Google Research's three-month patent-writing experiment found AI boosted output but did not accelerate junior lawyers' independent judgment
Google Research published a three-month field experiment on patent drafting through NBER. It randomly gave 133 lawyers at 11 intellectual-property law firms access to an unpublished Google Labs AI patent-writing assistant, now part of Gemini Notebook; two-thirds received early access.
Why it matters: The three-month patent-writing experiment separates AI's immediate productivity gains from changes in unaided judgment, providing comparative evidence on AI's effect on professional skills.
