Global law firm Freshfields and Anthropic are joining forces on a multi-year agreement to accelerate AI co-innovation and firm-wide adoption and 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 AI platform. They say that within the first six weeks, the adoption and usage of Claude has increased by ~500 percent, with thousands of users leveraging Freshfields’ solutions to access Claude.
The collaboration includes a commitment to firmwide 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 and define new AI workflows and processes leveraging Anthropic tools and solutions’ latest capabilities to deliver legal services for Anthropic. In parallel, Freshfields and Anthropic have established a unique co-development program to build legal-focused AI applications and design agentic workflows to enable faster and 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.
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 of CoCounsel Legal – fully rebuilt using Anthropic’s latest technology, with Westlaw and Practical Law natively embedded.
Gil Perez, chief innovation officer, at Freshfields, said: “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.” Perez has stressed that the firm will hold itself to the highest standards of responsibility and governance.
“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.
This announcement follows a webinar conducted by Anthropic, attended by thousands, in which it demonstrated how legal teams are using Cowork.
See also:
Freshfields joins forces with Google Cloud – Is this a turning point in their tech strategy?
