Google, Amazon, and the Big Tech Push Into Legal: When the AI Layer Commoditizes, Your System of Record Becomes the Only Moat

In 2026 Big Tech stopped supplying models to legal tech vendors and started competing with them — Google pitching Gemini to lawyers, Amazon training an agentic assistant for legal work, and specialist vendors consolidating fast in response. For law firms, the strategic implication is counterintuitive: as AI capability gets cheaper and more universal, the thing that determines your firm's leverage is not which model you use but whether your operational and financial records are structured enough to feed it.