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Google has launched Gemini Enterprise for Legal, a suite of AI-powered tools aimed at automating legal workflows. This new offering positions Google in direct competition with OpenAI and Anthropic, both of which have been developing legal-focused tools this year. Microsoft also announced its own legal agent earlier this year.

The new system, developed with input from attorneys at firms such as Cleary Gottlieb, Freshfields, and partnerships with Everlaw, Relativity, iManage, NetDocuments, and DocuSign, offers pre-built Gemini skills and virtual assistants tailored to plug directly into law firms' existing data systems and carry out substantive legal work. These agents handle tasks like contract review, redlining, regulatory tracking, and searching through case files and internal documents.

Google emphasizes that client data, model outputs, and other firm information will not be used to train its foundation models, addressing a major confidentiality concern among law firms about adopting AI tools. The product incorporates four key components: purpose-built skills for tasks like contract review and regulatory tracking, secure connections into a firm's existing document and case systems, agents that execute tasks rather than merely suggest actions, and an open ecosystem of partners to customize and extend the platform.

While Google isn't alone in pursuing the legal market, its approach stands out for its partnership-heavy strategy, rather than a direct replacement for existing software. This move comes amid growing pressure on law firms to move faster and demonstrate they are not billing associates for work that AI agents can handle, as well as in-house legal teams seeking to automate more of their tasks to reduce the need for outside counsel and lower overall legal spend.