On May 12, Anthropic announced 12 practice-area plug-ins for Claude, its large language model. They represent additional potential for how AI can help legal professionals, but none of it matters if the lawyers using these tools don’t understand them. AI can improve or damage a practice, depending on whether lawyers have the competency required for effective use.
Anthropic also announced more than 20 integrations across the legal tech stack: iManage and NetDocuments for document management; Relativity and Everlaw for eDiscovery; Thomson Reuters and Free Law Project for research; and Harvey for assistant-level work. A Claude integration inside Microsoft 365 carries context across Word, Outlook, Excel, and PowerPoint as a lawyer moves between them. And law firms, including Freshfields, Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, and Holland & Knight, have also announced Claude deployments. None of this is theoretical. The tools have arrived.
However, none of that matters if the lawyers using these tools don’t understand them and fail to incorporate them as part of their legal learning journey. AI can improve or damage a practice, depending on whether lawyers have the competency required for effective use.
Competency with technology goes beyond principle and has a regulatory backstop. The American Bar Association (ABA) revised Comment 8 to Model Rule 1.1 more than a decade ago to establish that competence in technology is part of attorney competence. The 2015 amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) pulled eDiscovery firmly into that frame, treating electronically stored information as part of the practice rather than a vendor problem. Formal Opinion 512, issued in July 2024, extended the analysis to generative AI, including competence, confidentiality, communications, supervision, candor, and fees. That means that lawyers saying “I’m not a tech person” stopped being a defensible posture some time ago.
As lawyers use GenAI more in everyday work, the stakes rise. A model that drafts a motion, summarizes a deposition, or analyzes a contract introduces new ways for a lawyer to mishandle a client matter if the lawyer does not understand what the tool is doing. A vendor demo and a half-hour webinar are not sufficient preparation.
SkillBurst training modules for GenAI from BARBRI Professional Education are built for that gap. They focus on what lawyers actually do with AI.
Persuasive Legal Writing with AI and Structuring Legal Writing with AI address the drafting and editing skills that shift when a model is in the loop. Prompting AI Reasoning Models covers how today’s models actually process instructions and how that differs from earlier systems. Understanding + Interacting with Modern Language Tools surveys the major reasoning models (Claude, OpenAI, Gemini, xAI), so lawyers can match the tool to the use case. Videoconferencing + Notetaking with AI Tools addresses what happens when AI sits in meetings and on transcripts, with the confidentiality consequences that follow.
Anthropic’s announcement will matter only to lawyers who can put a tool like Claude to work because they’ve had the training and built the skillset to do so. SkillBurst is where that capability is built. To learn how you or your firm can access the new modules, contact pdinfo@barbri.com.
Interested in reading more? Fill out the form to read the full article.