How Cooley is accelerating IPO work with ChatGPT

What happened

Cooley is an international law firm with a reputation for helping companies navigate capital markets and initial public offerings (IPOs). 5 billion in deal volume. Cooley has a decade-long track record at the top of the US issuer-side IPO market and has advised on more venture-backed IPOs than any other firm over the past 20-plus years. Capital markets involve huge amounts of information that need to be synthesized and analyzed.

The harness provides a controlled workflow for agents that lays out which steps agents can perform automatically, where lawyers must review or validate the work, and how it all comes together. ” Cooley partners closely with OpenAI to combine subject-matter expertise and AI engineering knowledge to ensure the right processes produce the right outcomes.

With GO Public, Cooley can redirect more lawyer and management time toward the substantive work that drives an IPO. “The amazing thing about integrating ChatGPT Work into GO Public is that it brings intelligence to this very large array of information that had to be manually sorted before,” Wang says. ” “That’s what we mean by speed to quality,” Peinsipp says.

“The point isn’t simply to do the same work faster. ” For management teams, the benefit extends beyond the legal work itself. IPO preparation competes for the attention of executives who are also running fast-moving businesses. Dave Peinsipp, Partner and Co-Chair, Global Capital Markets “Traditionally, the legal industry has been relatively change-averse,” Wang says.

But AI is giving Cooley an opportunity to rethink how capital markets work gets done while preserving the professional judgment and accountability clients depend on. “As attorneys, we have professional duties and obligations to make sure that the best, most legally defensible outcome occurs for our clients, and that just takes a lot of work,” Wang explains.

Why it matters

“For our lawyers, it’s always very busy,” explains David Wang, Chief Innovation Officer at Cooley. ” Cooley developed GO Public, a proprietary AI product offering built on ChatGPT Work. Its agentic harness analyzes information so lawyers can review and validate the work. The workflow comes together into a tailored starting point for an IPO.

David Wang, Chief Innovation Officer “An IPO is one of the most consequential moments in a company’s life, and it can consume enormous management attention,” says Dave Peinsipp, partner and co-chair of Cooley’s global capital markets group. ” Before GO Public, teams often began with a precedent from a comparable company and adapted it to fit the client’s circumstances.

GO Public allows Cooley to begin with the client itself, bringing together the information provided, relevant public sources, and carefully curated precedents to create a more tailored starting point for lawyer review. “Everybody understands that as the leading capital markets firm, we know what to do in an IPO,” Wang says.

Cooley’s legal engineers, innovation counsel, and practitioners worked together to translate the firm’s capital markets experience into a proprietary agentic system. “With GO Public and the agentic harness that we built using OpenAI’s technology, we were able to bring this forward into the AI era,” Wang says.

What to watch

GO Public, powered by OpenAI, is designed to help lawyers consider more information while directing their expertise toward the decisions that matter most. Peinsipp sees GO Public as the beginning of a broader shift in how capital markets work is delivered. “GO Public is our vision for the future of capital markets practice,” Peinsipp says. “Our collaboration with OpenAI has allowed us to rethink how this work gets done. ”