Freshfields Partners With Anthropic to Build AI Legal Tools

Global law firm Freshfields has signed a multi-year agreement with Anthropic to deploy Claude across its 33 offices and co-develop AI-powered legal workflows, announced April 23, 2026.

The deal marks one of the largest firm-wide AI deployments in the legal industry, giving 5,700 Freshfields employees access to a frontier AI model for daily client work.

Rapid Adoption

Freshfields rolled out Claude through its proprietary internal AI platform, the Freshfields Lab. Within the first six weeks of deployment, usage increased by approximately 500 percent.

Thousands of employees now use the platform daily across all practice groups and business services. The firm operates across 33 offices globally.

Scope of the Deal

The agreement covers the full Claude suite of products and frontier AI models across every office and department. Freshfields will also receive early access to future Anthropic models and tools as they become available.

Over the next 12 months, the legal teams of both organizations plan to work together to define new AI workflows. These workflows will use Anthropic tools and solutions to deliver legal services directly to Anthropic as a client.

Co-Development Plans

Freshfields and Anthropic have also launched a co-development program to build legal-focused AI applications. The program targets agentic workflows, a term that refers to AI systems that can carry out multi-step tasks with minimal human direction at each stage.

Key focus areas include legal and market research, contract review, document drafting, due diligence, business services automation, and multi-step legal task workflows. Freshfields also plans to expand to Cowork, Anthropic's agentic AI platform, in line with its internal security, compliance, and training frameworks.

"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."

In addition, Freshfields is an early adopter of Thomson Reuters' next generation of CoCounsel Legal, which is fully rebuilt using Anthropic's technology and includes Westlaw and Practical Law as native integrations.

Industry Significance

The deployment signals a shift in how large professional services firms are integrating AI into core operations rather than using it as a supplementary tool. It places legal work, business services, and agentic workflows under a single AI system.

"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 at Anthropic.

Gerrit Beckhaus, Partner and Co-Head of the Freshfields Lab, added that the collaboration moves beyond existing tools. "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."

About Freshfields

Freshfields is a global law firm with 33 offices worldwide. The firm serves clients across all major practice areas and business sectors. Its internal innovation unit, the Freshfields Lab, develops proprietary AI-powered platforms and tools for use across the firm.

About Anthropic

Anthropic is an AI research and technology company and the developer of Claude, a family of frontier AI models. The company focuses on AI safety and builds AI systems for enterprise, research, and consumer applications.