OpenAI on Thursday announced Astra for Law. It is a new offering for law firms and legal technology companies that build AI-powered products and workflows for professional legal work. The San Francisco-based company says the experience combines GPT-6 Astra with a legal search index, specialised instructions, tools designed around legal research, and writing. OpenAI also introduced privacy and governance controls, alongside 26 ecosystem plugins connecting the system with specialist legal tools.
Astra for Law
In a blog post, OpenAI said that Astra for Law is powered by GPT-6 Astra, which is described as the company’s most powerful model to date. Among the most notable features is the legal search index. As the name suggests, users can search US case law, statutes, regulations, court rules, and administrative decisions across a corpus of more than 230 million URLs.
The ChatGPT maker has also partnered with Free Law Project to bring its CourtListener case-law collection into the research experience.
Astra for Law is designed for finding relevant authorities, locating specific passages, and understanding how those authorities apply to a legal question. Citing a test comprising questions from the Vals AI’s Legal Research Bench, the service is claimed to have passed the benchmark’s overall correctness check on 54 percent of questions, compared with 38.7 percent for GPT-6 Astra using only web search.
Further, Astra for Law found 24 percent more reference cases on case-law-focused questions than GPT-6 Astra with web search alone. On an audited set of target passages, the company says it retrieved up to 54 percent more relevant passages from the correct court opinions.
The service also includes custom instructions for legal analysis and writing that can help the model apply research to a client’s facts, develop arguments or deal terms, identify weaknesses, and account for uncertainty. Citing an example, OpenAI said it can distinguish a court’s holding from other observations and identify cases that could weaken an argument.
OpenAI is also introducing additional controls for law firms handling confidential client information. The company claims to have created a Trusted Access Program for eligible law firms. This provides access to Astra for Law for professional legal work. Eligible firms can access Zero Data Retention on its API, while usage of ChatGPT Enterprise is excluded from human review by default.
There are 26 partner-built plugins introduced with Astra for Law. OpenAI says these cover various aspects of legal practice and business operations. For example, iManage can allow a lawyer to draft a negotiation brief in ChatGPT and save it to a matter file, while Intapp can surface activities that may require a time entry for review. Meanwhile, the Thomson Reuters plugin brings HighQ matter context into ChatGPT and previews a CoCounsel Legal connector.
