When Anthropic announced legal skills inside its Cowork environment this week, shares of Thomson Reuters, Reed Elsevier, and Wolters Kluwer tanked. Investors appeared to price in a new competitive threat from Claude. But Ken Crutchfield believes the market got it wrong. “I feel the market reaction does not reflect the reality of the situation,” he […]
When Anthropic announced legal skills inside its Cowork environment this week, shares of Thomson Reuters, Reed Elsevier, and Wolters Kluwer tanked. Investors appeared to price in a new competitive threat from Claude.
But Ken Crutchfield believes the market got it wrong.
Ken Crutchfield
“I feel the market reaction does not reflect the reality of the situation,” he writes. “The market reacted to a horizontal platform signaling more vertical ambition, which is hard even outside of the legal vertical.”
In his latest column for LawNext, Why the Market Overreacted to Claude’s Legal Skills Announcement, Crutchfield lays out 10 reasons why investors should take a breath, from Cowork’s corporate (not law firm) focus to the reality that litigation is where the money is, from the “legal wrinkles” that have kept even Microsoft from fully committing to legal to the commercial reality that lawyers don’t like change.
“Cowork’s legal skills skew toward transactional and drafting,” he notes. “By contrast, the bulk of Thomson Reuters and LexisNexis usage and revenue comes from law firms and is driven by litigation, legal research, and regulatory compliance.”
His conclusion? While Anthropic, OpenAI, or Microsoft could eventually win in legal, “a sober look at the obstacles suggests the market reaction is overstated for now.”
Crutchfield is principal of Spring Forward Consulting and has been an executive at LexisNexis, Thomson Reuters and most recently Wolters Kluwer, where he was vice president and general manager of legal markets for Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory U.S.
Read his full post on LawNext.
