AT&T and OpenAI Plan an AI Intake System for In-House Legal Work

A legal department that starts by gathering context

AT&T's in-house legal department has hundreds of lawyers and legal professionals around the world. Before they can advise the business, they need to assemble facts, documents and relevant past work, often drawing on expertise held across different teams.

For David McAtee, AT&T's Senior Executive Vice President and General Counsel, making that experience easier to access is central to improving the department's work. He says the 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."

The collaboration builds on LegalEdge, AT&T's team of attorneys, legal professionals, technologists and project managers focused on applying AI to major legal matters. According to OpenAI, the next step is to connect more of the company's accumulated expertise to the work arriving on a lawyer's desk.

A planned front door for legal requests

Requests reach the legal team from across the business, and the lawyers need to respond quickly without overlooking risks. They have to understand the issue, gather the relevant context and decide what needs attention first. That makes intake a critical part of protecting the business.

Bill Ryan, AT&T's Chief Compliance Officer, describes one planned initiative as an intake system with "a front door where we have natural language intake." According to the source, the system would:

• classify and prioritize incoming requests;
• connect them with relevant precedent, research and past work;
• give the responsible legal professional historical context and recommended first steps.

The aim is a more informed starting point for lawyers, with less time spent gathering the material they need to assess a matter. The source describes this as a planned initiative, not a system already in use.

Lawyers keep the decisions

Ryan sees the opportunity in bringing the department's judgment to more of the business's needs. "What most excites me about the future is expanding our ability to provide legal judgment at greater scale," he says.

McAtee states the principle guiding the work: "The decision making will always remain with the lawyers." The goal of the partnership, as the source puts it, is to put better information within reach so those lawyers can spend more time applying their expertise.

For in-house legal teams, the AT&T example points to a focus on the preparation stage of legal work: classifying requests, finding precedent and surfacing past work. The source gives no figures on time saved, rollout dates or results, so the impact remains to be shown. OpenAI also published a video in which McAtee and Ryan discuss LegalEdge and the next phase of the work.