AI Can’t Replace Legal Judgment. It Scales It Across the Enterprise.
When I joined Google nearly twenty years ago as a product counsel, almost every legal question we faced was brand new. Launching a single feature globally meant spending weeks stitching together legal surveys from multiple countries or retaining outside counsel to do the same. The nature of technology law was building knowledge launch by launch.
Two decades later, the challenge is different. After thousands of product launches, deals and contract negotiations, our department has built an enormous base of knowledge. We’ve answered similar questions, negotiated similar terms, and learned from what worked and what didn’t. But that experience is only useful if lawyers can find and use it when they need it.
Even in a tech company like ours, legal knowledge rarely sits neatly in one place. It’s often hidden in old contracts, closed files, forgotten folders and archived inboxes of lawyers who’ve moved on to different matters. The lawyer facing a question today may have no idea someone wrestled with the same issue a few years ago.
Making that knowledge instantly accessible is one of the most consequential applications of artificial intelligence in a legal department. For the first time, lawyers can use years of knowledge an organization has accumulated — external research, regulatory reviews and legal advice — to answer a question they have today.
We’re already seeing the impact of technology in our own legal work. Our lawyers can parse thousands of pages of deal documents to compare terms to agreements we already negotiated. They can review incoming contracts against company drafting standards. They can reason across hundreds of case files to pressure-test legal theories and surface relevant precedent. And increasingly, AI agents can carry out the next steps like suggesting redlines and producing drafts for lawyers to review and refine.
Beyond just speeding up the work, lawyers no longer have to start from scratch when the organization has already done the hard legal thinking.
That matters because great legal departments have never been measured by how quickly an attorney can find an old document. They’re measured by their judgement: prioritizing and managing risks, navigating uncertainty, advising leaders and helping them make tough decisions when there’s no easy answer.
Technology can’t replace that judgment. But by making an organization's experience immediately useful, it will give lawyers more time to use it.
In a field where the hardest work has always been thinking through what to do when there’s no precedent, that may be the most important benefit of all.
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By Halimah DeLaine Prado, General Counsel, Google