Google shipped Gemini Enterprise for Legal yesterday. It's a specialized version of its platform designed for law firms and legal departments, with AI agents that handle contract analysis, legal research, citation verification, monitoring regulatory changes, and other workflows on confidential data.
The system connects with legal databases and products already used by professionals, Thomson Reuters products are mentioned, which matters more than the AI capability itself. Enterprise AI isn't conquering verticals by being smarter. It's conquering them by fitting into existing infrastructure.
The deeper move here is that AI is no longer trying to be a general-purpose tool that replaces expertise. It's now moving into regulated professions as a specialized assistant that respects the structural constraints of those professions: confidentiality, access controls, internal policies, compliance requirements. That's a different sales motion than "use our AI instead of thinking."
Law is an obvious vertical for this. Law firms have money, they have data that needs handling with care, they already use expensive software systems they've customized over years. The value isn't in replacing lawyers. It's in integrating with their workflows in a way that doesn't require retraining everyone.
This is what enterprise AI looks like when it actually works. Not a chatbot in the corner. An integration into the stack you already depend on. Whether Google's AI is better at legal reasoning than some other model matters less than whether it connects to the systems lawyers are already paying for. Once you're baked into Thomson Reuters or LexisNexis integrations, it doesn't matter much if Claude or Grok could theoretically be better at the task.
The race for enterprise AI isn't being won by capability benchmarks. It's being won by whoever gets deeper into existing workflows first. Google is taking that seriously.
