Getty Images; Alyssa Powell/BIOpenAI is preparing for its biggest push yet into legal AI.It hired former lawyer and founder Jason Boehmig to lead a team building products for legal work.A question hanging over the effort: Did it wait too long to claim a market it helped make possible?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.When Jason Boehmig entered Y Combinator in 2015, Sam Altman was still president of the accelerator.Mandel NGAN / AFP via Getty ImagesThe stakes are enormous. OpenAI has filed paperwork to go public, and it wants to show investors that ChatGPT is not merely the thing people use to write emails, self-diagnose a rash, or ask whether their landlord can really do that. It wants to become the place where knowledge workers do their jobs, as well as the world's most popular chatbot.In legal, that means taking on Anthropic, which has spent all year trying to make Claude as familiar to lawyers as a yellow legal pad. In January, the company released a legal work plugin that could analyze contracts and track compliance, frightening investors in legacy legal software and sending shares of Thomson Reuters, Relx, and Wolters Kluwer sharply lower.For now, little is known about what OpenAI will actually build. In a LinkedIn post about his move, Boehmig said he would be working on products for the legal industry. A job posting for a founding software engineer on OpenAI's website is similarly broad, stating that the company aims to "transform legal workflows, improve access to information, and enable legal professionals and organizations to work more effectively." OpenAI declined to comment for this story.The question of what it builds is an existential one for legal startups. A technology that combs through contracts for risks poses a greater threat to a business built around contracts, whereas a bundle of legal skills strikes closer to Harvey's turf. OpenAI was an early Harvey investor.In interviews, Sam Altman has often described his own company as a foundation for other startups to build on, rather than a competitor with an app for every industry. "We see a future where intelligence is a utility like electricity or water," he said onstage at a BlackRock event in March, "and people buy it from us on a meter and use it for whatever they want to use it for."Legal may show whether OpenAI is content to sell the electricity — or whether it wants to manufacture the appliances, too.It's in the waterAn open question is whether OpenAI is too late to a category its main rival has already been working on."Absolutely not," Zach Abramowitz, a consultant who advises law firms on how technology is disrupting their industry, said in an interview.His reasoning is simple: Lawyers may not be buying "ChatGPT for Law" yet, but many of them are already ChatGPT power users. A recent Law360 survey found that attorneys are using AI a lot more often than they were a year ago. The tool with the highest self-reported usage was ChatGPT, at 54% of respondents, ahead of Microsoft Copilot, Gemini, Harvey, and Claude.In-house adoption is harder to track, but the pull may be even stronger. Corporate legal teams have every incentive to automate more work, and many sit inside companies where ChatGPT
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