Legal Tech AI Recap: Google, Thomson Reuters, LexisNexis, and iManage All Make Their Move

Episode Notes

Transcript

Phillip Vaden:

Hey everyone. Welcome back to the show. I’m your host, Phillip Vaden, partner manager at InfoTrac US, and this is the AI Sidebar’s Legal Tech AI Recap, where we catch you up on everything that happened in legal tech over the last few weeks. And I’ll tell you right now, it was not a quiet couple of weeks. We had the Ilticon Conference out in Nashville, which tends to be a magnet for big announcements, and this year was no exception. So grab your coffee, settle in, and let’s get into it. The story everyone’s talking about is Google. On Monday, Google Cloud officially launched Google Enterprise for Legal, which they’re describing as a purpose-built agentic AI platform designed specifically for law firm and legal department workflows. This isn’t just a chatbot bolted onto Gemini. It’s got dedicated skills for brief drafting, citation verification, contract lifecycle management, regulatory scanning, and even handling data subject access requests.

And here’s the part that really signals Google means business. They built in secure integrations with platforms that are already deeply embedded in legal workflows, including Harvey, iManage, Thomson Reuters, and RelativityOne. On top of that, they’ve lined up consulting muscle from Deloitte and Accenture to help firms actually implement it. This move puts Google squarely in the ring with OpenAI and Anthropic for a piece of the legal AI pie. Now, Google wasn’t the only one moving fast. Thomson Reuters had a big week too. They announced Thompson, their own proprietary large language model trained specifically on Westlaw and Practical Law content. That’s a notable shift. Instead of leaning entirely on a partner model, they’re building proprietary legal intelligence in-house, and they’re plugging into tabular analysis tools that can review up to 10,000 documents and answer 100 questions at a time. This comes right on the heels of their Next Gen Co-Counsel legal rollout, which added a Westlaw brief builder, Matter specific workspaces, and a drafting agent that works right inside of Microsoft Word.

Thomson Reuters says Co-Counsel is already being used by a million professionals across more than a hundred countries. So this is very much an incumbent doubling down rather than standing still. And speaking of incumbents doubling down, LexisNexis wasn’t going to let the week pass without a major announcement of its own. They unveiled what they’re calling the legal intelligence engine, which is essentially an agentic harness that sits on top of their existing protege platform. The idea is that instead of lawyers having to know which tool or model to reach for, they just describe what they’re trying to accomplish in plain language and the system figures out which AI models, agents, and data sources to pull together, including a direct line into shepherds for citation verification, and it can spit up formatted Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents with a single prompt. Also, it holds context across multiple steps of a task so you’re not just repeating yourself all the time.

It sounds like a really wonderful tool, and this is a meaningful architectural shift for them moving from a single AI assistant toward an orchestration layer. All right, now iManage, they were busy too. They announced general availability of their next generation platform built to scale AI more reliably across large organizations. And separately, they revealed their accelerating enterprise AI adoption through a direct integration with Google’s new Gemini enterprise for legal. So those two stories from this week are actually feeding into each other. iManage also struck a strategic partnership with Thomson Reuters to deliver what they’re calling governed AI-powered legal workflows, which is really about giving IT and risk teams more confidence that AI outputs are being tracked and controlled as they move across systems. Okay, now not everything this week or really the past couple of weeks was about a product launch. There’s a regulatory story worth watching closely if you’re in California or dealing with California licensed attorneys.

The state Senate, State Senate Bills 574 is sitting on the governor’s desk awaiting signature, and it contains a provision that says attorneys cannot delegate the practice of law to generative AI. Legal commentators are flagging this as a potential existential problem because the practice of law isn’t precisely defined, which means the delegation ban could end up functioning less like a supervision requirement and more like a blanket prohibition on a lot of current AI use cases. California’s legislative session wrapped up on August 31st, so we should know very soon whether it moves forward in its current form and it’s exactly the kind of thing that could reshape how legal AI vendors approach the California market. Well, that’s a wrap for this week. Big theme, if you’re keeping score, the Giants, Google, Thomson Reuters, LexisNexis, and iManage all made moves within days of each other, which tells you the competition for the legal AI stack is intensifying fast while a quieter but potentially bigger story is brewing in Sacramento.

Thanks for tuning in. I’m Phillip Vaden. If you found this useful, please share it with a colleague who’s trying to keep up with all of this. We’ll be back in a few weeks with another recap. Until then, take care.