Legal tech · Industry brief

Anthropic's launch of Claude for Legal establishes direct integrations with major eDiscovery platforms including Relativity and Everlaw, embedding AI directly into document review workflows rather than as a separate tool. This enables first-pass document review at reduced costs, custodian analysis in minutes, and automated matter setup and workspace governance for litigation teams. A recent court decision ordering disclosure of an expert's interactions with generative AI signals that AI prompts may become discoverable evidence. This raises new questions about preservation policies and whether human-AI interactions should be treated as electronic stored information (ESI) like emails, potentially creating a new category of digital evidence that eDiscovery and forensic professionals must preserve and analyze. Large language models are hallucinating metadata at high rates when generating office documents, fabricating critical fields including dates, authors, comments, and even hash values used for document authentication. Legal professionals warn this creates dual risks of misleading metadata in basic file properties and forensic analysis, with potential litigation over whether altered metadata constitutes spoliation under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 37(e).