We build for clients, not lawyers. 

TL:DR: General Legal chose to build a law firm instead of another legal technology vendor because when the company behind the underlying AI model also builds tools for lawyers, a vendor's roadmap can get overrun overnight. That risk became concrete when Anthropic released Claude for Word in beta on April 11, 2026, aimed squarely at lawyers, and fixed its most significant early flaw within about 72 hours. A law firm has nothing to lose from a better Claude. General Legal builds around client outcomes rather than defensible software, using whatever tools work best, to chase the 92% of civil legal problems that low-income Americans don't currently get adequate legal help for, according to the Legal Services Corporation's 2022 Justice Gap study.

Why We Chose to Build a Law Firm, Not a Legal Tech Vendor

I've been asked by numerous friends and investors over the last couple months why we chose to build a law firm and not another legal technology vendor. It's a fair question—we come from Casetext which built legal AI products for lawyers for a decade before selling to Thomson Reuters—and all three of our founders are engineers.

I think the answer becomes self evident, though, if you look at Anthropic's latest release.

Aligning with the bottom of the stack

Last Friday evening, Anthropic dropped a Microsoft Word plugin geared toward lawyers. I took a look, and as with most things Claude, the UX is awesome. Specifically, they seem to have embedded their web app’s React components into Office's webview container, so that the Word plugin feels exactly like the web app. They also built a few simple agentic tools that could be called from the chat: one that found minor errors with high precision and recall in my test called “check-doc”, and one that totally screwed up by misreading section numbers and paragraph spacing called “copy-edit”.

I reported back to my team that the plugin was as-of-yet unusable, though, because the redlines were made in blocks at the sentence level and not at the word and character level—a dealbreaker for lawyers redlining documents—and there was no playbook feature to provide structured client background to the AI.

What Held It Back on Day One

I reported back to my team that the plugin was as-of-yet unusable for two reasons:

• Redline granularity. The redlines were made in blocks at the sentence level rather than the word and character level, a dealbreaker for lawyers redlining documents, where a single changed word or number matters.
• No visible playbook feature. There was no obvious way to feed the AI structured client background, the kind of standing instructions a firm's own playbook (a set of predefined positions, fallback language, and client-specific preferences that guides how a tool drafts and flags issues) would normally provide.

Fixed in 72 Hours

But then, remarkably, the next day, just 72 hours after the plugin was released on Friday night, the redline issue had been entirely fixed by Anthropic (I also discovered that the plugin’s “skill creation” feature had always allowed users to build custom playbook skills).

It went from unusable to the best Word plugin I have seen on the market in one day, and our firm may well integrate it into our workflow soon.

Building for the Outcome, Not the Tool

Which brings me back to why we decided to build a law firm, and not a legal technology company for lawyers. If we did the latter, Anthropic diving headfirst into making lawyers more efficient would undermine our business. We would be carefully designing our roadmap to entrench tools that Anthropic can’t or doesn’t want to build, while scouring for information on what’s coming next.

How lame.

Instead, tools like this just make our services better, faster and cheaper, because clients, not lawyers, are our obsession. This will ultimately drive our price point down into the 92% of unmet legal demand in the US, bringing us more clients and creating immense value for people and businesses.

That is our mission and we are entirely agnostic about which tools we use to achieve it.