Google’s General Counsel Says AI Could Narrow the Law-Firm Technology Gap

On September 8, 2026, Axios reported Google general counsel Halimah DeLaine Prado’s view that AI can help smaller firms and legal-aid providers compete with larger practices, while remaining a complement to human judgment. She said Google’s legal department already uses AI for contract redlining, regulatory tracking, e-discovery, litigation preparation and institutional-knowledge retrieval. For BD teams, technology parity raises the importance of the firm’s client knowledge, judgment, responsiveness and ability to package repeatable expertise around a buyer’s business. The second-order implication is that firms should describe client outcomes and service design, because access to capable AI tools will become less persuasive as a differentiator on its own.