OpenAI wants to sell major companies on its technology. Now it’s taking its case to law firms.
The ChatGPT maker plans to launch new integrations with third-party legal software companies, according to people familiar with the matter.
A spokesperson for OpenAI declined to comment.
The company has been in talks with multiple legal software vendors to connect OpenAI’s chatbot to their tools and data sources, the people said. This way, lawyers can 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 that they are not billing their associates for work that software can do. Internal legal teams are looking for ways to automate more work themselves, so they can send less to outside lawyers and reduce their legal bills.
That question led to a flood of startups dealing with legal work. For years, these companies have built on major language models provided by groundbreaking research labs such as OpenAI and Anthropic.
Now the labs seem to want a closer relationship with the users themselves. Anthropic And Googling have both begun to package their models as products for legal departments and law firms, selling directly to enterprises rather than just supplying the models themselves.
That effort is rippling through the public markets. Anthropic’s February contract review plugin helped the “SaaSpocalypse,” a stock sell-off driven by fears that AI companies could absorb work that would one day be handled by standalone 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 that ChatGPT was the most used tool in the profession, with 54% of respondents reporting using 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 can trust ChatGPT to plan their St. Barths vacation. Convincing them it belongs in a company’s most sensitive workflows is another matter. Chatbots have already gotten lawyers into trouble with judges prepare cases and mutilate their meanings.
The company is making its legal move 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 job at Big Law to start Ironclad, a company that helps corporate legal departments manage contracts.
Lawyers will be closely watching the launch of OpenAI. The tech industry, meanwhile, is about to find out how much leeway the company is willing to give them.
