OpenAI wants to sell large enterprises on its technology. Now, it’s taking its case to law firms.
The ChatGPT maker is planning to launch new integrations with third-party legal software companies, according to people familiar with the matter.
An OpenAI spokesperson declined to comment.
The company has been in talks with multiple legal software providers about allowing OpenAI’s chatbot to plug into their tools and data sources, the people said. This way, lawyers could update a file, negotiate contracts, or search a legal database, without leaving ChatGPT.
Law firms are under pressure from clients to move faster and show they’re not billing associates for work that software can do. In-house legal teams are looking for ways to automate more work themselves, so they can send less to outside counsel and shrink their legal bills.
That demand has produced a flood of startups addressing legal work. For years, those companies have built on top of large language models supplied by frontier research labs such as OpenAI and Anthropic.
Now the labs appear to want a closer relationship with the users themselves. Anthropic and Google have both begun packaging their models as products for legal departments and law firms, selling directly to enterprises rather than only supplying the models themselves.
That effort has been rippling through the public markets. Anthropic’s February contract-review plugin helped ignite the “SaaSpocalypse,” a stock sell-off driven by fears that AI companies could absorb work once handled by stand-alone software.
OpenAI enters the legal market with an unusual advantage. ChatGPT is already the best-known chatbot among the lawyers it hopes to win over. A Law360 survey found ChatGPT was the profession’s most-used tool, with 54% of respondents reporting they use it, ahead of Microsoft Copilot, Gemini, Harvey, and Claude.
But the consumer brand is also a hurdle in a profession where confidentiality and precision are paramount. Lawyers may trust ChatGPT to plan their holidays in St. Barths. Persuading them that it belongs inside a firm’s most sensitive workflows is another matter. Chatbots have already landed lawyers in hot water with judges for making up cases and mangling their meanings.
The company is making its legal push three months after hiring Jason Boehmig, an executive who spent more than a decade figuring out the slow, messy business of selling software to lawyers. He had left a Big Law job to start Ironclad, a company that helps corporate legal departments manage contracts.
Lawyers will be watching OpenAI’s launch closely. The tech industry, meanwhile, is about to find out how much room the company intends to leave them.
Read the full article here
