Getty Images; Alyssa Powell/BI
For years, OpenAI let startups like Harvey, Legora, and others build software for lawyers on top of its foundation models — massive artificial intelligence systems trained on broad swaths of data. Now, the company, last valued at $852 billion, is making moves to court lawyers directly.OpenAI signaled that shift in June when it hired 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.That business looks a lot sexier than it did when Boehmig spun out. Law firms are under pressure from clients to move faster and show they are not billing armies of associates for work that chatbots can do. In-house legal teams are looking for ways to automate more work themselves, so they can send less to outside counsel and lower their legal bills.Suddenly, artificial intelligence has turned legal tech from what Boehmig once called an investor "wasteland" into one of venture capital's hottest parties. And OpenAI wants in."Jason's hire reflects the value OpenAI sees in the legal space," Dan Springer, who took over as Ironclad's chief executive last year, said in an email.The first hints of a playbook are now emerging. On Wednesday, OpenAI told Bloomberg Law that it is collaborating with the white-shoe law firm Willkie Farr & Gallagher to roll out ChatGPT Enterprise to every attorney and fold its large language models deeper into the firm's own tools.OpenAI's legal entry is part of a broader campaign to make ChatGPT NSFW. The company has built a desktop "super app" for software engineers, introduced secure healthcare tools for clinicians, and hired former investment bankers to train its systems in the ways of Wall Street.
