How AT&T is rethinking in-house legal work with OpenAI

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 how the department’s work can improve.

AT&T is working with OpenAI to build that next phase. “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 says.

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. The next step is to connect more of the company’s accumulated expertise to the work arriving on a lawyer’s desk.

Requests arrive from across the business, and legal teams need to respond quickly without overlooking risks. Before they can advise, 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.” The system would classify and prioritize requests, connect them with relevant precedent, research, and past work, and give the responsible legal professional historical context and recommended first steps.

That would give lawyers a more informed starting point, with less time spent gathering the material they need to assess a matter. Ryan sees the opportunity in helping the department bring its 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.

For McAtee, the principle guiding that work remains clear: “The decision making will always remain with the lawyers.” The partnership’s goal is to put better information within reach so those lawyers can spend more time applying their expertise.

Watch McAtee and Ryan discuss LegalEdge and the next phase of AT&T’s legal work with OpenAI.