Deploying Anthropic’s Claude Cowork 3P
NEON Brings Claude to Its Own Infrastructure – and Turns Lawyers into AI Builders
Berlin, 10 July 2026 – NEON is deploying Anthropic’s Claude Cowork | Code 3P in accordance with German professional confidentiality requirements (BRAO, StGB) to work client matters and has built a proprietary organizational AI hub, NEON BRAIN, to integrate generative AI into the firm’s legal workflows.
Why This Matters: Anthropic changes Legal AI Market
The deployment lands at a moment of rapid realignment in legal technology. In May 2026, Anthropic launched Claude for Legal, moving decisively into the legal vertical as a foundational model provider. The launch reordered the competitive landscape. Anthropic pairs the leading models for legal work with the most advanced agentic system available for professional use.
For German lawyers and other professionals bound by statutory confidentiality (Berufsgeheimnisträger), this raised a pressing question, debated openly: outside direct cooperations with Anthropic, such as Freshfields’ firm-wide partnership announced in April 2026, deploying the technology in a manner compliant with professional-secrecy obligations (BRAO, § 203 StGB) and data-protection law was not practically feasible. First-party consumer, team and enterprise plans lacked the required safeguards. The general availability of Claude Desktop on third-party infrastructure (3P) on 9 July 2026 removes this barrier: firms can now run Claude entirely on their own European infrastructure, for instance Google Cloud’s Vertex AI in the EU region, keeping client data within their own regulatory perimeter.
Coinciding with Anthropic’s general availability release of Claude Cowork|Code 3P, NEON has implemented the technology on dedicated European infrastructure in collaboration with legal AI engineering company iurAI.
NEON is among the first law firms in Germany – and potentially the first boutique law firm – to operate Claude Cowork 3P on its own infrastructure and deploy it in day-to-day legal work under the regulatory requirements applicable to legal professionals. But the firm’s approach extends beyond AI adoption. NEON lawyers are not only using AI tools, they are building applications with them.
A Dedicated Infrastructure for Legal Work
Anthropic’s Claude Cowork|Code 3P enables organizations with heightened regulatory require-ments to run Claude on their own infrastructure while maintaining access to Claude Cowork|Code capabilities. For law firms, this creates new opportunities to deploy generative AI in a manner aligned with professional secrecy obligations, data protection requirements, and the handling of highly sensitive client information. Over the past several months, NEON and iurAI have designed, implemented, and tested the technical environment required for production deployment.
At the center of the setup is NEON BRAIN, a proprietary organizational hub that connects Claude to the firm’s workflows, knowledge repositories, and data sources. The platform enables lawyers to work with AI directly within the context of their legal practice rather than through isolated consumer-facing tools.
“With NEON BRAIN, we’ve placed a model-agnostic layer between the model and the lawyers. It bundles context management, AI capabilities and data ingestion together with orchestration and observability for the firm’s AI use. Because that layer is plug-and-play, it can be connected to other providers and interfaces as the market evolves. This lets NEON respond dynamically to market shifts and keep building its own AI assets – skills today, agents tomorrow – in a proprietary environment.” Dennis Fordan, Founder and CEO, iurAI
The rollout begins with NEON’s Venture Capital practice and is already being expanded to additional practice groups, including M&A and Disputes.
From AI Users to AI Builders
The second pillar of NEON’s strategy is equally significant. Instead of treating AI as a productivity tool alone, the firm encourages lawyers to act as AI Builders, developing software applications based on their own legal expertise and practical experience. Lawyers create prototypes using Claude, translating legal workflows into functional applications for internal use and client collaboration. iurAI’s AI engineering team then hardens, validates, and productionizes these prototypes for professional deployment.
The resulting applications are built by the people who actually perform the legal work and understand the underlying processes in detail. Potential use cases include tools that support venture capital transactions, document generation for financing rounds, transaction management,other highly specialized legal workflows but also highly customised client facing applications and websites
“We started with our venture capital practice as the pilot group. Our VC lawyers now design their own tools because no one understands the realities of a Series A financing better than the lawyers working on these transactions every day. But this is only the beginning—we are rolling Claude out across all practice groups at NEON.” Patrick Auerbach, Partner at NEON
A New Operating Model for Legal Services
NEON views generative AI not as a replacement for legal expertise but as a new layer within the firm’s broader technology ecosystem. By combining proprietary infrastructure, advanced language models, and lawyer-led application development, the firm aims to create a new model for delivering legal services – one in which legal expertise and software development increasingly converge.