Introducing Astra for Law

What happened

Today, we’re introducing Astra for Law: a new foundation for law firms and legal technology companies to build AI products and workflows around their expertise. It combines GPT‑6 Astra, our latest and most powerful model, with settings, tools, and context tailored for professional legal work. API customers including Harvey and Legora will be able to build on Astra for Law, bringing this intelligence into their own products and workflows.

For example, when prompted to identify good law with similar fact patterns, Astra for Law could both pinpoint relevant precedent and match fact patterns better than other frontier models: Astra for Law will be initially offered to selected law firms through Trusted Access in ChatGPT and Codex, and will be coming soon to the API.

It will appear in the model picker as “GPT‑6 Astra Law” and in the API as gpt-6-astra-law. Law firms need to protect client confidences and control how AI is used in their practice. We’ve created a special Trusted Access Program for eligible law firms to give lawyers and people working under their supervision access to Astra for Law for professional legal work.

For eligible firms, the offering includes Zero Data Retention (ZDR) on our API, and usage of ChatGPT Enterprise is excluded from human review by default. We are also working with Latham & Watkins, a leader in AI governance, to design for information permissions, ethical walls, client instructions, and firm oversight.

With frontier intelligence and the right controls, firms can turn their own precedents, methods, and judgment into AI tools and workflows built to their standards.

Why it matters

As our frontier models advance, we’ll bring these legal capabilities to our latest models. We are also expanding our work on privacy and governance to give law firms specific controls for confidential client work. Firms can also customize Astra for Law using our 26 new ecosystem plugins that connect ChatGPT to the specialist tools firms already use, like Relativity and Clio.

Astra for Law combines GPT‑6 Astra with a powerful legal search index and instructions for legal analysis and writing. Together, they amplify Astra’s capabilities across the legal practice, while giving firms and legal technology companies the freedom to build their own applications and workflows. Our new legal search index is one of the tools Astra for Law can use.

Legal research often begins with finding the exact right authority, locating the relevant passages, and understanding how relevant and binding they are to the situation at hand. The index helps Astra for Law do that work, and complements the licensed content and specialist products firms rely on from providers such as Thomson Reuters. S.

case law, statutes, regulations, court rules, and administrative decisions across a corpus of more than 230 million URLs, with sources added daily. S. precedential case law⁠(opens in a new window) into this research experience. S. legal research questions from the private validation set of Vals AI’s Legal Research Bench⁠(opens in a new window).

This benchmark measures how well the model can find relevant sources and passages, and how well its research answers meet the evaluation criteria. 7% for GPT‑6 Astra using web search alone – a 40% relative improvement. Astra for Law also produces more comprehensive answers. On case-law-focused questions, Astra for Law found 24% more reference cases than GPT‑6 Astra using web search alone at the highest reasoning effort.

On the audited set of target passages, it retrieved up to 54% more relevant passages from the correct court opinions, when comparing the systems at the same reasoning effort. The result is a stronger research foundation for advising on a deal, assessing a dispute, or developing a legal strategy, with reliable authorities the lawyer can examine for herself. Legal research is only the first step.

Custom instructions for legal analysis and writing guide Astra for Law in applying that research to the client’s facts, developing arguments or deal terms, and identifying weaknesses and uncertainty. That can mean distinguishing a court’s holding from its other observations, addressing cases that weaken an argument, or explaining how a contract exception shifts risk between the parties.

What to watch

Working with selected firms, our forward-deployed engineers have been adapting ChatGPT Enterprise with custom interfaces and integrations to proprietary data, creating tools for each firm’s workflows: Firms can build with their own teams and partner products, with permitted sources and review processes defined for the work. We’re proud to work with the specialist companies who are advancing legal AI.

Today, we’re launching 26 partner-built plugins⁠ that help firms go deeper with the tools and knowledge they already use. These plugins cover the practice and business of law.