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AI Builds: How Secure is Google? · AI Tools for Practicing Lawyers

• 0:03
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome to AI Tools for Practicing Lawyers.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_01: Practical, no-nonsense guidance to help attorneys put AI power to work in their practice right now.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_00: How secure is Google?
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_00: That's a question I've been thinking about quite a lot lately.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: I suspect it's a question that many lawyers really ought to be asking, because whether you realize it or not, there's a pretty good chance that Google is already handling some of your clients' most confidential information.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: You might be using Gmail for client communications.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe you're storing documents in Google Drive.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe you're using Google Docs to prepare pleadings.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_00: And increasingly, you might be using Google's Gemini artificial intelligence to analyze some of those documents.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_00: But when we talk about security, what exactly are we really even talking about?
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: Are we worried about hackers?
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_00: Are we worried about Google employees reading our documents?
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: Are we worried that Google's AI will use our clients' information to train its models?
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: Or are we worried that someone at our own firm might accidentally give away access to thousands of client files?
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_00: These are four very different concerns.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_00: And today in AI Builds, I want to explore what Google actually does to protect your information, what it promises not to do with your information, and what you still need to do yourself.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_00: I'm Ron Tresher and welcome to AI Builds on AI Tools for Practicing Lawyers.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_00: So let's start with something that might surprise you.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's entirely possible that Google can provide better security for your client documents than you can provide yourself.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: Think about it.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_00: Google operates enormous data centers, employs teams of cybersecurity specialists, and invests extraordinary resources in protecting its infrastructure.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: Its cloud infrastructure provides encryption, identity management, access controls, monitoring systems, and protections against unauthorized access.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: And its enterprise products undergo independent security audits and holds numerous security certifications.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_00: Now, does that mean that Google can never be hacked?
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_00: Of course not.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_00: A small law firm with a server and a closet, a local IT consultant who comes in when something breaks, and a backup system that nobody has tested in three years.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_00: And by the way, that's a setup that many lawyers still use.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_00: But the question is, which environment would you rather trust with your confidential client information?
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_00: It's not necessarily a difficult question.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_00: But here's where things get interesting.
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  SPEAKER_00: Google can provide a very secure environment without guaranteeing that the information you put into that environment is secure.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: And that's because the security of your client information is a shared responsibility.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: Google secures its infrastructure.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_00: You are responsible for deciding who can access your information, what applications can connect to it, and how those and how those applications.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: What happens when you put documents in Google Drive?
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_00: Let's imagine that you're a bankruptcy lawyer.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_00: You've collected six months of bank statements, two years of tax returns, mortgage statements, and a credit report.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_00: You create a folder in Google Drive and upload everything.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
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  SPEAKER_00: So what happens?
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_00: Google stores that information in its cloud infrastructure, protected by its security systems.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_00: The information is encrypted when stored and while being transmitted through Google services.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_00: And access is governed by the permissions associated with your account and the documents.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_00: But here's something important.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_00: Suppose you accidentally share that folder with the wrong person.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_00: Or suppose someone gets access to your Google account.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_00: Or suppose you authorize a third-party application to read all the files in your drive.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_00: Google's underlying security systems might be working perfectly, but your clients' information could still be exposed.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_00: That's why one of the most important questions you should ask when evaluating any legal software that connects to Google Drive is how much access am I giving this software?
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_00: Google provides a particularly interesting solution.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_00: It's called limited scope authorization.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_00: Rather than granting an application permission to access your entire Google Drive, you can authorize an application to work with individual files that you select or that the application creates.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_00: Google calls this the drive.file permission.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_00: For example, suppose you have a thousand client folders in your Google Drive.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_00: You connect a new legal AI application because you want it to analyze the documents in one bankruptcy case.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_00: Properly implemented, the application doesn't need permission to read every file in your drive.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_00: It can be given access only to the files you authorize.
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  SPEAKER_00: This is kind of old news already.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_00: But that is dramatically better security arrangement than giving a third-party application unrestricted access to your entire filing cabinet.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_00: Of course, this depends upon how the developer implements the connection.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_00: Google provides the capability.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't force every application to use the narrowest possible permissions.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_00: So what happens when Gemini reads your clients' documents?
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_00: Now we get to the part that probably interests lawyers most, especially lawyers who are listening to an AI podcast.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_00: Suppose you upload a client's tax return to Gemini.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_00: Does Google use that tax return to train its artificial intelligence?
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_00: And could the information somehow become available to other people using Gemini?
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, these are really the gold star questions.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_00: The answer depends significantly on which Google product you're using.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_00: There are three environments I want to distinguish.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_00: The first is Google's consumer AI offering.
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  SPEAKER_00: The second is Gemini, provided through a qualifying Google Workspace Business Account.
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  SPEAKER_00: And the third is Google's enterprise AI development environment, which includes Vertex AI.
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  SPEAKER_00: These distinctions are extremely important.
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  SPEAKER_00: Google Workspace with Gemini.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_00: Now, Google makes specific contractual commitments to its business customers.
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  SPEAKER_00: According to Google's privacy documentation, workspace customer data, including prompts and documents, is not used to train its generative AI models without the customer's permission or instruction.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_00: Google also says those interactions are not subjected to human review for model training without permission.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_00: I mean that's a significant protection.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_00: But you need to make sure you're actually using Gemini under the applicable workspace business terms.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_00: Merely having a Gmail address doesn't necessarily mean you're receiving those protections.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_00: Consumer Gemini.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_00: Now some consumer Gemini configurations have different data use terms.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_00: Depending on the account and service, conversations may be reviewed by humans and used to improve Google's products.
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  SPEAKER_00: That makes it important to understand which account and service you're using before entering confidential client information.
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  SPEAKER_00: Now we get to Google Vertex AI.
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  SPEAKER_00: Suppose you aren't simply using Gemini to summarize a document.
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  SPEAKER_00: Suppose you're developing an application that automatically reads bank statements, extracts financial information, and identifies potential legal issues.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_00: Google has an enterprise platform for that.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_00: It's called Vertex AI.
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  SPEAKER_00: Under Google's published enterprise terms, customer data is not used to train or fine-tune AI models without prior permission or instruction.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_00: But of course, there's an important wrinkle.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_00: Not using your data for training is not the same thing as retaining none of your data.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_00: Depending upon your configuration and the features you use, Google may temporarily retain certain prompts or outputs for such purposes as abuse monitoring, caching, or search grounding.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, for example, Google's documentation describes certain grounding features that retain data for 30 days.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_00: And Google explains that achieving zero data retention may require affirmative configuration choices.
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  SPEAKER_00: So the relevant questions aren't just whether Google trains on your data.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_00: They include how long Google retains it, where it's processed, who might access it, and which contractual protections apply.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_00: These are questions every lawyer evaluating an AI service should be asking.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_00: All right, let's turn to Google Cloud documentation.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_00: This is the security lesson I learned building legal AI.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_00: Now, this next part comes from my own experience.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_00: As many listeners know, I've been developing an AI-assisted consumer bankruptcy platform along with the rest of the continental United States.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_00: And because the platform is intended to handle extremely sensitive financial information, security has become a major part of the development process.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_00: I recently had the system undergo a comprehensive internal security readiness review.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_00: The results were fascinating.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_00: We had already designed a number of important safeguards.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_00: The law firm's Google Drive would remain the primary repository for its original documents.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_00: The application would receive only limited access to authorized files.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_00: All processing would be disabled unless the firm authorized it.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_00: Individual law firms would be isolated from each other, and the system would maintain an audit trail identifying where information came from and how it was processed.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_00: All good things.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_00: But when we asked whether the application was ready to accept actual confidential client information, the answer was no.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_00: Not yet.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_00: Why?
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_00: Because designing security protections and proving that they work are two different things.
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_00: We still needed to establish and test production authentication, encryption and key management, isolation between law firms, backups, monitoring, and incident response procedures.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_00: And consider the consequences of getting just one thing wrong.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_00: Suppose a lawyer at firm A logs into an application and somehow gains access to firm B's client information.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_00: Now that's a real disaster.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_00: Doesn't matter how secure Google's data centers are, the application has failed.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_00: Or suppose a paralegal leaves the firm, but the firm forgets to disable the paralegal's access.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_00: Or suppose an application creates temporary copies of confidential documents and never deletes them.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_00: Or suppose the developer hasn't established procedures for responding to a security incident.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_00: Google's infrastructure cannot by itself solve those problems.
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  SPEAKER_00: That was the lesson I took away from this exercise.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_00: The question isn't simply whether Google is secure.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_00: The question is whether the entire chain of systems handling your clients' information is secure.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_00: All right, let's look at five things lawyers should do.
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  SPEAKER_00: First, know which Google account you're using.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_00: If you're using Google to handle confidential client information, investigate Google Workspace and its business security protections.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_00: Don't assume that all Google accounts and all Gemini products have the same privacy terms.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_00: Second, enable multi-factor authentication, although it is a massive pain.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_00: And preferably use phishing-resistant authentication, such as security keys or pass keys where supported.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_00: One stolen password should not be enough to compromise your firm's entire collection of client files.
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_00: Third, pay attention to third-party permissions.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_00: When an application asks to connect to your Google account, look at what it's requesting.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_00: Does it need access to one file, one folder, or your entire Google Drive?
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_00: The difference matters.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_00: Fourth, ask AI vendors what happens to your documents?
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_00: Are the documents retained?
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  SPEAKER_00: Are they used for model training?
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  SPEAKER_00: Are they sent to another AI provider?
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  SPEAKER_00: Where are they stored?
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_00: Can they be deleted?
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_00: And what happens if you terminate the service?
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_00: These are perfectly reasonable questions and vendors should be prepared to answer them.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_00: Fifth, remember, security is an ongoing process.
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_00: It isn't something you achieve once by checking a box.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_00: You need sensible access controls, backups, employee procedures, and a plan for what happens when something goes wrong.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_00: And if you're evaluating a legal AI product, ask the vendor how it tests those protections.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_00: So how secure is Google?
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_00: My conclusion is that Google's business and cloud platforms can provide a very strong foundation for protecting confidential legal information.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, for many small firms, using a properly configured enterprise cloud platform may be considerably safer than trying to maintain comparable infrastructure themselves.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_00: But here's the distinction I hope you'll remember.
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_00: Google can protect the vault.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_00: It can't always protect you from giving someone the key.
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_00: And as artificial intelligence becomes increasingly integrated into the daily practice of law, understanding who has these keys and what they're authorized to do with them will become more important than ever.
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_00: I put together what I hope is a useful document that will help lawyers navigate through Google's complex admin console so that you can get a head start on making these configurations available for your firm.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_00: And if you're an AI builder, your products.
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_00: I'm Ron Drescher.
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for listening to AI Builds on AI Tools for Practicing Lawyers.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_01: That's it for today's episode of AI Tools for Practicing Lawyers.
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks for listening.
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_01: We'll see you next time.