How Leading Law Firm Gunderson Dettmer Is Deploying AI at Scale with Perplexity Enterprise

80%

firm's partnership actively using Perplexity

68 NPS score

35,000

monthly queries

Gunderson Dettmer is the world’s leading law ﬁrm focused exclusively on the innovation economy. For over 30 years, it has been the top adviser to venture capital and growth equity investors, as well as market-deﬁning private companies from inception through maturity. The ﬁrm ranks #1 globally for venture capital ﬁnancings, dominating key categories including AI and software, and is consistently recognized by PitchBook, The Legal 500, Chambers, and Best Lawyers for client service and innovation.

Company website →

Gunderson Dettmer, the leading law firm serving high-growth companies and venture capital and growth equity funds, rolled out Perplexity Enterprise firmwide in May of this year. More than half of the partners logged in on the first day of the rollout, and now 80% of the firm’s lawyers (including 80% of its partners) actively use the platform. Perplexity Enterprise responds to more than 35,000 queries from Gunderson’s attorneys and business professionals per month, and the firm’s users reported having an exceptionally positive experience (with a recent NPS score of 68, higher than all other AI tools evaluated.).

Gunderson uses Perplexity Enterprise as a professional-grade research layer that expands what attorneys can rapidly discover, verify, and synthesize—at the pace of their fast-moving clients. The platform delivers citation-backed, comprehensive answers to attorneys’ questions in real-time; the attorneys then interpret, contextualize, and add their strategic insights to better advise clients. It’s a potent blend of AI, human expertise and professional judgment.

The Opportunity

Gunderson attorneys routinely handle urgent matters for high-growth companies and venture capital funds that require both business and legal judgment. Helping clients navigate these issues often requires attorneys to gather and synthesize a wide range of information from various sources, apply their knowledge and expertise within the client’s specific context and, finally, help business teams make the best risk-adjusted decisions under the circumstances. Doing this impactful, thoughtful work at the scale of thousands of startup companies and hundreds of venture funds with time-sensitive needs presented an opportunity to help their lawyers better manage these competing demands on their time.

In 2023, Gunderson launched a proprietary AI chat application with retrieval-augmented generation firmwide—ChatGD. While quite advanced at the time it was released, one of the limitations of ChatGD was that it could only be grounded in the context provided by the user (in the form of their prompts or documents that they uploaded). ChatGD did not have the ability to search the web for current, high-quality context to provide to the large language model under the hood. ChatGD did, however, give Gunderson lawyers early experience with GenAI and its limitations, while simultaneously helping them learn how to get the most out of this next generation of technology. This primed them to be able to take full advantage of Perplexity Enterprise out of the gate.

“Perplexity is now a reflex for our teams: rapid, cited context that we can validate quickly. It doesn’t replace expertise; it amplifies it. Our attorneys spend less time gathering information and more time on strategic advising. Clients feel that in the speed and clarity of our work."

Joe Green

Chief Innovation Officer, Gunderson Dettmer

The Solution

Stephanie Goutos, Head of Employment Law Practice Innovation at Gunderson, was selected earlier in the year as a Perplexity Business Fellow. Based on the insights from her fellowship and her personal experience using Perplexity, she advocated for Gunderson to adopt it to further expand the firm’s suite of AI capabilities, and the firm’s leadership saw the potential.

“Perplexity is a power tool for strategic judgment—not a substitute for it. I use it every day, personally and professionally. The real value is in how you interrogate, refine, and guide its outputs into decisive, informed action. The firms that will lead in the next decade won’t be the ones merely using AI—everyone will use AI. They’ll be the ones whose attorneys master the art of applying expert judgment to AI-expanded intelligence. That distinction is everything. As a Perplexity Fellow helping architect our rollout, I’ve seen firsthand the transformational difference it makes for our firm.”
Stephanie Goutos, Head of Employment Law Practice Innovation, Gunderson Dettmer and Perplexity Business Fellow

Perplexity Enterprise gives Gunderson the ability to quickly and easily access the best publicly available information on a wide variety of topics, verify the accuracy of the information and turn it into actionable insights and guidance for clients. Perplexity’s enterprise offering cleared the ﬁrm's strict information security requirements, allowing attorneys to use it with conﬁdence. And use it they have.

“The incredible speed of Perplexity's adoption at Gunderson really demonstrates what happens when you combine an intuitive, easy-to-use interface with a workforce that's already familiar with AI. Our experience with ChatGD gave our lawyers foundational skills in prompt engineering and AI workflows, so when Perplexity arrived with its clean, simple interface and no learning curve, adoption was almost instantaneous. People didn't need training or convincing—they just started using it. That's the power of intuitive design meeting an AI-ready culture.”
Naveen Pai, Chief Knowledge Officer, Gunderson Dettmer

Gunderson’s attorneys are using Perplexity Enterprise for many use-cases. It helps them stay up-to-date on current developments in the law, do deep dives on emerging tech verticals, track client markets and competitors and analyze trends in the venture ecosystem. Perplexity’s deeper research functionality has become especially popular at the firm.

Gunderson’s business professionals have also been quick to adopt Perplexity Enterprise, with significant gains in efficiency from the Marketing and Business Development teams. The firm’s HR team even built a beneﬁts enrollment Space to serve as a centralized hub for employee questions and documents.

The breadth and scale of Gunderson’s adoption show that Perplexity Enterprise has become embedded into daily workﬂows across the ﬁrm. Months after the rollout, adoption continues to grow, with most attorneys now reporting they’re using Perplexity Enterprise as their search engine replacement. As one attorney reported: “It’s hard for me to overstate how useful Perplexity is. I now use it for all my internet searches.”