Gazprom Neft and SberLegal to Develop an AI Legal Assistant
The companies have agreed to develop the first AI legal assistant for Russia’s oil and gas industry. The multi-agent system, built on AI and Sber’s proprietary neural-network technologies, is scheduled to enter operation in autumn 2026.
The assistant will work with regulations covering subsoil use, licensing, environmental legislation, and the governance of oil and gas companies. In a broader sense, the project represents an effort to build a practical tool for one of the world’s most complex and highly regulated industries. Legal technology, or LegalTech, is widely used across sectors globally to streamline and automate legal processes, make legal services more accessible, and improve lawyers’ productivity. Nothing comparable has existed in Russia’s energy sector until now.
How Will the Assistant Help?
In practice, systems of this kind function as contract-building platforms, assembling documents from templates and modular components. Users answer guided questions, while the software inserts the appropriate legal language. They also simplify legal research by providing current versions of laws, examples from court practice, and expert commentary. AI-powered tools can review thousands of court decisions within minutes and identify the most relevant precedents.
Today, generative AI is moving beyond public-facing services and office assistants toward specialized corporate agents embedded directly into the business processes of large industrial companies. Its role is to accelerate the preparation of legal opinions, document analysis, and the search for relevant regulations and court practice. It is also designed to reduce workloads for legal departments and minimize the risk of errors in routine operations. Importantly, the new system is being built on a Russian technology stack and tailored specifically to Russian regulations rather than foreign legal frameworks.
Works Without Breaks and Without Internet Access
The project participants have announced that the AI assistant will be used to draft legal opinions, analyze court practice, review contractual and corporate documentation, and identify potential legal risks. By handling these tasks, the system will allow legal teams to focus more attention on strategy and the management of complex legal matters.
The assistant will be equipped with a comprehensive regulatory database covering subsoil use, licensing, environmental legislation, oil and gas industry regulation, industrial safety, and natural resource management. At the same time, the agent will not require internet access to operate: GigaChat will perform computations on Gazprom Neft servers without external connectivity and without relying on third-party cloud services. According to industry experts, combining Sber’s technology with the expertise of one of Russia’s largest businesses could produce a predictable, reliable, and secure service that gives an industry leader a competitive advantage.
Gazprom Neft is already deploying AI in selected segments of its value chain. The company’s next objective is to achieve full coverage of its technological and business processes through digital twins and then move toward large-scale adoption of AI agents.
Russian Legal Technology Tools
Global experience shows that the more complex an industry’s regulatory environment becomes, the greater the value of an assistant capable of quickly locating regulations, preparing draft documents, analyzing contracts, and assessing legal risks.
Sber has been developing its legal technology portfolio since 2024, when it introduced the GigaLegal legal assistant based on the GigaChat API for work with legal documentation, Russian legislation, and court practice. That project became the technological foundation for the next generation of specialized legal assistants, including industry-specific solutions.
Another major legal-information provider, Garant, launched its AI service ISKRA in 2025. The system can answer legal questions, assist with document creation, and analyze court practice using the Garant information database. The same year, ConsultantPlus introduced an AI assistant capable of answering legal and tax questions, selecting relevant documents, and incorporating current regulations, court practice, and expert materials from the ConsultantPlus platform.
The partnership between Gazprom Neft and SberLegal illustrates the growing industry specialization of generative AI in Russia. While legal AI previously evolved primarily around legal-reference systems and general-purpose assistants for lawyers, this project brings the technology directly into the operational environment of a major industrial company with highly specific regulatory requirements.
