Legal startup founder Robert Mahari joins Anthropic to lead Claude's push into law practices

Robert Mahari is Anthropic's first "Head of Claude for Legal," responsible for deploying and expanding the Claude AI model across the legal industry. Mahari holds a PhD in legal AI and founded the legal AI startup Akiva AI.

Back in May, Anthropic had already unveiled twelve legal plugins for Claude and announced partnerships with more than 20 legal tech companies, including LexisNexis and Relativity. The legal market is drawing more attention from major tech companies. OpenAI hired Ironclad founder Jason Boehmig, Amazon launched Amazon Quick for legal tasks, and Microsoft introduced a legal agent in Word.

Until recently, AI systems weren't reliable enough for legal work. They could fabricate sources and case citations, and privacy and confidentiality rules made adoption even harder. Models have since gotten more capable and are now better connected to legal sources and existing practice software. That makes them easier to fit into the workflows of law firms and legal departments.

AI News Without the Hype – Curated by Humans

Subscribe to THE DECODER for ad-free reading, a weekly AI newsletter, our exclusive "AI Radar" frontier report six times a year, full archive access, and access to our comment section.