Claude for legal, explained

In January 2026 Anthropic added plugins to Cowork, its desktop agent, and published a starter set of eleven. One of them was Legal: review documents, flag risks, track compliance. It was a single plugin for every paid Claude user, offered as a research preview.

In May 2026 Anthropic followed it with Claude for the legal industry: twelve practice-area plugins (commercial, corporate, employment, privacy, product, regulatory, AI governance, IP, litigation, and three for students, clinics and builders) and twenty-three connectors to the systems lawyers already use, from iManage and NetDocuments to Ironclad, Docusign and Thomson Reuters CoCounsel.

Underneath, it is still Claude: a general-purpose model that writes well and reasons carefully, now given legal instructions and a way to reach legal tools. That is the important point for a legal team choosing between it and a platform built for legal work. The plugins change what one person can ask Claude to do. They don't change who does the work.

• Practice-area plugins. Each plugin is a bundle of instructions and named agents for one area of law, such as an NDA triager or a renewal watcher. They are open source, so a team can read and adapt them.
• Connectors. Twenty-three MCP connectors reach document systems, deal rooms, e-discovery platforms and research services. Many need your own subscription and key for that product: Ironclad, iManage, Everlaw and CoCounsel among them.
• Places to work. Claude in the browser and desktop app, Cowork for scheduled tasks, and Claude for Microsoft 365, which redlines in Word with tracked changes and compares a contract with a playbook clause by clause.

1. Get a paid Claude plan. Pro for one person, or Team or Enterprise for a firm or department. On Enterprise, an administrator turns the legal plugins on for the workspace.
2. Install the plugins. In Cowork, open Customise and browse the plugins, or upload them from Anthropic's GitHub repository. Developers can install them in Claude Code too.
3. Run the cold-start interview. Each plugin begins with a 10 to 20 minute interview that writes a practice profile: your playbook positions, who to escalate to and your house style.
4. Connect your systems. Add the connectors you need, with your own credentials for each product. Without a research connector, Claude flags its citations for you to check.
5. Repeat for every lawyer. Profiles and plugins live with the person who set them up. A team of five does all of this five times, and keeps five profiles in step.

In-house legal work doesn't arrive as a prompt. It arrives as a message from sales about a customer's paper, a renewal nobody flagged, a supplier asking for the DPA back by Friday, and twenty NDAs a week from across the business. It needs picking up, doing, filing and remembering, whether or not a lawyer has a free hour.

Claude for Legal waits for a lawyer to open Claude and ask. What comes back is a draft for that lawyer to check and finish, and whatever it learned stays in that lawyer's profile. The next lawyer starts again.

Claren is built the other way round. Its envoys are AI employees with their own computer and memory. They take requests from the Claren app or straight from Slack, review against the team's single playbook, hand back tracked-change redlines in Word, file every contract and its terms in the team's datastore, and run routines on a schedule, checking renewals each morning or reading every contract that lands in a channel. Before anything leaves the team, they ask.

That is the difference between a better way for one lawyer to work and work taken off the whole team.

There is no separate price for the legal plugins. A lawyer needs a paid Claude plan: Pro from $20 a month, Team from $25 per seat a month, or Enterprise, which Anthropic sells with a 20-seat minimum and usage billed on top.

The connectors are where the bill grows. Many reach products you pay for separately, with your own subscription and key: Ironclad, iManage, Everlaw, CoCounsel. A team that wants research it can rely on needs a research connector, and a research licence behind it.

Then there is the time. Every lawyer installs the plugins, runs the interview, connects their systems and keeps their profile current. Nobody owns the team's version, because there isn't one. For a team of five, that is five setups to maintain and five sets of answers to reconcile.

Claren is priced per seat, on the page, with usage included: Pro at $70 and Team at $250 per seat a month, and a free plan for one person. The envoys, the shared playbook, the routines and the team's records come with it.

Monday. Sales sends three NDAs and a customer's MSA in Slack. With Claude, a lawyer downloads each one, opens Claude, uploads it, reviews the answer and redlines it in Word. With Claren, the envoy linked to the sales channel picks all four up, reviews them against the team's playbook and posts the tracked-change redlines back in the thread, with a note on anything off-playbook.

Wednesday. A supplier renewal is due in thirty days and nobody has noticed. Claude only knows what it is asked. Claren's renewals routine checked the contract tracker that morning and flagged it, with the notice clause and the date.

Friday. The general counsel wants to know what came in this week and where it stands. With Claude, someone assembles it by hand. With Claren, every request was filed in the team's datastore as it was handled, and the envoy writes the summary.

The model in both cases may be the same. What differs is who does the work.

1. Is the work one lawyer's, or the team's? If one lawyer wants a better assistant, Claude for Legal will help them. If the team needs requests picked up and finished, that is what Claren's envoys are for.
2. Where do requests come from? If they come from the business, in Slack and email, you want something that picks them up, routes them and tracks them there. Claren does; Claude answers whoever asks it.
3. Do you need one playbook, or one per person? Claude keeps a profile for each lawyer who sets it up. Claren holds one playbook for the team, and every envoy follows it.
4. Who keeps the records? Claude leaves the filing to you. Claren's envoys file every contract and its terms as they go, and build your trackers on top.

There's no need to choose a model. Claren's envoys run on models from Anthropic, OpenAI and Google, chosen per envoy, so a team that likes Claude keeps it. What Claren adds is everything around the model that turns it into a working legal function: intake, a shared playbook, routines, records and sign-off.

A common split: lawyers keep Claude for quick questions and personal drafting, and route the work that repeats (NDAs, supplier contracts, renewals, data room reviews) to Claren's envoys, which pick it up from Slack and hand it back done.