Google is stepping up for law firms with a new set of tools built for the world’s most rigorous profession.
The company on Tuesday unveiled Gemini Enterprise for Legal, a bundle of pre-built Gemini skills and virtual assistants, known as agents, that can plug into the systems where a company’s data resides and perform tasks.
Google and other tech companies see dollar signs in the legal sector. Since the beginning of this year, Anthropic has been courting lawyers with plug-ins for reviewing and drafting documents. OpenAI is building out a legal software team led by Ironclad founder Jason Boehmig. Microsoft also debuted this year as a legal agent.
Law firms are under pressure from clients to move faster and show that they are not billing their associates for work that agents can do. In-house legal teams are looking for ways to automate more work themselves, so they can send less to outside lawyers and reduce their legal bills.
Google’s suite of AI tools positions it as a central hub for that legal work. Lawyers can use Gemini Enterprise for Legal to review and negotiate contracts, track regulatory changes, and search files and internal documents. Google said in a blog post that customer data, model output and other information will not be used to train Google’s base models.
In its blog post, Google said that general-purpose artificial intelligence is “not nearly enough” for lawyers, whose work depends on trust and accuracy. It says it developed Gemini Enterprise for Legal with input from lawyers from law firms including Cleary Gottlieb and Freshfields to provide better tools for their work.
Customers can also connect Gemini’s agents to the systems that contain their internal documents. Google works with Everlaw and Relativity for lawsuits. iManage, NetDocuments and Docusign are used to arrange matters and contracts. Other partners include Thomson Reuters, Harveyand Legora.
These partnerships may help explain why legal tech stocks were largely flat or saw only modest declines in early trading on Tuesday. Shares of Thomson Reuters fell about 3% one day after the announcement first AI modelwhile DocuSign fell less than 2%.
In February, a small legal release from Anthropic wiped out tens of billions of dollars in market value of legal technology and information services companies, as investors worried the company’s move into the legal space would displace incumbents.
Now Google appears to be taking a deliberately conciliatory approach.
