Legal Quants Weekly Digest — Week 20

Anthropic's week — Opus 4.7 ships and Claude for Word lands hard on the legal-SaaS layer; Legora's response is Jude Law and a pastry competition.

• Opus 4.7 launches — explicitly not Mythos, faster reasoning, more literal prompts at lower effort levels, session limits on fire.
• Pre-release throttling — Bedrock unaffected; "/effort medium" is the new "high".
• Claude for Word — token-efficient, friction-free, EU/UAE residency via Bedrock and Vertex; Spellbook on the chopping block.
• The "deep understanding of lawyers" critique — legal-SaaS moats are mostly prompts; the rainmaker debate lands on the robo-advisor parallel.
• Open legal data infrastructure — Free Law Project's Blackletter + Inception, OpenDataLoader PDF, Candle.law for patents.
• Novel terrain — AI agents and tax presence/transfer pricing, work product as a more durable shield than privilege under US law, GLM-5.1 as the on-prem reference point.