Installing Claude for Legal Plugins
What you’ll learn:
What Claude for Legal actually is — the new suite of 12 practice-area plugins (commercial, employment, privacy, litigation, AI governance, and more) plus 20+ MCP connectors to the tools you already use (DocuSign, Box, iManage, Westlaw, Harvey, CoCounsel), and how plugins bundle skills, connectors, and agents into a single install.
How to install the plugins from GitHub today — the step-by-step backdoor for getting Claude for Legal running in Cowork right now, before the plugins land in your marketplace, including how to zip a plugin folder from the anthropics/claude-for-legal repo and upload it through Customize → Browse plugins.
How to configure a plugin so it actually works for your practice — why the /<plugin>:cold-start-interview step matters, what seed documents to feed it, and how the practice profile it generates makes every other skill in the plugin sharper.
Installing 12 Claude for Legal Plugins through Github
Yesterday Anthropic announced Claude for Legal — 12 practice-area plugins covering commercial counsel, employment counsel, litigation, privacy, and more. They're rolling out to the Cowork plugin marketplace, but as of today they're not showing up in mine yet (may be an EU issue?).
So in this video I'm going to walk you through the backdoor:
Installing the 12 Claude for Legal plug-ins directly from GitHub, where Anthropic has published the full set as an open-source repo.
Before we get into the install, let me define what we're actually installing, because the terminology matters.
A plugin is a bundle. It's a single package you install once that brings three things with it: skills, connectors, and agents.
A skill is a specific capability you invoke when you need it — think of it as a pre-built workflow Claude knows how to run. In the commercial counsel plugin, for example, there's a skill that reviews a contract clause-by-clause against your playbook, another that triages incoming NDAs, another that drafts a redline. You call them with a slash command, or Claude fires them automatically when the context fits.
A connector is the integration layer — how Claude reaches the systems your work actually lives in. DocuSign, Box, iManage, Westlaw, Harvey. The plugin bundles the right connectors for that practice area so you're not wiring them up one by one.
An agent is the autonomous piece. Where a skill waits for you to ask, an agent runs on a schedule or trigger — for example, a daily briefing on regulatory developments in your jurisdictions, or a vendor agreement check that runs every Monday morning without you prompting it.
Plugin = the package.
Skills = on-demand workflows.
Connectors = system integrations.
Agents = the things that run on their own.
Once that's clear, the install is straightforward.
Here’s a quick and dirty run-through in 8 minutes.
