AT&T Partners With OpenAI to Rethink In-House Legal Work
AT&T's in-house legal department is collaborating with OpenAI to build a new knowledge layer that makes legal expertise easier to access, streamline intake, and scale legal judgment.
Radwan AbdulhadiEditor and technology writer
Transforming In-House Legal Operations
AT&T is building on LegalEdge to explore new ways to support its legal team. According to information detailed by [OpenAI News](https://openai.com/index/att-legal/), the telecommunications giant's in-house legal department consists of hundreds of lawyers and legal professionals operating globally. Before these legal professionals can advise the broader business, they are regularly required to assemble facts, critical documents, and relevant past work while drawing on expertise held across various internal teams.
David McAtee, AT&T’s Senior Executive Vice President and General Counsel, noted that making this experience easier to access is central to improving the department’s overall work. To achieve this, AT&T is working with OpenAI to build the next phase of its technical and operational infrastructure.
Building the Knowledge Layer
The collaboration is designed to establish a foundational technical infrastructure that unifies expertise across the enterprise. "Our partnership with OpenAI is going to allow us to build that plumbing that powers the knowledge layer throughout the company and that all of us will draw into," McAtee explains regarding the strategic direction of the initiative.
This joint effort builds directly upon LegalEdge, which is AT&T’s dedicated team of attorneys, legal professionals, technologists, and project managers. The team focuses specifically on applying artificial intelligence to major legal matters. The next step in this evolution is to connect more of the company's accumulated corporate expertise directly to the work arriving on a lawyer’s desk.
Reimagining Legal Intake and Prioritization
Requests routinely arrive from across all segments of the business, requiring legal teams to respond rapidly without overlooking critical risks. Prior to rendering advice, these teams must understand the core issue, gather relevant context, and determine what needs attention first. Because of these demands, intake serves as a critical component in protecting the broader business operations.
Bill Ryan, AT&T’s Chief Compliance Officer, described one of the planned initiatives as an intake system featuring "a front door where we have natural language intake." Under this proposed system, requests would be automatically classified and prioritized, connected with relevant legal precedent, research, and past work, while supplying the responsible legal professional with historical context and recommended first steps.
Scaling Legal Judgment
By utilizing a natural language intake approach, the department expects to give lawyers a more informed starting point for their tasks, thereby reducing the time spent manually gathering the materials required to assess a legal matter. Ryan sees significant opportunity in helping the department bring its judgment to bear on a greater share of the business's daily needs.
"What most excites me about the future is expanding our ability to provide legal judgment at greater scale," Ryan states, highlighting the operational objectives behind the technological upgrade.
Maintaining Human Oversight and Decision-Making
Despite the integration of advanced artificial intelligence capabilities into the workflow, AT&T leadership maintains a clear boundary regarding the ultimate responsibility for legal decisions. For McAtee, the guiding principle for this technological work remains straightforward: "The decision making will always remain with the lawyers."
Ultimately, the core goal of the partnership with OpenAI is to place better information within reach so that human lawyers can spend more of their time applying their specialized expertise and judgment. Entities interested in enterprise solutions can also review broader platform offerings or [Contact sales](https://openai.com/contact-sales/) for further information on corporate deployments.
Sources
- OpenAI NewsHow AT&T is rethinking in-house legal work with OpenAI
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