Making Legal AI More Powerful
Anthropic launched Cowork last week alongside a legal plugin, and both deserve the attention they're getting. Cowork raises the bar for what professionals should expect from AI, and the legal plugin signals that Anthropic sees legal as a domain where AI matters most. We think they're right and we encourage legal professionals to make the most of AI in their work!
August is built on top of Anthropic’s models, including Cowork. Therefore every advancement in Anthropic's models flows directly into our platform, and we work closely with their team: contributing feedback, testing new capabilities before they're released to the public, and pushing the boundaries of what Claude can do for legal work. But a plugin and a platform solve different problems.
The legal plugin, like 'legal skills' that already exist on ChatGPT, gives individual users a strong starting point for contract review, NDA triage, and template first-drafts, particularly useful for small businesses and in-house teams handling routine agreements. August solves a different challenge: how law firms actually practice at scale.
Enabling Collaboration & Privacy
Legal work doesn't happen in isolation. August is where teams work together on matters across every stage of an engagement, with shared playbooks, coordinated review workflows, and access controls that reflect the firm's ethical walls. Cowork's memory isn't siloed by matter, meaning information from one client engagement can surface in another. August enforces confidentiality walls at the matter level, a requirement, not a feature, for firms with obligations under ABA Model Rules 1.1 and 1.6.
Built for Law Firms
Cowork's legal plugin is well suited for simple agreements and basic in-house legal work. August is designed for complex litigation, multi-party transactions, and regulatory work that requires drafting from the firm's own templates and producing work consistent with institutional standards. August knows how your law firm works. August comes pre-configured with workflows built from how leading firms actually operate, and gives your team the ability to customize agents that produce work product aligned with your firm's standards, precedent, and style from day one.
Leading Agentic Workflows
August includes citation-backed legal research grounded in case law and statutory authority, not general summaries, but verifiable references lawyers can rely on. Beyond research, August orchestrates multi-step agentic workflows that are tailored to the way lawyers really work: review documents, flag deviations from precedent, generate redlines in bulk, and route deliverables for approval, all without manual handoffs. Any response generated by August’s Assistant can be verified, with citations drawn from case law, or from the user’s uploaded documents. We’ve built industry-leading OCR capabilities through deep technical partnerships with companies like Reducto. This is the difference between a tool that helps one lawyer with one document and a platform that powers an entire deal team through a closing.
Legal-Grade Auditability and Security
Firms whose clients include financial institutions, public companies, or government entities need to know exactly what their AI did, on which matter, and when. Anthropic's own documentation states that Cowork activity is not captured in audit logs, compliance API, or data exports, and advises against using it for regulated workloads. August provides SOC 2 Type II certification, single-tenant isolation, regional deployment, and contractual guarantees that no data is used for model training.
Fully Integrated with Microsoft
August connects natively with Outlook, Word, SharePoint, iManage, NetDocs, and mobile, fitting into the environment lawyers already work in. Cowork is currently unavailable to Windows users (over 90% of practicing lawyers), lacks a native Word plugin, and does not integrate with other DMS platforms like iManage, NetDocs, or SharePoint.
Predictable Pricing
Coworks pricing starts at $20/month for 2 or 3 queries but has usage-based pricing that can cost users hundreds of dollars monthly. August offers flat, per-seat pricing with no usage surprises.
We're proud to build on Anthropic's latest models, and we're focused on making sure they can deliver for the profession that need them the most.