Google's Chief Legal Officer Prado: AI Cannot Replace Lawyers
Google's Chief Legal Officer Halimah DeLaine Prado publicly stated that artificial intelligence cannot replace human lawyers and judges, defining the role of AI in the legal industry as "supplementary rather than substitutive."
Prado emphasized that the foundation of legal practice is always based on sound judgment, and AI currently cannot take on the role of the final decision-maker in legal matters. This statement follows Google's recent launch of the Gemini Enterprise product aimed at the legal industry last month.
The Gemini Enterprise legal version launched by Google last month is targeted at law firms and in-house legal teams, covering functions such as legal document drafting, case citation verification, contract management, regulatory tracking, and data discovery. Google's own legal department is currently using this tool for tasks such as contract annotation revisions, regulatory tracking, electronic discovery, and litigation preparation.
Prado mentioned that with the help of AI tools, lawyers can now obtain information that previously took days to organize in just a few minutes, allowing them more time for thinking and judgment. However, she also stressed that the quality of legal services should not depend on the technology budget of the organization, implying that small and medium-sized law firms should also benefit from the efficiency gains brought by AI, rather than being limited to large firms with substantial financial resources.
Prado's remarks also echo the ongoing concerns in the legal industry regarding the issue of AI "hallucinations". According to researcher Damien Charlotin, over 2,000 cases involving AI-generated false content have been identified. Previously, a prosecutor in Georgia was suspended for six months for submitting legal documents containing non-existent case law, and the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals sanctioned two lawyers for submitting documents with fabricated citations.
From a market perspective, Google is entering the legal tech space with Gemini Enterprise, directly competing with existing legal AI products such as CoCounsel from Thomson Reuters and the startup Harvey. Prado's statement that "AI is supplementary rather than substitutive" is also a form of risk management language for Google as it promotes its own legal AI products—showing the commercial appeal of AI in enhancing efficiency while emphasizing that "human judgment is irreplaceable" to mitigate the professional risks and potential legal liabilities caused by AI hallucinations, thereby gaining the trust of the legal community in adopting AI tools.
Source: Public Information
ABAB AI Insight
Google has been continuously penetrating vertical industries with the capabilities of the Gemini series large models in recent years, having previously launched customized AI products for sectors such as healthcare and finance. The recently released Gemini Enterprise legal version is the latest extension of its strategy to productize general large model capabilities and enter the professional services market in the legal industry. The risks of "hallucinations" caused by AI applications in the legal field have previously been highlighted in public cases, including the mentioned suspension of the Georgia prosecutor and the sanctions against lawyers by the Ninth Circuit Court.
Google's capital strategy is to monetize its massive computing power investment in large model research through vertical industry SaaS products for enterprise clients. The legal industry, due to its high client fees, strict compliance requirements, and standardized document processing needs, is seen as one of the key scenarios for the commercialization of large models. By using its own legal department as the first internal application scenario for validation, Google employs the common "use it before selling it" strategy often used by large model vendors to enhance product credibility among target customer groups.
This is similar to the previous layout paths of CoCounsel from Thomson Reuters and the startup Harvey in the legal AI space. The legal tech sector has currently formed a competitive landscape among traditional legal information service giants (Thomson Reuters), AI-native startups (Harvey), and large model vendors (Google). This sector is transitioning from "efficiency tool validation" to "large-scale commercialization," and the legal industry's tolerance for AI hallucination risks will directly determine the speed of this penetration.
Essentially, this involves a redefinition of responsibility boundaries under the logic of technological substitution—AI significantly reduces the time costs required for legal information retrieval and initial draft generation, but since legal judgment involves final professional responsibility and judicial consequences, the roles of human lawyers and judges are redefined as "final judges and bearers of responsibility," rather than being completely replaced. The core mechanism is that in professional service fields with strong accountability attributes, the speed of technology replacing efficiency aspects is inherently faster than its replacement of final decision-making and responsibility aspects, which is a structural pattern commonly observed in the AI penetration process across many professional service industries.
ABAB News · Cognitive Law
- AI can help you research, but it cannot take on your responsibilities.
- Efficiency aspects are replaced first, and responsibility aspects come last.
- Those selling AI tools always emphasize that "AI cannot replace humans."