Freshfields and Anthropic Partner on AI Legal Workflows
Global law firm Freshfields and Anthropic, a leading AI research and technology company, are joining forces under a multi-year agreement to accelerate AI co-innovation and firm-wide adoption, and to develop novel AI legal workflows.
Freshfields has provided access to Claude, Anthropic’s family of frontier AI models, to 5,700 employees, via Freshfields’ proprietary general-purpose AI platform delivered securely and responsibly. Within the first six weeks, adoption and usage of Claude have increased by approximately 500 per cent, with thousands of users leveraging Freshfields’ solutions to access it.
The collaboration includes a commitment to firm-wide deployment of the Claude suite of products and frontier AI models globally across 33 offices, spanning all practice groups and business services.
Over the next 12 months, Freshfields and Anthropic’s in-house legal teams plan to collaborate to define new AI workflows and processes, leveraging Anthropic’s latest tools and solutions to deliver legal services to the company. In parallel, Freshfields and Anthropic have established a unique co-development program to build legal-focused AI applications and to design agentic workflows that enable faster, more efficient delivery of legal advice to clients. Freshfields plans to expand to Cowork, Anthropic’s agentic AI platform, in line with the firm’s security, compliance, and training frameworks.
Key focus areas include:
- Legal and market research
- Contract review, document drafting and due diligence
- Business services workflow automation
- Agentic workflows for multi-step legal tasks
Through the Freshfields Lab, the firm has developed proprietary platform solutions that integrate Claude, giving every lawyer and business services professional a single, secure entry point to AI-powered workflows connected to the firm’s institutional knowledge.
This collaboration will embed Claude’s reasoning capabilities into general-purpose AI tools across the firm, including agentic workflows built jointly with Anthropic. Freshfields is also an early adopter and tester of Thomson Reuters’ next-generation CoCounsel Legal – fully rebuilt using Anthropic’s latest technology, with Westlaw and Practical Law natively embedded.
“For us, innovation is about practical impact – helping our teams deliver the very best outcomes for clients, while holding ourselves to the highest standards of responsibility and governance,” said Gil Perez, Chief Innovation Officer, at Freshfields. “Partnering with Anthropic strengthens our ability to co-innovate at pace and to bring new capabilities into our work in a way that is secure, compliant and focused on client needs.”
“Our approach in the Freshfields Lab has always been to build on the best available technology. Claude’s capabilities have become an essential part of our proprietary AI-powered solutions,” said Gerrit Beckhaus, Partner and Co-Head of Freshfields Lab. “With this collaboration, we are going further: co-developing agentic workflows with Anthropic that can handle multi-step legal tasks end-to-end. For our clients, that translates into faster, more precise and more scalable legal services.”
“Freshfields operates at the highest levels of global law. Their decision to go wall-to-wall with Claude – across legal work, business services, and now agentic workflows – is the clearest signal yet that the enterprise AI moment in professional services has arrived,” said Kate Jensen, Head of Americas, Anthropic.
About Freshfields
Freshfields is a global firm with over 280 years of experience in anticipating change, setting new standards and shaping the future of law.
About Anthropic
Anthropic is an AI research and development company that creates reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems.