux 5mo ago
    Shades of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nissan_Motors_v._Nissan_Computer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nissan_Motors_v._Nissan_Comput...
  - freetanga 5mo ago
    Paying for stuff is not part of their modus operandi.
  - sahn44 5mo ago
    A mere .01% equity seems fair
- cube00 5mo ago
  >Imagine the shenanigans someone can achieve with that user. First step out of line and that account along with anything remotely connected will be banned to oblivion. Given they share models on Azure, Anthropic will have someone at Microsoft on speed dial. I've even seen disconnected commit hashes disappear during their security responses which the repo owner has no way of removing.
pawelkomarnicki 5mo ago
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.
- gosub100 5mo ago
  I would love this for poor people to fight giant corporations via 'lawfare'. It's largely unethical (just like many corporations) but just knowing how to file junk lawsuits that cost corporations millions to fight would be nice. I dont mean 'frivolous' like prisoners who file pro-se about their ice cream melting [1], but a level or two above that , that costs time and money to produce records and testimony to defend, even if nary a dime is paid out. Basically ask GPT to figure out the terms and theories to file to get your lawsuit accepted, and done by poor people who cannot afford to post $ or repay if they lose. aka "asymmetric warfare" that benefits the little guy, just like the kind private equity or other terrible corporations wield against the poor via"mandatory arbitration" clauses or damages caps and similar rules that always benefit corporations. 1. https://www.deseret.com/1994/3/21/19098386/melted-ice-cream-courts-clogged-by-inmates-suits/ https://www.deseret.com/1994/3/21/19098386/melted-ice-cream-...
- cucumber3732842 5mo ago
  It's already doing wonders for small time businesses and individuals that municipalities think they're free to jerk around because the size of the screwing they're trying to dish out isn't worth hiring a lawyer and/or fighting through court over.
  - vkou 5mo ago
    I assure you, in most democracies, most people are jerked around by other people acting in bad faith far more often than their government acting in bad faith. Landlords, tenants, vendors, business and former romantic partners, clients, banks, even your local gym is way more likely to try to fuck you over than the government is.
    - hansvm 5mo ago
droidjj 5mo ago
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] [1] https://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/administrative/professional_responsibility/ethics-opinions/aba-formal-opinion-512.pdf https://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/administrative/p...
- bryant 5mo ago
  Citation for #1 - https://harvardlawreview.org/blog/2026/03/united-states-v-heppner/ 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, 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. (not a lawyer, unlike OP, who might be able to refine what I highlighted with more precision)
  - clickety_clack 5mo ago
    Can anyone be your lawyer, or does a lawyer have to be certified somehow?
    - xboxnolifes 5mo ago
      It is my understanding that they must be certified. You are allowed to represent yourself, but it is my understanding that a non-lawyer cannot represent you.
OkWing99 5mo ago
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 company generates as much as slop as Anthropic does.
- ares623 5mo ago
  It's like that short animation of a Kiwi bird getting high[1]. Each cycle gets shorter and shorter to sustain the high. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUngLgGRJpo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUngLgGRJpo
- nozzlegear 5mo ago
  There's going to be a "Claude for wiping my ass" at this rate.
  - stevepotter 5mo ago
    I’m working on ways to evaluate and give feedback on surgical techniques. But you just helped me find a new pivot. Thanks! And yes I’m on the toilet.
    - testbjjl 5mo ago
      Wasn’t this the concept behind the toilet in the Your Friends and Neighbors series on Apple TV?
  - e12e 5mo ago
    You jest, but combination of robotics and AI is likely the only constructive way to deal with the population getting older.
- jackb4040 5mo ago
  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.
unstyledcontent 5mo ago
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.
- singleshot_ 5mo ago
  No. If you talk to an attorney and they take reasonable precautions to maintain the integrity of the confidential attorney client relationship, the privilege is preserved. If not, not preserved.
- bethekidyouwant 5mo ago
  [flagged]
  - MrDarcy 5mo ago
    IANAL but I believe discovery is where this would happen.
    - weird-eye-issue 5mo ago
      In most cases this would be coming up in a criminal case not a civil case so it would be through search warrants and subpoenas not discovery
  - oliver236 5mo ago
    why not?
  - weird-eye-issue 5mo ago
    I'm not sure if you're joking but there's actually active court cases right now where they have done just that Just a few of the perps: Hisham Abugharbieh (Florida student murders), Jonathan Rinderknecht (Palisades Fire arson), Phoenix Ikner (FSU shooter), Ryan Schaefer (Missouri State vandalism) There's also that thing involving somebody I think he used to be in the NFL and he was using ChatGPT to try to hide the body of his wife or something iirc Digital evidence is huge for the last couple of decades and this is no different... Also there was somebody who was just recently sentenced to life in prison for AI CSAM But yeah I'm sure "this is just not gonna happen." lol
arbirk 5mo ago
Would use it if it wasn't supporting the space wanker
- nozzlegear 5mo ago
  Who? There are several space wankers but I don't know of any tied to Anthropic.
  - Phelinofist 5mo ago
    I guess he his referring to Musk. IIRC Anthropic uses compute of xAI or whatever it is called atm.
awongh 5mo ago
How does this compare to the other legal tech ai startup products? Harvey is valued at $11b
- moostii 5mo ago
  Investors in Harvey and Legora are both in for a rude shock.
  - testbjjl 5mo ago
    Not sure why this was downvoted, I came to read more about it. I have a friend that runs a firm and uses Legora and can’t stand it. We have conversations all of the time about pain points. I sent him the Claude Law docs, and while he’s not technical he was intrigued because he envisions his workflows to eventually be similar to mine as a developer.
- romanovcode 5mo ago
  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.
  - DannyBee 5mo ago
    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.
- DannyBee 5mo ago
  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.
personjerry 5mo ago
RIP Harvey
- __loam 5mo ago
  Harvey was always an upstart in the legal tech industry. There's other companies that have a much better understanding of the market and compliance issues but you don't hear about them because nobody wants to talk about legal tech.
  - ahepp 5mo ago
    who do you think stands out?
    - __loam 5mo ago
      Every company with Fedramp certification.
- DannyBee 5mo ago
  Good. Harvey was never actually good.
ricardobeat 5mo ago
> 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?
- DLarsen 5mo ago
  "Are (legally and morally) entitled" vs "act as if they are entitled"... yes, a big question.
- lionkor 5mo ago
  Yes they are training on your business's data so that their AI can replace your business later. If you don't believe it, name one thing they didn't train on.
  - hirsin 5mo ago
    It definitely looks like the old tale come true - at Microsoft people would warn against using Google because then Google could figure out what we're working on, since it was pretty easy to tell where a query was coming from. Sounded far fetched back then, and on the face of it illegal, but now it's just common sense I imagine.
    - nsvd2 5mo ago
      It's pretty clear to me that these systems have a massive potential for intelligence agencies as people move more and more of their internal thought process to an external tool. And, of course, intelligence agencies are good at realizing potential.
- dbbk 5mo ago
  And in what country? They know that the law is different in every country right?
  - jongguk 5mo ago
IceHegel 5mo ago
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.
TrackerFF 5mo ago
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.
- bigstrat2003 5mo ago
  Every valuation in the AI space is iffy. Nobody actually has a solid business plan, only vibes, but that isn't stopping people from throwing money at them.
- matusp 5mo ago
  It's like asking what if AWS starts doing it, they have all the infrastructure in place. LLMs are just one cog. There is a lot on the application side they are not doing at all.
lostathome 5mo ago
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.
- MrDarcy 5mo ago
  Your lawyer uses cloud software, this is no different.
syngrog66 5mo ago
if ever there was a domain for an LLM to be sloppy, reckless or emit lies or hallucinations it would be related to law advice and legal documents er, wait
prima-facie 5mo ago
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. https://www.fca.org.uk/freedom-information/dual-regulation-claims-management-firms-february-2022 https://www.fca.org.uk/freedom-information/dual-regulation-c...
ChrisArchitect 5mo ago
Blog post: https://claude.com/blog/claude-for-the-legal-industry https://claude.com/blog/claude-for-the-legal-industry (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48113982 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48113982)
DeathArrow 5mo ago
Is this usable just for US law?
amelius 5mo ago
Great, this will finally help people in online forums write legal comments that make sense.
trunkiedozer 5mo ago
This won’t go well for them, the legal system is intentionally obfuscated and corrupt, can’t bring law and order to law and order.
risfriend 5mo ago
should rename to "claude for US legal"
redanddead 5mo ago
This is the third category they've entered this quarter
intrasight 5mo ago
Honest question: How do I convince my fiancé - who is a very busy attorney - to allocate some time to get familiar with the capabilities of tools like Claude for Legal?
- x187463 5mo ago
  I must believe, as with the medical profession's uptake of AI tools, if these tools prove themselves to be reliable and meaningfully helpful, she will experience more than enough professional influence to learn the tools.
  - dyauspitr 5mo ago
    Fiancé refers to a man.
    - intrasight 5mo ago
      While traditionally specific to men, modern usage treats fiancé as a gender-neutral term for anyone engaged.
  - intrasight 5mo ago
    I would just prefer her to be in front of that wave
    - austinjp 5mo ago
      Find people in her field who are already hopping on the wave. Better still, gently persuade her to find those people. She'll probably know where to look. In fact, I'd be surprised if her professional newsletters aren't already starting to surface those folks.
jorisw 5mo ago
I am reminded of Nilay Patel's "Beware Software Brain" piece in which he cites Legal/Law as one of the industries that tech bros vastly underestimate in terms of how much can be automated this way https://www.theverge.com/podcast/917029/software-brain-ai-backlash-databases-automation https://www.theverge.com/podcast/917029/software-brain-ai-ba... (Search for "another example" for the relevant section)
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
realty_geek 5mo ago
I wonder why there isn't much for real estate in this package. Are they perhaps working on a totally different real estate project. I am in that space and very nervous about it getting wiped out by anthropic or openAI. To be honest, I am not sure why they still haven't make a big play for that industry.
- mtnGoat 5mo ago
  I’d guess they have some kind of analytics telling them what kind of questions are being asked. It seems to me that heavily gate kept professions/knowledge will go first. As those tend to be extensive opinions to get.
- arm32 5mo ago
  It would be silly to assume they're not making a real estate product, lol.
- oflannabhra 5mo ago
  The biggest issue in the real estate world is dealing with local state, county, and municipality governments and each one's unique ordinances, etc. While I think LLMs will be great at pulling data from a variety of disparate sources (ie, records databases), or even automating interacting with them, they are not going to be great at solving the problem whose solution is "this is the person in the county court clerks office you need to talk to."
ethin 5mo ago
You would think these AI companies would learn by now that the legal field is not a place where you screw around. I mean, we just have to look at the record. Apparently, these particular AI boosters are incapable of learning
- monkaiju 5mo ago
  I mean if they aren't going to be forced to eat the liability then the hype they get from it is worth it. Not a great state of affairs...
- NoboruWataya 5mo ago
  I don't think they will ever stop screwing around in this field because lawyers are expensive, which means the potential gains from switching to AI are high. However, people seem to think the AI companies will be offering legal advice directly, as competitors to lawyers. I can't see them ever doing that, it would be too much of a liability minefield. Instead they want to offer these AI services to law firms, who will then use them in the provision of their own legal services. For better or worse, this is happening, and pretty much all of the bigger corporate law firms are now using AI in some way or another (and clients are demanding it). We will certainly continue to see issues caused by the use of AI in law, but that will be on the lawyers.
  - ethin 5mo ago
    Sure, but the record already shows how well that goes. These companies have marketed their products so badly (or well, depending on your viewpoint) that lawyers think that these tools are glorified search engines. Then they get busted in court because the LLM made up citations, quotations etc. I honestly struggle to see how that outlook will change unless Anthropic actually starts being a lot more honest in their marketing campaigns.
SubiculumCode 5mo ago
This is not from anthropic, right?
- dawnerd 5mo ago
  It's their repo
  - SubiculumCode 5mo ago
    yeah, I was confused because "anthropics", not "Anthropic." But I now see there was discussion on this very point in the threads.
yabones 5mo ago
Who's accountable when it does something wrong? Surely Anthropic Inc won't take the fall for you. There's no errors or omissions insurance, no legal accountability, no attorney-client privilege, and no bar association to handle disciplinary action. I think we should be realistic here, this is a more advanced version of those "will kits" that spit out a PDF. The legal system will not look fondly upon this stuff until something fundamentally changes. And like, I would love if we didn't have to spend thousands of dollars to defend ourselves in a culture as litigious as ours. But I wouldn't put my life and well being on this thing.
- sorokod 5mo ago
  > The legal system will not look fondly upon this stuff True, but the legal system didn't look fondly on outlawing jaywalking, until it did. Took it about 20 years in the US.
  - Dodo45611 5mo ago
    Whenever you think AI snakeoil salesmen can't possibly make a more deranged argument, Hackernews delivers
    - Procrastes 5mo ago
      A more charitable reading might be that the comment you're replying to was specifically referring to how jaywalking was a made-up offense that was specifically created and promoted to cynically protect the auto industry from liability. So there are parallels. [1] 1. https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-26073797 https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-26073797
      - rayiner 5mo ago
        That's is a deeply bizarre article. In a world where 90% of people would rather drive than walk, you'll obviously have laws that regulate when and where people can walk. You think that if the auto industry hadn't done that, we wouldn't have jaywalking laws today?
ElijahLynn 5mo ago
That seems like a really misleading GitHub organization name, "Anthropics"...

225 points by Einenlum 5mo ago

I’m excited about the upcoming Claude for Surgery, Claude for Autonomous War Robots, Claude for Soufflé, and Claude for Nuclear Waste Reprocessing.

vb-8448 5mo ago

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.

forshaper 5mo ago
Almost makes me want to get a law degree.
nozzlegear 5mo ago
I mean, the laws are written down somewhere though. A human can still look at the actual law and surmise that the AI is feeding them bullshit.
- macintux 5mo ago
  I think the problem is that laws overlap, with decades of case law clarifying their interactions. Looking at one law probably isn't enough to determine whether an LLM is lying to you.
  - dyauspitr 5mo ago
    In that situation I would trust an LLM over a person. It’s a digest and review problem.
- einpoklum 5mo ago
  Human judges today often don't bother to look at "the actual law" and surmise that the human is feeding them bullshit.
gnerd00 5mo ago
the look on the face of the Court administrator upon hearing someone describe the "paperclip maximizer" problem.. ominous!
giobox 5mo ago
> I guess at some point we will have lawyers, attorneys and judges using this stuff We are already well beyond this point. Look already at the number of cases around the world where lawyers have provided documents to the court with hallucinated case citations.

Shank 5mo ago

It seems like they ripped out Lexis, which is probably one of the most important tools for lawyers: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-for-legal/pull/5 https://github.com/anthropics/claude-for-legal/pull/5.

dolebirchwood 5mo ago
> at partner request Curious if Thomson Reuters (Westlaw) felt threatened if they were this compelled to moan about it. All it does is make me wonder how well these skills perform when paired with Lexis (if possible?) instead of Westlaw.
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
nisegami 5mo ago
Can't we just use the version of the codebase from before that change?
- darkstar999 5mo ago
  Yes, they are just text-based "skills" that you are free to change to your liking.
stopyellingatme 5mo ago
as someone who's worked with legal entities in the past, this is likely a deal breaker for many firms. LexisNexis is an integral part of the legal system for many states.

ares623 5mo ago

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.

dawie 5mo ago
It made me double check if it was a fake repo.
dsr_ 5mo ago
One would think that they could spontaneously offer him a hundred million dollars for it and solve the problem. I half-suspect they threatened him and he stuck to his guns.
- nerdsniper 5mo ago
  It's possible they wanted to offer that person convincing amounts of money and couldn't get ahold of them.
- macintux 5mo ago
  Shades of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nissan_Motors_v._Nissan_Computer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nissan_Motors_v._Nissan_Comput...
- freetanga 5mo ago
  Paying for stuff is not part of their modus operandi.
- sahn44 5mo ago
  A mere .01% equity seems fair
cube00 5mo ago
>Imagine the shenanigans someone can achieve with that user. First step out of line and that account along with anything remotely connected will be banned to oblivion. Given they share models on Azure, Anthropic will have someone at Microsoft on speed dial. I've even seen disconnected commit hashes disappear during their security responses which the repo owner has no way of removing.

pawelkomarnicki 5mo ago

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.

gosub100 5mo ago
I would love this for poor people to fight giant corporations via 'lawfare'. It's largely unethical (just like many corporations) but just knowing how to file junk lawsuits that cost corporations millions to fight would be nice. I dont mean 'frivolous' like prisoners who file pro-se about their ice cream melting [1], but a level or two above that , that costs time and money to produce records and testimony to defend, even if nary a dime is paid out. Basically ask GPT to figure out the terms and theories to file to get your lawsuit accepted, and done by poor people who cannot afford to post $ or repay if they lose. aka "asymmetric warfare" that benefits the little guy, just like the kind private equity or other terrible corporations wield against the poor via"mandatory arbitration" clauses or damages caps and similar rules that always benefit corporations. 1. https://www.deseret.com/1994/3/21/19098386/melted-ice-cream-courts-clogged-by-inmates-suits/ https://www.deseret.com/1994/3/21/19098386/melted-ice-cream-...
cucumber3732842 5mo ago
It's already doing wonders for small time businesses and individuals that municipalities think they're free to jerk around because the size of the screwing they're trying to dish out isn't worth hiring a lawyer and/or fighting through court over.
- vkou 5mo ago
  I assure you, in most democracies, most people are jerked around by other people acting in bad faith far more often than their government acting in bad faith. Landlords, tenants, vendors, business and former romantic partners, clients, banks, even your local gym is way more likely to try to fuck you over than the government is.
  - hansvm 5mo ago

droidjj 5mo ago

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] [1] https://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/administrative/professional_responsibility/ethics-opinions/aba-formal-opinion-512.pdf https://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/administrative/p...

bryant 5mo ago
Citation for #1 - https://harvardlawreview.org/blog/2026/03/united-states-v-heppner/ 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, 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. (not a lawyer, unlike OP, who might be able to refine what I highlighted with more precision)
- clickety_clack 5mo ago
  Can anyone be your lawyer, or does a lawyer have to be certified somehow?
  - xboxnolifes 5mo ago
    It is my understanding that they must be certified. You are allowed to represent yourself, but it is my understanding that a non-lawyer cannot represent you.

OkWing99 5mo ago

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 company generates as much as slop as Anthropic does.

ares623 5mo ago
It's like that short animation of a Kiwi bird getting high[1]. Each cycle gets shorter and shorter to sustain the high. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUngLgGRJpo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUngLgGRJpo
nozzlegear 5mo ago
There's going to be a "Claude for wiping my ass" at this rate.
- stevepotter 5mo ago
  I’m working on ways to evaluate and give feedback on surgical techniques. But you just helped me find a new pivot. Thanks! And yes I’m on the toilet.
  - testbjjl 5mo ago
    Wasn’t this the concept behind the toilet in the Your Friends and Neighbors series on Apple TV?
- e12e 5mo ago
  You jest, but combination of robotics and AI is likely the only constructive way to deal with the population getting older.
jackb4040 5mo ago
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.

unstyledcontent 5mo ago

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.

singleshot_ 5mo ago
No. If you talk to an attorney and they take reasonable precautions to maintain the integrity of the confidential attorney client relationship, the privilege is preserved. If not, not preserved.
bethekidyouwant 5mo ago
[flagged]
- MrDarcy 5mo ago
  IANAL but I believe discovery is where this would happen.
  - weird-eye-issue 5mo ago
    In most cases this would be coming up in a criminal case not a civil case so it would be through search warrants and subpoenas not discovery
- oliver236 5mo ago
  why not?
- weird-eye-issue 5mo ago
  I'm not sure if you're joking but there's actually active court cases right now where they have done just that Just a few of the perps: Hisham Abugharbieh (Florida student murders), Jonathan Rinderknecht (Palisades Fire arson), Phoenix Ikner (FSU shooter), Ryan Schaefer (Missouri State vandalism) There's also that thing involving somebody I think he used to be in the NFL and he was using ChatGPT to try to hide the body of his wife or something iirc Digital evidence is huge for the last couple of decades and this is no different... Also there was somebody who was just recently sentenced to life in prison for AI CSAM But yeah I'm sure "this is just not gonna happen." lol

arbirk 5mo ago

Would use it if it wasn't supporting the space wanker

nozzlegear 5mo ago
Who? There are several space wankers but I don't know of any tied to Anthropic.
- Phelinofist 5mo ago
  I guess he his referring to Musk. IIRC Anthropic uses compute of xAI or whatever it is called atm.

awongh 5mo ago

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

moostii 5mo ago
Investors in Harvey and Legora are both in for a rude shock.
- testbjjl 5mo ago
  Not sure why this was downvoted, I came to read more about it. I have a friend that runs a firm and uses Legora and can’t stand it. We have conversations all of the time about pain points. I sent him the Claude Law docs, and while he’s not technical he was intrigued because he envisions his workflows to eventually be similar to mine as a developer.
romanovcode 5mo ago
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.
- DannyBee 5mo ago
  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.
DannyBee 5mo ago
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.

personjerry 5mo ago

RIP Harvey

__loam 5mo ago
Harvey was always an upstart in the legal tech industry. There's other companies that have a much better understanding of the market and compliance issues but you don't hear about them because nobody wants to talk about legal tech.
- ahepp 5mo ago
  who do you think stands out?
  - __loam 5mo ago
    Every company with Fedramp certification.
DannyBee 5mo ago
Good. Harvey was never actually good.

ricardobeat 5mo ago

> 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?

DLarsen 5mo ago
"Are (legally and morally) entitled" vs "act as if they are entitled"... yes, a big question.
lionkor 5mo ago
Yes they are training on your business's data so that their AI can replace your business later. If you don't believe it, name one thing they didn't train on.
- hirsin 5mo ago
  It definitely looks like the old tale come true - at Microsoft people would warn against using Google because then Google could figure out what we're working on, since it was pretty easy to tell where a query was coming from. Sounded far fetched back then, and on the face of it illegal, but now it's just common sense I imagine.
  - nsvd2 5mo ago
    It's pretty clear to me that these systems have a massive potential for intelligence agencies as people move more and more of their internal thought process to an external tool. And, of course, intelligence agencies are good at realizing potential.
dbbk 5mo ago
And in what country? They know that the law is different in every country right?
- jongguk 5mo ago

IceHegel 5mo ago

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.

TrackerFF 5mo ago

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.

bigstrat2003 5mo ago
Every valuation in the AI space is iffy. Nobody actually has a solid business plan, only vibes, but that isn't stopping people from throwing money at them.
matusp 5mo ago
It's like asking what if AWS starts doing it, they have all the infrastructure in place. LLMs are just one cog. There is a lot on the application side they are not doing at all.

lostathome 5mo ago

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.

MrDarcy 5mo ago
Your lawyer uses cloud software, this is no different.

syngrog66 5mo ago

if ever there was a domain for an LLM to be sloppy, reckless or emit lies or hallucinations it would be related to law advice and legal documents er, wait

prima-facie 5mo ago

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. https://www.fca.org.uk/freedom-information/dual-regulation-claims-management-firms-february-2022 https://www.fca.org.uk/freedom-information/dual-regulation-c...

ChrisArchitect 5mo ago

Blog post: https://claude.com/blog/claude-for-the-legal-industry https://claude.com/blog/claude-for-the-legal-industry (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48113982 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48113982)

DeathArrow 5mo ago

Is this usable just for US law?

amelius 5mo ago

Great, this will finally help people in online forums write legal comments that make sense.

trunkiedozer 5mo ago

This won’t go well for them, the legal system is intentionally obfuscated and corrupt, can’t bring law and order to law and order.

risfriend 5mo ago

should rename to "claude for US legal"

redanddead 5mo ago

This is the third category they've entered this quarter

intrasight 5mo ago

Honest question: How do I convince my fiancé - who is a very busy attorney - to allocate some time to get familiar with the capabilities of tools like Claude for Legal?

x187463 5mo ago
I must believe, as with the medical profession's uptake of AI tools, if these tools prove themselves to be reliable and meaningfully helpful, she will experience more than enough professional influence to learn the tools.
- dyauspitr 5mo ago
  Fiancé refers to a man.
  - intrasight 5mo ago
    While traditionally specific to men, modern usage treats fiancé as a gender-neutral term for anyone engaged.
- intrasight 5mo ago
  I would just prefer her to be in front of that wave
  - austinjp 5mo ago
    Find people in her field who are already hopping on the wave. Better still, gently persuade her to find those people. She'll probably know where to look. In fact, I'd be surprised if her professional newsletters aren't already starting to surface those folks.

jorisw 5mo ago

I am reminded of Nilay Patel's "Beware Software Brain" piece in which he cites Legal/Law as one of the industries that tech bros vastly underestimate in terms of how much can be automated this way https://www.theverge.com/podcast/917029/software-brain-ai-backlash-databases-automation https://www.theverge.com/podcast/917029/software-brain-ai-ba... (Search for "another example" for the relevant section)

deleted 5mo ago

[deleted]

realty_geek 5mo ago

I wonder why there isn't much for real estate in this package. Are they perhaps working on a totally different real estate project. I am in that space and very nervous about it getting wiped out by anthropic or openAI. To be honest, I am not sure why they still haven't make a big play for that industry.

mtnGoat 5mo ago
I’d guess they have some kind of analytics telling them what kind of questions are being asked. It seems to me that heavily gate kept professions/knowledge will go first. As those tend to be extensive opinions to get.
arm32 5mo ago
It would be silly to assume they're not making a real estate product, lol.
oflannabhra 5mo ago
The biggest issue in the real estate world is dealing with local state, county, and municipality governments and each one's unique ordinances, etc. While I think LLMs will be great at pulling data from a variety of disparate sources (ie, records databases), or even automating interacting with them, they are not going to be great at solving the problem whose solution is "this is the person in the county court clerks office you need to talk to."

ethin 5mo ago

You would think these AI companies would learn by now that the legal field is not a place where you screw around. I mean, we just have to look at the record. Apparently, these particular AI boosters are incapable of learning

monkaiju 5mo ago
I mean if they aren't going to be forced to eat the liability then the hype they get from it is worth it. Not a great state of affairs...
NoboruWataya 5mo ago
I don't think they will ever stop screwing around in this field because lawyers are expensive, which means the potential gains from switching to AI are high. However, people seem to think the AI companies will be offering legal advice directly, as competitors to lawyers. I can't see them ever doing that, it would be too much of a liability minefield. Instead they want to offer these AI services to law firms, who will then use them in the provision of their own legal services. For better or worse, this is happening, and pretty much all of the bigger corporate law firms are now using AI in some way or another (and clients are demanding it). We will certainly continue to see issues caused by the use of AI in law, but that will be on the lawyers.
- ethin 5mo ago
  Sure, but the record already shows how well that goes. These companies have marketed their products so badly (or well, depending on your viewpoint) that lawyers think that these tools are glorified search engines. Then they get busted in court because the LLM made up citations, quotations etc. I honestly struggle to see how that outlook will change unless Anthropic actually starts being a lot more honest in their marketing campaigns.

SubiculumCode 5mo ago

This is not from anthropic, right?

dawnerd 5mo ago
It's their repo
- SubiculumCode 5mo ago
  yeah, I was confused because "anthropics", not "Anthropic." But I now see there was discussion on this very point in the threads.

yabones 5mo ago

Who's accountable when it does something wrong? Surely Anthropic Inc won't take the fall for you. There's no errors or omissions insurance, no legal accountability, no attorney-client privilege, and no bar association to handle disciplinary action. I think we should be realistic here, this is a more advanced version of those "will kits" that spit out a PDF. The legal system will not look fondly upon this stuff until something fundamentally changes. And like, I would love if we didn't have to spend thousands of dollars to defend ourselves in a culture as litigious as ours. But I wouldn't put my life and well being on this thing.

sorokod 5mo ago
> The legal system will not look fondly upon this stuff True, but the legal system didn't look fondly on outlawing jaywalking, until it did. Took it about 20 years in the US.
- Dodo45611 5mo ago
  Whenever you think AI snakeoil salesmen can't possibly make a more deranged argument, Hackernews delivers
  - Procrastes 5mo ago
    A more charitable reading might be that the comment you're replying to was specifically referring to how jaywalking was a made-up offense that was specifically created and promoted to cynically protect the auto industry from liability. So there are parallels. [1] 1. https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-26073797 https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-26073797
    - rayiner 5mo ago
      That's is a deeply bizarre article. In a world where 90% of people would rather drive than walk, you'll obviously have laws that regulate when and where people can walk. You think that if the auto industry hadn't done that, we wouldn't have jaywalking laws today?

ElijahLynn 5mo ago

That seems like a really misleading GitHub organization name, "Anthropics"...