Cooley, an international law firm known for capital markets and IPO work, has developed GO Public, a proprietary AI product built on ChatGPT Work to streamline and speed up IPO preparation. The tool is designed to surface issues earlier, centralize relevant information, and produce a tailored starting point that lawyers can review and validate.
Cooley’s track record and scale
In 2025, Cooley advised on 180 deals worldwide, with aggregate deal value exceeding $51.5 billion. The firm has maintained a decade-long leading position on the U.S. issuer-side IPO market and, over the past 20-plus years, has advised on more venture-backed IPOs than any other law firm.
Why the new approach matters
Capital markets work requires synthesizing and analyzing large volumes of information. David Wang, Cooley’s Chief Innovation Officer, describes IPO preparation as continuously busy, with thousands of tasks arising during a transaction. Historically, teams frequently began from a precedent document for a comparable company and adapted it for the client—an approach that required substantial manual sorting and customization.
GO Public reverses that starting point by centering the client: it aggregates client-provided materials, relevant public sources, and curated precedents to create a more bespoke initial draft for attorney review.
How GO Public works
The system uses an agentic harness that orchestrates automated agent steps, specifies where lawyers must review or validate outputs, and composes the results into a cohesive workflow. The harness embeds know-how from prior analyses so the system reflects Cooley’s institutional experience.
Cooley’s legal engineers, innovation counsel, and practicing attorneys collaborated to translate the firm’s capital markets expertise into this proprietary agentic system. Cooley works closely with OpenAI to combine subject-matter expertise and AI engineering to ensure appropriate processes yield appropriate outcomes.
Effects on practice and decision-making
By handling the initial information curation and early issue-spotting, GO Public frees lawyers and management teams to spend more time on substantive judgment, disclosure challenges, and strategic issues. Wang says the integration of ChatGPT Work brings intelligence to a large set of information that previously had to be manually sorted; after that ‘‘first cut’’ human effort can be concentrated where it adds the most value.
Dave Peinsipp, partner and co-chair of Cooley’s global capital markets group, frames the benefit as ‘‘speed to quality.’’ The aim is not merely to do the same work faster but to reach a strong starting point sooner so lawyers can devote more time to judgment and strategy.
Professional responsibility and broader implications
Wang notes that the legal industry has been relatively change-averse, but that AI gives Cooley an opportunity to rethink capital markets workflows while preserving professional judgment and accountability. GO Public, powered by OpenAI technology, is intended to help attorneys consider more information while directing their expertise to the decisions that matter most.
Peinsipp views GO Public as the beginning of a larger shift in how capital markets work is delivered, with potential applications beyond IPOs to capital markets transactions more broadly.
