September 18, 2026, (Inside AI) — International law firm Cooley has built a proprietary AI product called GO Public on top of ChatGPT Work, aiming to compress the most labor-intensive phases of an initial public offering into a faster, more controlled workflow. The firm advised on 180 deals globally in 2025, totaling more than $51.5 billion in deal volume, and has led the US issuer-side IPO market for a decade.
The tool is an agentic harness that analyzes large volumes of deal information so lawyers can review and validate output rather than assemble it from scratch. Cooley says the system produces a tailored starting point for an IPO, combining client-provided information, public sources and curated precedents.
Capital markets work is defined by volume and repetition. Thousands of discrete tasks run in parallel during an IPO, and every one of them carries legal consequence. Before GO Public, teams typically began with a precedent from a comparable company and adapted it to the client's circumstances. The new system starts with the client itself.
"For our lawyers, it's always very busy," says David Wang, Chief Innovation Officer at Cooley. "When there's an IPO, there are thousands of things that need to be done constantly."
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Cooley's legal engineers, innovation counsel and practicing attorneys worked together to translate the firm's capital markets experience into the agentic system. The harness defines which steps agents can perform automatically, where lawyers must review or validate work, and how the pieces come together. Information curated from previous analyses provides what Wang calls baked-in know-how.
The firm partnered closely with OpenAI to combine subject-matter expertise with AI engineering. That collaboration matters because legal work demands traceability. An agent that drafts a disclosure section must be able to show its sources and reasoning to a reviewing attorney.
"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.
"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. "Once you do that first cut, you're able to really concentrate the human effort and expertise on the highest value surface areas."
Cooley frames the benefit as speed to quality rather than speed alone. The distinction matters in a profession where malpractice liability and regulatory scrutiny follow every filing. The firm says lawyers retain professional duties and obligations to ensure the best, most legally defensible outcome for clients.
"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. "GO Public helps us move through the intensive preparation faster so lawyers and management teams can spend more time on the decisions that shape the transaction -- where judgment, market experience and strategic thinking matter most."
"That's what we mean by speed to quality," Peinsipp says. "The point isn't simply to do the same work faster. It's to get to a strong starting point sooner, so our lawyers can spend more time applying judgment, challenging the disclosure and thinking strategically about the issues that matter most to the company."
The timing reflects a broader shift in how professional services firms view generative AI. Law firms spent much of the past three years experimenting with general-purpose chatbots for research and drafting. Cooley's move goes further by embedding AI into a defined production workflow with human checkpoints.
That architecture mirrors what enterprise software vendors call human-in-the-loop automation. Agents handle the first pass. Attorneys handle judgment. The system records what was automated and what was reviewed.
"Traditionally, the legal industry has been relatively change-averse," Wang says.
But AI is giving Cooley room to rethink how capital markets work gets done while preserving the professional judgment and accountability clients depend on. Wang notes that attorneys have professional duties and obligations to ensure the best, most legally defensible outcome occurs for clients, and that takes a lot of work.
IPO preparation competes for the attention of executives who are also running fast-moving businesses. Reducing the administrative drag of preparation gives management teams more bandwidth for strategic decisions. That is where Cooley sees the commercial case for GO Public.
Peinsipp describes the product 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. We see enormous potential not only for IPOs but for capital markets transactions more broadly."
Cooley's track record gives the experiment unusual weight. The firm has advised on more venture-backed IPOs than any other over the past two decades. If GO Public changes how those deals are prepared, competitors will study the results closely.
Inside AI could not independently verify the performance claims made about GO Public. The firm has not disclosed pricing, deployment scale or the specific models used within ChatGPT Work. What is clear is that a top-tier IPO advisor is now treating agentic AI as core infrastructure rather than a side experiment.
