Yesterday, ‘Google Legal’ gave an inside look at how Gemini Enterprise can be deployed for lawyers, from everyday prompting, to NotebookLM use, to custom app development. Artificial Lawyer was there.
The demonstration was led by Xavier Polidoro, Legal Counsel, Google Cloud, and the highlight was what he called the ‘advanced’ uses, which covered ‘Cloud Legal AI Helpers’. These customised solutions appear to connect to the more specifically branded ‘Gemini Enterprise for Legal’ – the recently announced offering that comes with a number of agents, although in this case they used a different wording.
Here’s an overview of what was on show – with a lot of it simply about how lawyers can use the Gemini LLM capability and also NotebookLM for legal work. At the end, Polidoro covered the development of customised agents that can be connected to whatever sources you want, and then steered to perform certain tasks, e.g. redline a document, or help to write brief.
They also interestingly mentioned Harvey’s use of Gemini, as well as Freshfields – which they have mentioned before, and also Inspira.
So, first an overview of what they showed, then NotebookLM, then the Legal AI Helpers
Live In-Tool Demonstrations:
‘General Prompting: Accelerating contract summaries, risk flagging, and preliminary client communications using Gemini Enterprise chat.
Grounded Research: Using Gemini Notebook to search, cross-reference, and summarize dense legal repositories and multi-amendment agreements with full source grounding.
Custom Helpers: A walkthrough of the Cloud Legal AI Helpers, showing how legal teams can build and deploy custom chatbots for deal management.’
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After an introduction on how to get the most out of standard prompting with Gemini, Polidoro moved onto NotebookLM. It’s got a lot on offer, including turning your work product into an audio ‘podcast’ – which is wild, but the main benefit is simply the way that you can connect Notebook to multiple sources and then get to work.
Google highlighted that you can add in 300 sources, each up to 500,000 words. In short, a law firm or legal team could connect Notebook to a huge trove of documents and data. And that’s really useful.
He focused on how you can ‘chat’ with your documents and gain deep insights very quickly.
And then Google focused on what it’s calling Cloud Legal AI Helpers, showing how legal teams can build and deploy ‘custom chatbots’ for deal management. (And the use of the term ‘chatbot’ here stood out. AL would say this seems more like an agent…..but the use of terminology with Google and its legal offering does seem to be a bit unclear. That possibly suggests that despite the recent launch of Gemini for Legal, the overall offering has not been tied down yet into a fully unified set of products. But, it’s early days.)
Polidoro noted that there are two versions of this now, a Pro and a Flash offering. These can be connected to the sources of your choice and customised to perform certain tasks, which as noted sounds more like an agent to AL. He noted that this capability is highly versatile and can be used across a range of legal use cases.
He also gave one example of working off playbooks and other trusted sources, where the Cloud Legal AI Helper would surface improved language, place that in a separate box on the page, and then you could cut and paste that into your new version of the document you were creating.
And there was also a word about data. Google stressed that they don’t train on any of your legal data.
Overall, it was a very interesting demo. It clearly showed the ‘ease of use’ when it comes to deploying Google / Gemini for legal work. And as noted before, one advantage Google has here is that it has ‘centrality’ working on its side. I.e. a chunk of work may already be happening in connection to Google’s wider platform, if you then add in legal uses, then you have a good reason just to stay there.
Did what was on offer blow AL’s mind? No. Prompts …. well, nice, but nothing new there. NotebookLM – also nice, and surprisingly useful, especially the mass of source data that you can connect it to. And the Helpers….which seem like the agents from Gemini Enterprise for Legal, but with a different brand name….are also nice, and helpful. In fact, they would no doubt give many legal AI tools in the market a good run for their money.
And as noted above, if you want to ‘live’ inside this context, then you can, up to a point. There’s a lot there…..if you are willing to do the work to connect sources, build agents/chatbots, keep things organised and more.
But, it’s also lacking plenty of more developed point solution tools, doesn’t have its own legal data – although you can connect to just about everything, and it’s unclear how easy it is to sustain the overall Google context here for a lawyer when they’re also working with other tools, even if there are connectors available.
It’s early days for Google and specific legal tools still. AL would expect things to become more ‘joined up’ as things progress. It all looks very promising. Let’s see where this goes.
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Legal Innovators Conferences London and New York this November
Come and join us in London this November 4th + 5th at Legal Innovators. The conference at the intersection of legal AI and the business of law. Day One: law firms, Day Two: inhouse.
Legal Innovators UK – London, Nov 4 and 5
And,
Legal Innovators New York – Nov 17 and 18
See you at Legal Innovators New York – Nov 17 and 18 – join us at the intersection of legal AI and the business of law in New York for the most important legal innovation event of the year! Day One: law firms, Day Two: inhouse. Top speakers from across the legal AI world, leading law firms, and major companies. All for one purpose: to describe and explore the frontier of legal technology. See you there!
UK and New York event links are here:
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