The APEX benchmark – built by Mercor, with tasks authored by BigLaw-experienced lawyers and advised by Cass Sunstein – is the most rigorous test of whether AI can perform real legal work. The answer is more specific than vendors or skeptics suggest.
Every major AI lab prices inference below cost. When the venture capital subsidizing your five-cent contract review runs out, your AI economics change whether you're ready or not.
Anthropic launched Claude for Legal with 12 practice-area plugins and 20+ MCP connectors – positioning Claude as the hub that legal tech plugs into, not just the model underneath it.
OpenAI's Astra for Law and Anthropic's Claude for Legal work with many of the same legal vendors, but OpenAI builds the legal knowledge into the harness while Anthropic ships it as skills and connectors you can edit, and neither vendor compared itself to the other's real setup.
