By Julie Bays, OBA Practice Management Advisor
Just when you thought there couldn’t possibly be another legal AI product to keep track of, Google has entered the legal AI market.
In August, Google Cloud announced Gemini Enterprise for Legal, a new version of its
Gemini Enterprise platform designed specifically for law firms and corporate legal departments. It is currently available in preview and joins a rapidly growing field of legal AI products from companies including Microsoft, OpenAI, Anthropic and a long list of legal technology vendors.
What makes Google’s approach interesting is that it isn’t simply another chatbot for lawyers. Gemini Enterprise for Legal is designed to connect with many of the systems lawyers already use. Its announced partners include iManage, NetDocuments, Thomson Reuters, Harvey, Legora, Everlaw, RelativityOne, Docusign and the Free Law Project’s CourtListener database.
Google says the system can assist with tasks such as drafting legal briefs, checking citations, reviewing contracts, monitoring regulatory developments and preparing other legal documents. It can also use information from an organization’s own systems and work with other legal AI products through those integrations.
Whether this approach ultimately proves useful for most law firms remains to be seen. But the announcement is another indication that the major technology companies see the legal profession as an important market for AI.
And, as always, lawyers should remember that adding reliable documents, legal databases or other source material to an AI workflow does NOT guarantee that the AI’s answer will be accurate. Generative AI can still misunderstand information, make incorrect conclusions or simply make things up. Citations, quotations, legal authorities and substantive legal analysis still need to be independently verified.
Interestingly, Google’s own general counsel, Halimah DeLaine Prado, recently made essentially the same point when discussing AI and the legal profession. She described AI as a complement to lawyers rather than a replacement and emphasized that the practice of law ultimately depends upon good human judgment. See Google’s general counsel says AI cant’ replace human judgement.
Further reading: Artificial Lawyer, Google Launches Gemini Enterprise for Legal.