OpenAI is taking its seat at the counsel table.
On Thursday, the company announced Astra for Law, its long-awaited offering for legal work. Lawyers have already become ChatGPT power users, but the new launch brings plugin tools, a way to search legal cases more effectively, and custom model tweaks that will help others build on the tech.
As OpenAI prepares for its initial public offering, it's making a play at customers in specific industries. The legal launch marks yet another sector where OpenAI is pouring investment in its bid to become the go-to destination for AI work tools. Last week, the company unveiled ChatGPT for Financial Services, aimed at Wall Street customers. It has also launched industry-specific products for teachers, clinicians, life sciences researchers, and the personal health and finance sectors.
OpenAI's launch lines up in many ways with a legal release from Anthropic, its chief rival, back in May. Both releases featured a spate of integrations, though OpenAI is also tailoring its model specifically for legal work by embedding it with tools and tweaking its settings.
"You win by focusing on the customer and not the competition," said Jason Boehmig, who leads legal product at OpenAI, at a press briefing.
With Astra for Law, OpenAI is targeting the legal tech industry and the 200 largest American law firms, collectively known as AmLaw 200, Boehmig said. It's built on the company's most advanced and expensive model.
"What we really solved is: How do you stay on the frontier of capability, but also make the output relevant to a specific type of knowledge work," Boehmig said.
Sherwin Wu, a member of the technical staff at OpenAI, said the company's model tweaks ground it in "actual case law," which led to fewer hallucinations and "just much more sound legal reasoning."
The tool also gives answers that are about twice as long as typical Astra responses, the company said.
"Lawyers like longer responses," Boehmig said. "That was one thing that came back from feedback."
Legal tech companies like Harvey and Legora can add the tool to their own products. The launch also comes with plugins for ChatGPT from those companies, as well as from Thomson Reuters, iManage, DeepJudge, and others.
Wu said that the legal product team had worked closely with the financial services team and will bring one of that launch's standout tools — a citations feature — to the legal offering soon.
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