AT&T's in-house legal department, with hundreds of lawyers and legal professionals around the world, often spends significant time assembling facts, documents, and relevant past work before it can advise the business. David Mc Atee, AT&T's Senior Executive Vice President and General Counsel, says making that accumulated expertise easier to access is central to improving the department's work. AT&T is working with OpenAI to build that next phase.
"Our partnership with Open AI 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," Mc Atee says. The collaboration builds on Legal Edge, 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 expertise to the requests arriving on lawyers' desks from across the business.
Before legal teams can advise, they must understand the issue, gather context, and decide what needs attention first, which makes intake a critical part of protecting the business. Bill Ryan, AT&T's Chief Compliance Officer, describes a planned intake system with "a front door where we have natural language intake." The system would classify and prioritize requests, connect them with precedent, research, and past work, and give responsible legal professionals historical context and recommended first steps. Ryan says the goal is "expanding our ability to provide legal judgment at greater scale."
Mc Atee emphasizes that the decision making will always remain with the lawyers. The partnership aims to put better information within reach so lawyers can spend more time applying their expertise.
Source: OpenAI Blog · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing