As a leading law firm in the field of Artificial Intelligence, Gunderson Dettmer is proud to announce the launch of its own homegrown generative AI chat application, ChatGD. The firm has deployed third-party AI tools for years—including some powered by Large Language Models (LLMs)—for a variety of use cases. With ChatGD, however, the firm has created its first proprietary internal AI tool incorporating the latest in generative AI technology, achieving a new milestone in Gunderson’s ability to marry its in-house legal expertise with cutting-edge engineering and technology.

ChatGD allows the firm’s attorneys to query and manipulate documents using a secure, enterprise instance of OpenAI’s models through Microsoft Azure. Attorneys using ChatGD can leverage the underlying models and the power of ChatGPT to accelerate and enhance their work as subject-matter experts. It also gives attorneys the ability to provide legal agreements or other relevant source material as context for queries using retrieval-augmented generation (RAG).

“Our legal engineering and data teams have years of experience experimenting with different approaches to Natural Language Processing for legal applications,” said Joe Green, the firm’s Chief Innovation Officer. “We built ChatGD using the same state-of-the-art tech stack that many of our clients are using in their products.”

Much of the tech stack underlying ChatGD is open source, and the firm regularly uses and contributes to open-source projects that are becoming foundational to the future practice of law. “Whether through our work with the Open Cap Table Coalition or contributing to major open-source AI building blocks like LlamaIndex, we’re big believers in contributing to the open-source commons that is accelerating the pace of innovation in processing human knowledge, whether it be corporate contracts, legal filings or enterprise data,” said John Scrudato, Gunderson’s Legal Engineering and Data Strategy Manager, who also leads the Open Cap Table Coalition’s Technical Working Group.

As early adopters and legal industry leaders in this space, the firm has developed internal AI use guidelines that permit attorneys to use generative AI technology with appropriate guardrails in place to protect clients’ confidential information and the accuracy and quality of the firm’s work product.  “As a firm, we are making significant investments in AI to ensure we have the talent, technology and training to provide our clients the world-class advice and service that they expect from us,” said David Young, the firm’s Managing Partner.

Developing in-house technical expertise and experience using generative AI tools is enabling the firm’s attorneys, who are on the vanguard of legal developments in the field, to better advise the firm’s clients on how they can safely leverage AI tools in their business. “We are on a journey together with our clients to learn as much as we can—both about the legal issues raised by AI and the underlying technologies—so that we can help build a future where AI fundamentally changes the way people work and interact with technology for the better,” said Green.

To find out more about Gunderson Dettmer's approach to AI, download this PDF from our practice innovation team.

About Gunderson Dettmer 

Gunderson Dettmer is the preeminent international law firm with an exclusive focus on the innovation economy. The firm serves market-leading venture capital and growth equity investors and pioneering companies through inception, growth and maturity, as well as groundbreaking public companies that result from the global venture capital ecosystem. The firm’s clear-cut focus and well-honed technical skill enables an accelerated pace and unmatched efficiency, delivering best-in-class value at each phase of a client’s business.