Anthropic’s tieup with Freshfields and the emergence of vibe-coding as market-ready tools underline GenAI’s growing presence in the legal sector
The incursion of foundational GenAI models into the legal sector took a giant step last week – and once again Anthropic was in the vanguard of change. The hot story in legal tech is Freshfields’ multi-year strategic partnership with Anthropic to accelerate AI firm-wide adoption, develop AI legal workflows and co-create legal AI tools.
The announcement, published on Freshfields’ website on 23 April, explains that its 5,700 users already access Claude via the firm’s proprietary AI platform, with adoption having increased rapidly in the first six weeks. Freshfields will have early access to future Anthropic models and will collaborate with Anthropic’s legal team on new AI workflows and processes to deliver legal services for Anthropic.
'A year into our Google Cloud partnership, Gemini is no longer an experiment at Freshfields – it is infrastructure'
Lukas Treichl, Freshfields Lab
In parallel, Freshfields and Anthropic have established a co-development program to build legal-specific AI applications and agentic workflows that could eventually be sold to other law firms. Freshfields already acts as external counsel to Anthropic.
This is not an exclusive partnership, and nor was it intended to be. On 15 April, Freshfields announced (on its website) multiple bespoke legal solutions developed by Freshfields Lab and powered by Google Gemini on Google Cloud for due diligence, case management and multi-jurisdictional analysis, having rolled out Google Workspace to over 2,800 users. ‘A year into our Google Cloud partnership, Gemini is no longer an experiment at Freshfields – it is infrastructure,’ said Lukas Treichl, partner and co-head Freshfields Lab.
The combination of Anthropic and Google is interesting because the GenAI giants themselves are closely connected. Google Cloud hosts both Gemini and Claude on its Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform (formerly Vertex AI), launched on 22 April. And Google has just increased its stake in Anthropic. Bloomberg reports that Google has agreed to make an additional investment in Anthropic of up to $40bn ($10bn now and potentially $30bn dependent on performance targets) and support a significant expansion of Anthropic’s computing capacity.
From deficiency to optionality
Is optionality the next legal tech buzzword? Freshfields’ chief innovation officer Gil Perez reportedly said last week that the firm’s direct partnerships with Google and now Anthropic addressed a deficiency with legal-specific AI solutions. ‘The deficiency with the vendors is that they usually do not provide you [with] the transparency of which models they’re using in the backend and how to fine-tune it… we really want to have the optionality to work and really tinker with these models,’ he said. This flexibility would mitigate the risk of ‘fierce competition’ in the market.
This echoes comments from Freshfields’ global managing partner Alan Mason in the Financial Times. ‘We want to be leaders in this space because we believe it’s absolutely essential as part of being a modern lawyer to use AI tools.’
However, Freshfields is not eschewing legal-specific GenAI tools. The firm mentions that it ‘is also an early adopter and tester of Thomson Reuters’ next generation of CoCounsel Legal – fully rebuilt using Anthropic’s latest technology, with Westlaw and Practical Law natively embedded.’
While Anthropic’s legal plugin led to partnership agreements involving deep integrations with incumbent legal AI vendors including Thomson Reuters and LexisNexis, this is a pivot which gives Anthropic – and Freshfields – the potential to compete directly with legal-specific AI tools and applications. It creates new optionality for law firm build and/or buy strategy and elevates vibe-coding to enterprise level.
New frontiers
Anthropic is clearly targeting the legal market. The deal with Freshfields was announced two days after Anthropic’s Claude for Legal webinar on 21 April, which attracted some 20,000 attendees. This level of interest reflects an acknowledgement that GenAI has shifted legal tech’s competitive environment.
The Claude legal plugin that crashed tech and legal tech stocks in February turned out to be a bid for deep integration rather than direct competition with key legal tech incumbents. Claude Marketplace, launched in March as a platform for third-party software that integrates with Claude, was again about partnership and market positioning.
April saw a pivot to enterprise apps for both Anthropic and OpenAI as they race towards IPOs (initial public offerings) later this year. Claude for Word, announced in public beta on 10 April, can be accessed via Microsoft Copilot or Harvey (although they typically deliver Opus 4.6, whereas Claude for Word direct runs by default on the latest version Opus 4.7), and is potentially direct competition for legal-specific tools that lead on Word integrations.
At the movies
LTH Velocity hosted the premiere of The Last of Them (pictured), an AI-generated film created by Douwe Groenevelt, partner at Datacation and former deputy general counsel and head of legal at chip manufacturing company ASML. The Last of Them is the sequel to his 2025 AI-generated film Barney – The End of Lawyers.
‘Legal services and legal tech tools are becoming multimodal, yet multimodality is underrated,’ he observes, in the same week as OpenAI discontinued its video generation platform Sora to focus on agentic AI and training robots. Making AI movies isn’t straightforward. Groenevelt wrangled multiple AI tools to turn his storyline into a movie, which he acknowledges is not perfect, but it is good enough to get his message across – that AI is the future of law, so don’t get left behind – in six minutes, and in an entertaining and engaging way. You can watch The Last of Them here.
AI resizing the investment opportunity
GenAI is also resizing the investment opportunity in legal. Nick Baughan, managing director of boutique investment bank Marks Baughan, which specialises in advising legal and compliance businesses, spoke about this at LegaltechHub’s LTH Velocity event for vendors and buyers of legal tech. He quoted Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz: ‘Legal is the infrastructure for capitalism.’
While legal tech has seen more than 275 M&A deals in the last 10 years, since the emergence of GenAI in legal, deal values have soared, attracting private equity into the sector and leading to ever higher valuations. Baughan pointed out that, with the exception of Clio, the private equity-backed legal tech companies with the highest valuations were founded within the last three or four years (Harvey in 2022 and Legora in 2023).
High valuations are attracting both venture capital and private equity into legal AI, creating more options for legal tech founders. The likelihood is that, notwithstanding legal’s poor IPO track record to date, there will be a new crop of public companies in the legal tech space in the next two to three years.
The optionality trajectory
A major advantage of GenAI is that it accelerates tasks and processes, but the rapid pace of its own evolution and trajectory is challenging for vendors and purchasers alike. Foundational models such as Anthropic and OpenAI, which just launched GPT5.5, are adjusting their service offerings every week. Legal AI giants Harvey, Legora, and longstanding legal tech unicorn Clio, which dominates the SME segment, are responding. For example, Legora recently acquired legal research startup Qura.
The number of AI-native law firms is also growing exponentially. Matt Pollins, co-founder of legal tech company Lupl and Vibecode.law, an open source platform for legal vibe-coding, curates a directory of AI-native law firms – there are currently 50 listings. How long will it be before this becomes a category in the traditional legal directory rankings?
The speed of GenAI evolution is a perennial problem for procurement and adoption, as AI and innovation leads – and lawyers themselves – see new solutions every day. Decision-makers need to manage how they evaluate and pilot new offerings, with a key strategy being to retain the ability to switch when the next ‘killer app’ appears. Users need to adjust to new ways of working, and they are also becoming proficient/confident at vibe-coding their own GenAI tools and agents.
The latest developments have elevated vibe-coding from a personal or team project to market-ready tools and resources. Last month, Tristan Sherliker (pictured), a lawyer at Bird & Bird, created BunTool, which makes PDF court bundles as a free resource for law firms and barristers. Although this was not vibe-coded (that is, Sherliker did not build BunTool with Claude code; he used open source tools), it follows the same principle of lawyer-built tools. And now Freshfields is effectively doing enterprise-level vibe-coding with Anthropic and Thomson Reuters CoCounsel.
GenAI has flattened the silos between different elements of the legal and legal tech marketplace, and the race is anyone’s to win.
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