Freshfields has entered into a multi-year partnership with Anthropic, rolling out Claude across the firm and agreeing to collaborate on development of further AI services and workflows.
The UK-founded firm has already provided access to Anthropic AI model family Claude to 5,700 employees through its proprietary general AI platform, with adoption and usage up by around 500% within the first six weeks.
The agreement will also see Freshfields collaborate with the San Francisco-headquartered AI leader to deliver ‘AI-native legal services’ as well as ‘novel legal agentic workflows.’ according to a statement.
As part of the agreement, the firm plans to expand its use to Claude Cowork, Anthropic’s agentic AI platform.
The move comes a year after Freshfields struck a separate agreement with Google Cloud to roll out Gemini with Google Workspace across the firm, as one play in what it called at the time its ‘tech-agnostic innovation strategy.’
Commenting on the Anthropic deal, Freshfields chief innovation officer Gil Perez 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.’
Gerrit Beckhaus, partner and co-head of Freshfields Lab, the firm’s multidisciplinary tech solution-development team, added: ‘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.’
‘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,’ he concluded.
Kate Jensen, head of Americas at Anthropic, also commented, saying: ‘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.’
