Research · 2026-10-07

AI helps experienced lawyers more than junior ones, Google study finds

A three-month experiment with patent lawyers found that AI assistance improved the quality of their work, but junior lawyers did not build the same independent skills as senior ones.

✨ What was tested

Google researchers, together with academics, ran a three-month field experiment. It involved 133 patent lawyers from eleven intellectual property law firms that work with Google. Some lawyers got early access to an AI patent writing tool that had not yet been released. The rest could use it only after the study ended.

At 10 and 90 days, lawyers were given materials for a hypothetical invention and asked to draft a patent. Independent experts scored the work on five criteria: enforceability, accuracy, strategic ambiguity, completeness, and clarity.

📌 What happened

The AI tool did improve the work: after 90 days, scores rose by about 11 percentile points compared with lawyers who did not use it. The improvement came mainly from fewer very weak submissions, while the number of truly excellent ones did not change.

When the AI was removed and lawyers had to fix errors in an existing patent unaided, the picture changed. Senior lawyers (with seven or more years of experience) outperformed colleagues who had not used AI. Junior lawyers showed no average gain, and their scores spread out: more very low scores, but also more good ones.

The researchers concluded that AI works like a temporary exoskeleton: it helps people perform right now, but does not guarantee they learn the skill themselves. Junior lawyers who relied on AI often described problems without fixing them, and this habit did not change over three months.

Sources: 🔗 Google Research Blog