Google Conducts Three-Month Field Experiment on AI's Impact on Patent Lawyers' Expertise
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On October 8, 2026, Google Research published an NBER paper reporting a three-month randomized field experiment: covering 133 lawyers at 11 IP law firms, two-thirds of the lawyers were given early access to the then-unreleased Google Labs AI patent drafting tool (now part of Gemini Notebook) to study the AI assistant's impact on patent lawyers' professional capabilities. The study concluded that the AI assistant increased lawyers' output but did not necessarily cultivate junior lawyers' professional judgment. The report contains only this first-hand source, and the event's follow-up developments remain to be seen.
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Google Research published an NBER paper reporting a three-month randomized field experiment with 133 lawyers at 11 IP firms, giving two-thirds of the lawyers early access to the then-unreleased Google Labs AI patent drafting tool (now part of Gemini Notebook).