AT&T is extending its LegalEdge initiative through a partnership with OpenAI to make internal legal knowledge more accessible and speed the handling of incoming matters. The company’s in‑house legal department includes hundreds of lawyers and legal professionals worldwide who often must compile facts, documents and relevant prior work from across teams before advising the business.
David McAtee, AT&T Senior Executive Vice President and General Counsel, says improving access to that collective experience is central: “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.” He framed the project as building the underlying infrastructure to connect knowledge across the company.
Building on LegalEdge
LegalEdge is AT&T’s internal team of attorneys, legal professionals, technologists and project managers focused on applying AI to major legal matters. The next phase of work with OpenAI aims to link more of the company’s accumulated expertise directly to the matters that land on a lawyer’s desk.
Requests come from across AT&T’s business units, and legal teams must respond quickly without missing legal risks. Before offering advice, lawyers need to understand the issue, gather relevant context and set priorities—so intake is a critical control point for protecting the company.
Bill Ryan, AT&T Chief Compliance Officer, described a planned capability as an intake system with “a front door where we have natural language intake.” The envisioned system would classify and prioritize incoming requests, connect them with relevant precedent, research and past work, and provide the responsible legal professional with historical context and recommended first steps.
Expected benefits and guardrails
Such tooling would give lawyers a better-informed starting point and reduce the time spent assembling materials needed to assess a matter, enabling them to apply legal judgment more broadly across the business. Ryan said he is excited about “expanding our ability to provide legal judgment at greater scale.”
McAtee stressed that the guiding principle remains that decision‑making will stay with the lawyers: “The decision making will always remain with the lawyers.” The partnership’s objective is to surface better information so lawyers can devote more time to expert judgment rather than document gathering.
Next steps
The collaboration with OpenAI builds on LegalEdge’s work to date and focuses on making the company’s internal precedents and research more readily available during intake and triage. McAtee and Ryan have discussed this next phase of AT&T’s legal operations in the context of the OpenAI partnership.
