How AT&T is rethinking in-house legal work with OpenAI

Why it matters

AT&T is partnering with OpenAI to expand LegalEdge, its internal team of attorneys, legal professionals, technologists, and project managers that applies AI to major legal matters. The department's lawyers, spread across the world, must gather facts, documents, and past work before advising the business, and the collaboration aims to make that accumulated expertise easier to reach. General Counsel David McAtee frames the partnership as building the plumbing behind a company-wide knowledge layer. A key planned initiative is a natural-language intake system, described by Chief Compliance Officer Bill Ryan as a front door for requests, which would classify and prioritize incoming matters, link them to precedent and prior work, and suggest first steps. The stated goal is to give lawyers a more informed starting point and extend legal judgment across more of the business. McAtee emphasizes that decision making stays with the lawyers, with AI serving to put better information within their reach.