Gunderson Dettmer Hits 80% Firmwide Attorney Adoption of AI Research Tool Within Months

Gunderson Dettmer's attorneys routinely handle urgent, high-stakes matters for high-growth startups and venture/growth equity funds, requiring them to rapidly gather and synthesize information from many sources under time pressure. The firm's existing 2023-built internal tool, ChatGD, gave lawyers early GenAI experience but could only reason over context the user explicitly provided (prompts or uploaded documents) — it had no ability to search the live web for current, high-quality context.

Gunderson rolled out Perplexity Enterprise firmwide in May, adopting it as a citation-backed research layer that lets attorneys and business staff discover, verify, and synthesize public information in real time. The rollout was championed by a Perplexity Business Fellow on staff, cleared the firm's strict information security review, and built on the prompt-engineering habits lawyers had already developed using ChatGD.

More than half of partners logged in on the rollout's first day, and 80% of the firm's lawyers (including 80% of partners) now actively use the platform, generating over 35,000 queries per month with an NPS of 68 — higher than any other AI tool the firm evaluated. Adoption extended beyond attorneys to Marketing, Business Development, and HR, which built a dedicated benefits-enrollment Space, with many attorneys now using it as their default search engine replacement.

• Prior in-house GenAI exposure (ChatGD) primed attorneys to adopt a new tool instantly, with no formal training needed.
• Real-time, citation-backed web search fills a gap that a closed, document-grounded internal chat tool cannot.
• Adoption and satisfaction (68 NPS, 35,000+ monthly queries) extended beyond lawyers to business professional staff.