Google launches Gemini Enterprise AI for legal firms

Google Cloud has launched previews of Gemini Enterprise for Legal, an AI system designed to help law firms and corporate legal departments give tasks like contract review, regulatory tracking, and court filing prep over to software agents.

Cleary Gottlieb, Freshfields, Weil, and Williams & Connolly are the first four firms to sign on as customers at launch.

Gemini Enterprise serves as base

Google built the legal offering as a plugin that runs inside the existing Gemini Enterprise platform instead of creating a totally new app. The tech giant calls it “a legal plugin inside the Gemini Enterprise app, not a separate application your team logs into.”

The system is focused on four key parts that drive the platform. These include specialized skills that help to put agents through the details of legal work, and secure connectors into software a firm already has running prior. There are also third-party agents from legal-tech vendors, and a governance layer that allows control and access for IT and risk staff.

Connector list for new platform

Connections run over Model Context Protocol, with a very long list of systems on the roster. Google named iManage, NetDocuments, Everlaw, RelativityOne, DocuSign, Thomson Reuters, Harvey, Legora, and the Free Law Project’s CourtListener database, among others. Consultants and legal-service providers including Accenture, Deloitte, KPMG, and Factor Law are also available to handle launches.

The tech firm says client files, firm strategies, and outputs from the models stay within a customer’s private cloud and are never used in training its foundation models. The company also emphasizes the need for traceable citations.

Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said that accuracy was the core problem, and claimed making agentic legal work “accurate, factual, and grounded in legal authority is of critical importance,” in a statement carried by Quartz.

Why is Google moving to legal now?

Business Insider reported that Anthropic has been proposing document-review and drafting plugins to legal firms since earlier this year, while OpenAI has built a legal team led by Ironclad founder Jason Boehmig. Microsoft also launched a legal agent of its own this year. Google’s move seems like a direct answer to its rivals’ products directed at lawyers.

Weil co-managing partner Jonathon Soler told Reuters that expectations have now shifted, and firms now have to adopt AI. Cleary Managing Partner Jeff Karpf said that the tool “can slot in seamlessly with other daily work tools,” while Freshfields Global Managing Partner Alan Mason described a “strategic, multi-year partnership” with Google Cloud.

Thomson Reuters shares fell about 3% and DocuSign saw a dip of less than 2% in early Tuesday trading, a dampened move compared to when a smaller Anthropic legal release in February erased tens of billions of dollars from legal-tech and information-services stocks.

Legal is the first of several industry packages Google plans to build on Gemini Enterprise, a platform Alphabet launched in October as the successor to Vertex AI. A financial services version arrived the same day, and Google says healthcare, life sciences, and other sectors are next in line.

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