Working Like a Lawyer with Claude

1. MPMark Pike0:00

   [on-hold music] I'm excited to chat with you today.

2. AGAnna Gressel0:17

   I know. Me too, Mark.

3. MPMark Pike0:18

   I help lead a team of product lawyers who focus on Anthropic's enterprise product offerings. That includes the platform, things like Claude Code, and other enterprise verticals. And so we're often reviewing new features and products that are coming out, uh, from Anthropic, and sometimes I need advice and counsel from trusted experts, and so I call Anna.

4. AGAnna Gressel0:40

   I am the Global Co-Head of AI at Freshfields, which means I help head up our AI practice globally. In my own personal practice, I do a lot of what you might call outside product counseling. We have, I think, uh, five thousand seven hundred, uh, staff and lawyers worldwide who are using AI. Usually, one of the stickiest and kind of trickiest areas for us to navigate is the context gap, and understanding, like, what does the spec look like today, and the fact that it might look different tomorrow, and your engineering teams are moving at the speed of light.

5. MPMark Pike1:10

   A lot of lawyers, when they first start using Claude, are just using it for these sort of chat-based question-and-answer experiences. But the more powerful stuff to be unlocked is by leveraging Cowork, which is, uh, the ability for Claude to use your local computer to create the types of files that you would typically be using as a knowledge worker. So that could be a Microsoft Word document or an Excel spreadsheet or even a PowerPoint. If there's one thing that I feel like AI is very good at, it's making sense of large bodies of information and spotting themes across them.

6. AGAnna Gressel1:43

   Yeah.

7. MPMark Pike1:43

   And so being able to upload a lot of existing memos and docs and product roadmaps and new legislation that's coming out, and just putting that all in one place, and then be able to have a conversation with Claude to create that new artifact that's based on all the things it's seeing across those different surfaces.

8. AGAnna Gressel2:00

   Everyone's asking this question: How does AI make us different in the future? Like, what does the future bring to knowledge work or otherwise? And from my perspective, you know, one of the core questions in that is, how do we add value? If we are, you know, one of the top global law firms, what does it mean to be the most, you know, fluent in our clients', uh, enterprises and their kinds of, you know, hopes and dreams? How do we actually deliver on advice in the most seamless, contextual way possible? We as an institution are doing all these great things, but what if we took everything we were separately doing with AI and then brought it to the center of the conversation? I really appreciate sometimes our junior associates. Sometimes they have such an inherent understanding of, um, you know, the benefits, but also the limitations and the right process for checking and being in the loop. The role that we play ideally for our clients is to help them sail a ship. Sometimes they're sailing through, like, a really rocky, um, strait, and there might be, you know, rocks to the left and rocks to the right, and they're being, like, slammed by, you know, hail and all of these things. But at the end of the day, our judgment is the thing that keeps the rudder straight.

9. MPMark Pike3:15

   At Anthropic, we have this saying of, uh, holding light in shade, and it's-

10. AGAnna Gressel3:20

    Mm-hmm

11. MPMark Pike3:20

    ... it's one of our values. And for me, that can represent that I feel like there's so much risks in this technology, and that as lawyers, we often help our clients navigate that risk. But there's also a lot of promise. [outro music]

Episode duration: 3:39