OpenAI is working to persuade major corporations to adopt its technology, and its next target is law firms.
The maker of ChatGPT is preparing to introduce integrations with outside legal-software companies, according to people familiar with the matter.
An OpenAI spokesperson declined to comment.
The company has discussed with several legal software providers ways to connect its chatbot to their platforms and data sources, those people said. The integrations would let attorneys update files, negotiate contracts, or search legal databases without leaving ChatGPT.
Law firms are facing growing pressure from clients to work more quickly and demonstrate that they are not charging for associate labor that software could handle. In-house legal departments are also seeking to automate more tasks internally so they can send less work to outside counsel and reduce their legal expenses.
That demand has prompted a surge of startups focused on legal work. For years, these companies have built their products on large language models supplied by frontier research labs such as OpenAI and Anthropic.
Now, those labs appear to be seeking closer relationships with end users. Anthropic and Google have both begun offering their models as products for legal departments and law firms, selling directly to enterprises rather than simply providing the models themselves.
The effort is already affecting public markets. A contract-review plug-in released by Anthropic in February helped spark the “SaaSpocalypse,” a stock sell-off fueled by concerns that AI companies could take over work previously handled by standalone software.
OpenAI is entering the legal market with a distinctive advantage. ChatGPT is already the best-known chatbot among the lawyers it hopes to attract, and a Law360 survey found that 54% of respondents used it—more than Microsoft Copilot, Gemini, Harvey, or Claude.
However, its consumer reputation is also a challenge in a profession that places the highest value on confidentiality and accuracy. Lawyers may trust ChatGPT to help plan a vacation in St. Barths, but convincing them to place it within a firm’s most sensitive workflows is a different task. Chatbots have already caused trouble with judges after lawyers used them to invent cases and distort their meanings.
OpenAI’s legal push comes three months after the company hired Jason Boehmig, an executive who spent more than a decade learning the slow and complicated business of selling software to lawyers. He had left a Big Law role to found Ironclad, which helps corporate legal departments manage contracts.
Lawyers are expected to watch OpenAI’s launch closely. Meanwhile, the technology industry is about to learn how much room the company intends to leave for it.