AT&T’s legal AI innovation would sort requests while lawyers retain authority

AT&T is focusing its legal AI innovation on the work that comes before legal advice: finding facts, documents and relevant experience across teams. Its collaboration with OpenAI aims to make that knowledge easier to access, including through a planned request-intake system, while leaving decisions with the company’s lawyers.

Key takeaways

• AT&T’s legal department spans hundreds of lawyers and legal professionals worldwide.
• A planned AI intake tool would sort requests and retrieve supporting material.
• AT&T’s lawyers retain authority over legal decisions.

A global legal team with knowledge spread across teams

AT&T’s in-house legal department includes hundreds of lawyers and legal professionals worldwide, according to OpenAI’s account of the collaboration. Advising the business requires them to gather documents, establish facts and draw on expertise held by colleagues across different teams.

According to David McAtee, AT&T’s Senior Executive Vice President and General Counsel, making that accumulated experience easier to access would help the department perform better. The partnership’s goal is to reduce the effort needed to find useful information so lawyers can spend more time applying their expertise.

How AT&T is organizing legal AI innovation

The OpenAI collaboration builds on LegalEdge, AT&T’s internal team applying AI to major legal matters. It brings together attorneys, legal professionals, technologists and project managers.

The next step is to connect more of the company’s existing expertise with incoming legal work. McAtee describes the ambition as infrastructure extending beyond individual matters: “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 says.

A planned intake system would organize incoming requests

AT&T plans a natural language intake system that would classify legal requests, assign priorities and connect each matter with relevant precedent, research and previous work. It would also provide the responsible legal professional with historical context and recommended first steps.

Bill Ryan, AT&T’s Chief Compliance Officer, describes the proposed entry point as “a front door where we have natural language intake.” Requests come from across the business, requiring legal teams to understand each issue, gather context and determine what deserves attention first without overlooking risks.

The intended benefit is a better-informed starting point, with less time spent assembling the material needed to assess a matter.

Lawyers keep authority as AT&T seeks greater scale

Legal decision-making remains with AT&T’s lawyers. The intended role of AI is to improve access to information and help the department apply its judgment to more of the business’s needs.

“What most excites me about the future is expanding our ability to provide legal judgment at greater scale,” Ryan says.

McAtee sets the governing principle for AT&T’s legal AI innovation: “The decision making will always remain with the lawyers.”