AI lawyers just scored 45% on professional legal benchmarks. Discover why this leap changes everything for the legal field.
Matilda
Maybe AI Agents Can Be Lawyers After All
AI Lawyers Just Cleared a Major Hurdle—And It Happened Fast Can artificial intelligence actually practice law? Just weeks ago, the answer seemed obvious: no. Leading AI agents were scoring below 25% on professional legal tasks, failing basic contract analysis and regulatory reasoning. Lawyers could breathe easy. But that comfort vanished overnight. Anthropic's latest model, Opus 4.6, recently scored nearly 30% on a single attempt—and a staggering 45% average when allowed multiple tries on Mercor's APEX-Agents benchmark. This isn't incremental progress. It's a seismic shift suggesting AI legal agents may arrive far sooner than experts predicted. Credit: Google The Benchmark That Changed Everything Last month, professional AI testing painted a bleak picture for legal automation. Every major lab's agents stumbled through scenarios requiring nuanced judgment—misinterpreting liability clauses, overlooking jurisdictional nuances, and failing to synthesize case law. Scores ho…