· IQdoc
What the model labs built for legal
Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI and xAI have taken five completely different positions on the legal industry — from twelve practice-area plugins to nothing at all.
The $6.2 billion we counted went to companies building legal software on top of somebody else's models. This year the somebody-elses started shipping legal products themselves.
Five labs, five different answers.
| Lab | Legal offering | Shipped | For whom |
|---|---|---|---|
| Anthropic | Claude for the Legal Industry | May 2026 | Firms, in-house, and self-represented |
| Gemini Enterprise for Legal | Aug 2026, preview | Enterprise and BigLaw | |
| Microsoft | Legal Agent in Word | Apr 2026, preview | Contract reviewers |
| OpenAI | A vertical, no product | — | — |
| xAI | Nothing | — | — |
Amazon has a legal landing page on its general Quick Suite. Mistral supplies models to Harvey. Cohere, Meta and DeepSeek have nothing in legal at all.
Anthropic went first and went widest
Claude for the Legal Industry landed on 12 May 2026: 20+ MCP connectors, 12 practice-area plugins — Litigation, IP, Employment, Privacy, Regulatory, AI Governance and others, including Law Student and Legal Clinic — plus Microsoft 365 integration. The plugins are open-source.
The connector list reads like a market map: Definely, DocuSign, Ironclad, iManage, NetDocuments, Everlaw, Relativity, Consilio, Thomson Reuters CoCounsel, midpage, Trellis, Harvey, Solve Intelligence.
Then there is the part nobody else has copied. Anthropic's Justice Partner programme makes connectors from Courtroom5, the Free Law Project's CourtListener, Descrybe and BoardWise free to Claude users, with nonprofit pricing behind it. Courtroom5's contribution is pro se case intake, a deadline calculator and next-step guidance across all 50 states.
Anthropic hired a Head of Claude for Legal in August. Lawyers are reportedly now the largest user segment on Claude Cowork.
Google went straight at BigLaw
Gemini Enterprise for Legal launched on 25 August, in preview and by request. Named skills: brief drafting, citation verification, contract lifecycle management, regulatory horizon scanning, DSAR fulfilment. It ships its own research, screening and contract-drafting agents, plus partner-built ones from Deloitte and Eudia.
Launch customers are Cleary Gottlieb, Freshfields, Weil, and Williams & Connolly. There is no free tier, no legal aid pricing, and no disclosed price for the legal SKU at all.
Its connector list includes Harvey and Legora — which is the interesting part, and we will come back to it.
Microsoft shipped the most concrete thing, quietly
In April 2026 Microsoft released Legal Agent for Word: clause-by-clause playbook review with tracked-change redlining and rationale comments. Preview, US tenants, Word for Windows, gated behind Microsoft 365 Copilot — and behind the E7 Frontier Suite at $99 per user per month, which is the only clearly stated price anywhere in this entire landscape.
It is widely read as the first output of Microsoft's January 2026 acqui-hire of Robin AI's engineering team.
Sit with that for a second. Robin AI raised $61.5M to do AI contract review. It ran out of money, sold its services arm, and its engineers went to Microsoft — where they now ship contract redlining inside Word, to anyone with a Copilot licence. The startup died and the feature shipped anyway, at the bottom of somebody else's bundle.
OpenAI has a legal vertical with nothing in it
In June 2026 OpenAI hired Jason Boehmig, Ironclad's co-founder, to lead product for a legal vertical. That is an organisational announcement, not a launch. There is no ChatGPT for Legal, no legal SKU, no plugin library.
Its one legal-industry move since is a July partnership with Willkie Farr, rolling ChatGPT Enterprise across the firm and powering Willkie's own proprietary tooling. That is a customer, not a product.
xAI has nothing. Grok 4.5's launch materials mention contract review and case summarisation as things the model can do, which is model positioning, not a legal offering.
The awkward part: they are platforms and competitors at once
Harvey, Legora and Solve Intelligence appear in both Anthropic's and Google's connector lists. Thomson Reuters is in both. Legora put out a release describing the flow: ask a question inside Gemini Enterprise, get an answer with links, then move into Legora for the harder work.
At the same time Google ships its own contract drafting and legal research agents, Anthropic's Commercial Legal plugin reviews vendor agreements and NDAs against your playbooks, and Microsoft's Legal Agent redlines contracts inside the app where lawyers already write.
Harvey's CEO said the quiet part in May: "long term we would end up competing with the model companies" — while shipping a Claude connector.
The bind is real. When the model company packages your workflow as a one-click plugin and learns the firm's playbook in a setup interview, what is left for the application layer to sell? Thomson Reuters' CTO gave the best answer available: "the control point isn't where work starts. It's whether the output is accurate, grounded in authoritative sources, and defensible." Which is a bet that verification, citation and liability are the durable business, not the chat window.
Worth noting who is in neither list: Eve, Clio, Spellbook, LegalOn, Luminance. Distribution through the labs is not being handed out evenly, and it is not clear the missing names chose to be missing.
One lab is building for people without lawyers
Across all five, exactly one has shipped anything for self-represented litigants: Anthropic's Justice Partner programme, free, citing the roughly 80% of US civil litigants who appear without counsel. Its LegalZoom connector goes further — flag a risky clause, hand off to a LegalZoom attorney for a flat fee explicitly pitched against the billable hour.
Google gestured at it — Courtroom5 and CourtListener are both in its connector list — but the product around them is enterprise, preview by request, priced at enterprise seat rates and launched with four of the largest firms in the world.
Microsoft, OpenAI, xAI, Amazon: nothing.
That maps almost exactly onto what we found in the funded market, which is either a coincidence or a description of where the money is.
What we would watch
Whether Google's preview reaches general availability with a legal price attached. Whether OpenAI's vertical ever ships a product or stays a hiring line. Whether any lab publishes reliability numbers for legal tasks — still nobody has. And whether the application-layer companies in those connector lists are building distribution or building a dependency.
Dates and product names are as announced by the companies. Two of these products are in preview rather than general availability, and preview feature lists change. Nothing here is legal advice.