January 7, 2026
Order in the AI-court!
Notebook Lawyer
VC swaps $50k lawyer for Google AI; founders cheer, skeptics warn of blind spots
TLDR: A VC used Google’s NotebookLM to review a deal and skipped a $50k legal bill. Readers are split between celebrating cheaper, faster closings with standard forms and warning that AI could miss things—especially if both sides use it—putting pressure on founders to demand safety and standards.
A veteran VC just told pricey lawyers to take the holidays off and let Google’s NotebookLM do the heavy lifting—saving a quoted $50,000 and predicting that by 2026 most venture deals will close without lawyers. He fed past deal docs and a startup’s entire data room into the tool, asked pointed questions, spotted one issue for a quick call, and otherwise said the paperwork matched the term sheet. He also pushed for standard templates like the NVCA docs and used NotebookLM, Google’s AI research tool.
The crowd? Split and spicy. One camp is chanting “kill the billable hour,” celebrating a robot paralegal that never sleeps. Another camp is clutching their NDAs, warning that if both sides use AI, they’ll share the same blind spots—yikes. A pragmatist chimed in with a pre-AI reality check: reusing existing paperwork was already the secret to cheaper closings. The memes wrote themselves: “Notebook Lawyer, admitted to the bar… of Google Drive,” and “No more ambulance chasers, just algorithm chasers.”
Strongest takes: speed and savings vs. risk and responsibility. Can AI answer “which contracts have arbitration?” quickly and reliably? Commenters want proof, standard forms, and a human backstop—especially when founders usually foot the bill. The verdict: thrilling, scary, and suddenly very real.
Key Points
- •USV led a mid-December financing and received a $50,000 quote for investor-side legal work.
- •The author used Google’s NotebookLM to assemble prior closing binders and the signed term sheet into a notebook.
- •A second NotebookLM was created from the startup’s data room to query corporate structure, board composition, employee equity, and arbitration clauses.
- •AI-generated review identified one issue for discussion; otherwise, the drafts aligned with the term sheet and customary protections.
- •The experiment incurred no legal fees and advocates adopting NVCA standard documents to enable lawyer-free VC closings by 2026.