Copilot for legal, and Gemini

Most in-house legal teams already have an AI assistant, whether they chose one or not. If the business runs on Microsoft 365, it is Copilot. If it runs on Google Workspace, it is Gemini. Both write, summarise and answer questions inside the documents and email you already use.

The difference for lawyers is that Microsoft has built something specific. In 2026 it added a Legal Agent to Word, aimed squarely at contract review. Google has no equivalent: Gemini for legal work is the same general assistant everyone else in the business uses.

So the question for a legal team is a practical one. You already pay for one of these. What does it do for legal work, and what is still left to the team?

The Legal Agent runs inside Copilot Chat in Word. Open a contract, ask the agent to review it, and it flags risky and non-standard clauses, compares the document with a playbook, and proposes redlines as tracked changes, with citations back to the text.

Microsoft released it as a Frontier preview for US tenants from late April 2026, in Word desktop only. It needs a Microsoft 365 Copilot licence. A worldwide preview from mid-June and general availability from early July 2026 have been reported, but Microsoft hasn't confirmed them on its own pages.

It works on the document you have open in Word. One contract, one lawyer, one review at a time. That makes it suited to a lawyer who already lives in Word desktop, and narrow for a team.

• Flags risky clauses. Marks terms that are risky or out of the ordinary in the contract open in Word.
• Compares with a playbook. Checks the document against a set of preferred positions.
• Redlines with tracked changes. Proposes edits as tracked changes, with citations, for the lawyer to accept or reject.
• Works in Word desktop. The preview runs in the Word desktop app, for organisations with Microsoft 365 Copilot.

Google Gemini sits inside Google Workspace. On Business Standard and above it works across Docs and Gmail: drafting, summarising long threads, rewriting a clause in plainer words, answering questions about a document. Google says it doesn't use Workspace data to train its models without permission.

There is no Gemini legal product. No playbook review, no legal agent, nothing built for contracts. A lawyer can paste in their positions and ask Gemini to check a draft, and get a read of it. The standard, the redline and the record are left to the lawyer, every time.

For legal teams in Google Workspace, Gemini is a general writing assistant. Good for first drafts and summaries. Not tailored to legal workflows.

The Legal Agent starts when a lawyer opens a contract in Word. In-house legal work starts before that, and carries on long after. A message from sales about a customer's paper. A supplier MSA forwarded by procurement. A renewal nobody flagged. Twenty NDAs a week from across the business. Each one has to be picked up, reviewed, sent back, filed and remembered.

Copilot speeds up the review, for the lawyer doing it, one document at a time. Everything around the review, and the review itself, still needs a lawyer at the keyboard. The team's volume doesn't change. Neither does the queue.

Claren is built for the whole job. Its envoys are AI employees, each with its own computer and its own memory. They take requests from the Claren app or straight from Slack. They review against the team's single playbook and hand back tracked-change redlines in Word, with a comment on every change, your fallback positions applied and a summary of what is off-playbook. They file every contract and its terms in the team's datastore, and build the trackers you want on top. They run routines on a schedule or when a message lands. Before anything leaves the team, they ask.

And they work at the scale of a team, not a document. A whole data room read, indexed and reviewed through an acquisition. Every contract in the queue redlined against the playbook. That is not a review in Word. That is work taken off the team.

1. Is the problem the review, or the volume? If a lawyer wants help marking up the contract in front of them, the Legal Agent gives them that. If the team has more contracts than hours, it needs the work taken off it. That is what Claren's envoys are for.
2. Where do requests come from? In-house requests come from the business, in Slack and email. Claren's envoys pick them up there and track them to done. Copilot starts once a lawyer opens the document.
3. Who keeps the records? Copilot and Gemini leave the filing to you. Claren's envoys file every contract and its terms as they go, and build your trackers on top.
4. One document, or the whole portfolio? A Word agent reviews the contract that is open. Claren's envoys review a data room, a renewal book or every NDA posted in a channel this month.

Claren doesn't replace Copilot or Gemini. Lawyers keep them for quick drafting, email and the odd look at a contract. Claren's envoys take the work that repeats: NDAs, supplier contracts, order forms, renewals and data room reviews.

The handover is simple. Envoys take requests from Slack or the Claren app and hand back Word documents with tracked changes, so the redline lands where your lawyers already work. Through connectors they reach Notion, Linear, Jira, Confluence or any tool with an MCP server. Envoys run on models from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google, chosen per envoy, so the team keeps the models it likes.