Anthropic has hired Robert Mahari as head of Claude for Legal, helping law firms, in-house teams and legal tech companies move “from product to GTM,” in a move that signals the frontier AI provider is putting further weight behind its push into the legal sector.
The hire comes around three months after Anthropic launched Claude for Legal, with 20 MCP connectors linking Claude to the software that law firms run on.
Mahari holds a JD-PhD from Harvard Law School and the MIT Media Lab focused on legal artificial intelligence and has served as associate director of Stanford’s CodeX Center for Legal Informatics. Announcing his move on LinkedIn, Mahari, who has spent much of his career at the intersection of AI and legal practice, said: “For almost a decade, I’ve been weaving AI into the study and practice of law. A surprising amount of my energy went into being convincing: convincing MIT Media Lab and Harvard Law School that the intersection of AI and law merits a JD-PhD program (thank you Alex ‘Sandy’ Pentland and David Wilkins for helping make the case!), convincing lawyers that this technology will have a profound impact on practice sooner than later, and convincing my computer science colleagues that law is not as boring as it sounds.
“No one at Anthropic needed to be convinced. This first became clear to me when Mark Pike, Eleanor Dorfman, and their team launched Claude for Legal. Since then, everyone I met at Anthropic sees that AI will change legal practice at its core. That lawyers deserve tools built with real care for privilege, confidentiality, and getting things right. And that legal education and access to justice belong at the center of this transformation. I can’t wait to work with these incredible people to reimagine the legal profession.”
Commenting on the hire Pike, who is associate general counsel, said: “Anthropic just hired Robert Mahari and I’m beyond excited. I rely on Claude to do my best legal work, and I can’t wait to collaborate with Robert to make sure every legal team out there has access to these same amazing tools.”
Pike added: “When Robert’s start was announced internally, I wrote that I was in awe of his ability to explain technical concepts to non-technical audiences (many of us lawyers!) in a very accessible way. It goes both ways, too: he’s just as good at explaining the work legal pros are doing to our Research and Product teams. That’s exactly the skill this moment demands. The tech is moving fast, and the profession deserves someone who can meet practitioners where they are.”
What’s interesting about the hire is the focus now on translating product capability into adoption.
