The local well-posedness of the Cauchy problem for the Hirota equation is established for low regularity data in Sobolev spaces Hs(s ≥ -1-4). Moreover, the global well-posedness for L2 data follows from the local well-posedness and the conserved quantity. For data in Hs(s ＞ 0), the global well-posedness is also proved. The main idea is to use the generalized trilinear estimates, associated with the Fourier restriction norm method.