AT&T has hundreds of lawyers, and like every legal department it has the same problem: the answer to today’s question is sitting in somebody’s old email, or in the head of a lawyer three floors away. General Counsel David McAtee wants legal department AI to be the “plumbing” that fixes that. The first project is intake, a natural language front door that sorts requests, pulls precedent and suggests first steps.
Note who is telling the story. It’s OpenAI’s case study, so expect sunshine. Still, when a GC and chief legal officer at this level says the lawyers keep the decisions, that’s the line every legal team will be quoting to its board. If you want to future-proof your own seat, intake triage is a good place to start…
“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.”
Read: How AT&T is rethinking in-house legal work with OpenAI at OpenAI