Anthropic just released Cowork. It's Claude Code, but for everyone.
I wanted to see what it could do for legal work. So I tested a Skill for tabular review, one of Legora's most loved features.
The setup: a small legal data room. Corporate filings, commercial contracts, employment agreements, IP assignments.
The task: extract parties, dates, terms, and governing law from each document. Output to Excel with citations.
Claude launched 5 agents in parallel. Each one took a batch of documents and extracted all four fields simultaneously. No scripting. No configuration. The orchestration was automatic.
The output: a structured Excel matrix with one row per document. Every extracted value includes a page number and a source quote. Hover over any cell to see exactly where the information came from.
It's genuinely impressive.
But there are limits. The mock data room had 13 small documents. A real one might have 200+ files, some running to hundreds of pages, robust parallelization will be essential. PDF quality matters too; Claude's native parsing isn't perfect yet. And then there's confidentiality: Cowork on Claude Desktop sends data to Anthropic's servers. Use with caution for sensitive matters.
For cases where you need more control over hosting and data residency, alternatives exist. Claude in VS Code lets you connect to third-party cloud providers (Google, Microsoft, etc.) that offer stricter data agreements for enterprise requirements. Antoine Louis recently documented how to set up VS Code for non-coders and it has become my default setup since then.
This demo is a quick look at what's possible with Claude Cowork. And it's good. But as with any LLM, trust but verify. That's what the citations are for.
It's not perfect yet, but it might be useful for bulk-analyzing a small sample of documents.
If you're curious about how Skills work or want to create your own, happy to help. A good starting point I recommend is the Lawvable hub.