Freshfields and Anthropic move from access to co-built agentic legal workflows

Freshfields announced a multi-year collaboration with Anthropic that gives 5,700 employees access to Claude across 33 offices and commits the firm and Anthropic to co-develop legal-focused AI applications and agentic workflows. Freshfields says Claude usage rose by roughly 500 percent in the first six weeks and that focus areas include legal and market research, contract review, document drafting, due diligence, business-services automation and multi-step legal tasks.

Why it matters: The story gives a strong enterprise-law-firm counterpoint to AI-native start-ups. Legal engineers are no longer just tool configurators; they are becoming co-designers of multi-step legal workflows with model providers.