How law firm Cooley is using ChatGPT to speed up IPO work

Hi, I'm Shii-chan! Today I found a great AI use case from the legal world. Going public is one of the biggest moments in a company's life, but behind the scenes it generates a huge amount of paperwork. Let's see how ChatGPT is changing that.

OpenAI News openai.com

What was announced?

OpenAI's News covered a customer story about Cooley, an international law firm known for its work on capital markets and IPOs. In 2025, Cooley advised on 180 deals globally, totaling more than $51.5 billion in deal volume, and it has advised on more venture-backed IPOs than any other firm over the past 20-plus years.

Cooley built GO Public, a proprietary AI product on top of ChatGPT Work. Its agentic harness analyzes information so lawyers can review and validate the work, bringing everything together into a tailored starting point for an IPO.

Why it matters

David Wang, Chief Innovation Officer at Cooley, explains that during an IPO, lawyers are always extremely busy because there are thousands of things that need to happen constantly. Before GO Public, teams typically started from a precedent set by a comparable company and adapted it to the client's situation.

GO Public flips that approach: it starts from the client itself, combining the information the client provides, relevant public sources, and carefully curated precedents into a tailored starting point for lawyer review. It's a way of translating Cooley's decades of capital markets experience into an agentic system.

What changes

Dave Peinsipp, partner and co-chair of Cooley's global capital markets group, says GO Public helps the firm move through intensive preparation faster so lawyers and management teams can spend more time on the decisions that shape the transaction — where judgment, market experience, and strategic thinking matter most.

Wang adds that once ChatGPT Work brings intelligence to information that used to be sorted manually, that first cut lets the firm concentrate human effort and expertise on the highest-value areas.

ChatGPT Work allows us to move more quickly through intensive preparation and give valuable time back to management. We want their attention focused where only they can add value — on the business, the story and the decisions that will ultimately shape the offering.

This benefit isn't limited to lawyers — it also gives time back to management teams, who are already busy running fast-moving businesses while preparing for an IPO.

Dive Deep

Here's what the source reveals about how GO Public actually works:

• It uses a controlled workflow that lays out which steps agents can perform automatically, and where lawyers must review or validate the work
• It relies on information curated from previous analyses, which Wang calls "baked-in know-how"
• It was built by Cooley's legal engineers, innovation counsel, and practitioners working together with OpenAI, combining subject-matter expertise with AI engineering knowledge

Because lawyers have professional duties to produce the best, most legally defensible outcome for clients, GO Public is designed to help lawyers consider more information while keeping the final judgment calls in human hands.

Wrap-up

Here's the recap:

• Cooley built GO Public, a proprietary IPO support tool on top of ChatGPT Work
• It shifts the starting point from generic precedents to the client's own information
• Agents handle the first-pass sorting of information, freeing lawyers to focus on high-judgment work
• The time savings benefit not just lawyers but also management teams with limited bandwidth

Even in an industry often described as change-averse, this is a solid example of AI reshaping how the work actually gets done. If you're thinking about AI adoption in legal or compliance work, this one's worth a look.