Google is making a play for law firms with a new suite of tools built for the world's most scrupulous 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 firm's data lives and carry out tasks.
Google and other tech companies are seeing dollar signs in the legal sector. Since early this year, Anthropic has been courting lawyers with plugins for document review and drafting. OpenAI is building out a legal software team led by Ironclad founder Jason Boehmig. Microsoft also debuted a legal agent this year.
Law firms are under pressure from clients to move faster and show they're not billing 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 counsel and shrink their legal bills.
Google's suite of AI tools positions it as a central hub for that legal work. Lawyers will be able to use Gemini Enterprise for Legal to review and negotiate contracts, track regulatory changes, and search case files and internal documents. Google said in a blog post that client data, model outputs, and other information won't be used to train Google's foundation models.
In its blog post, Google said that general-purpose artificial intelligence is "nowhere near sufficient" for lawyers, whose work relies on trust and accuracy. It said it developed Gemini Enterprise for Legal with input from attorneys at law firms, including Cleary Gottlieb and Freshfields, to bring better tools to their work.
Customers can also connect Gemini's agents to the systems that contain their internal documents. For litigation, Google has partnered with Everlaw and Relativity. For wrangling cases and contracts, it's tapped iManage, NetDocuments, and Docusign. Other partners include Thomson Reuters, Harvey, and Legora.
Those partnerships may help explain why legal tech stocks mostly held steady or saw only modest drops in early trading Tuesday. Shares of Thomson Reuters slid about 3%, one day after announcing its first AI model, while DocuSign was down less than 2%.
In February, a small legal release from Anthropic wiped out tens of billions of dollars in market value from legal tech and information services companies, as investors worried the company's push into legal would edge out incumbents.
Now, Google appears to be taking a deliberately conciliatory approach.