AT&T + OpenAI Partner for Legal AI Workflows

AT&T LegalEdge, the telecom giant’s new inhouse legal agency, is partnering with OpenAI to develop AI-enabled legal workflows. Jason Boehmig, GM Legal Industry at OpenAI, commented: ‘We’re exploring how AI can put [their institutional] knowledge to work across the business, with lawyers’ judgment at the centre.’

The announcement comes not long after OpenAI announced its Astra for Law launch – see here – along with a major collection of plugins from across the legal tech market.  

AT&T explained: ‘The effort combines enterprise legal expertise, advanced AI capabilities, and human judgment to make institutional knowledge more accessible.’

And as to LegalEdge, it has been described as a ‘lean, cross-functional team…including remote attorneys, paralegals, technologists, and legal operations and e-discovery experts’.

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They also call it AT&T’s ‘AI-first centre of expertise’ and it launched in January this year. So far it’s ‘handled nearly 100 matters in its first six months, while helping advance new approaches to legal service delivery, knowledge management, and workflow design across the AT&T Legal Department’.

David McAtee, senior executive vice president and general counsel, AT&T, commented: ‘AI gives legal departments an opportunity to do more than improve individual productivity. It gives us an opportunity to rethink how legal work moves through an organization, how institutional knowledge is retained and how our lawyers focus their time.

‘Together with OpenAI, we are building an AT&T Legal Department-wide capability designed to make our knowledge and expertise more accessible to every AT&T organization we serve. AI can expand what we do and how quickly we do it. Legal judgment remains human.’

And expanding on his above comment, OpenAI’s Boehmig – who previously co-founded CLM company Ironclad – said: ‘AI can help in-house legal teams play an even greater role in advancing the business, from evaluating new opportunities to helping teams make informed decisions and act on them. AT&T is helping lead the way by rethinking how its legal expertise and institutional knowledge can serve the entire company. Together, we’re exploring how AI can put that knowledge to work across the business, with lawyers’ judgment at the centre.’

And Bill Ryan, senior vice president and chief compliance officer, AT&T, concluded: ‘Success will not be measured by how much technology we deploy. It will be measured by whether we improve quality, make knowledge more accessible, build reusable capabilities, and give our legal professionals more capacity for the work that requires experience and judgment. This partnership is about doing that responsibly, in real workflows and at enterprise scale.’

Is this a big deal?

Well, many major companies work with LLM giants. But, there is something highly structured here that sets the move apart, especially as it’s connected to the new LegalEdge group, which is all about applying AI to more routine legal work that the huge company has to handle.

Overall – and we’ll have to wait and see how things go – it may mean a reduction in legal spend for the company and perhaps even less standard work going out to external law firms. We shall see…!

More about OpenAI – Astra for Law here.

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