Law Firm Cooley Now Uses ChatGPT to Fast-Track IPOs

Cooley is a major law firm — the kind Silicon Valley startups hire when they want to sell shares to the public for the first time. The firm built a tool called GO Public using ChatGPT (the business version companies pay for) to read through the giant piles of documents an IPO creates: the prospectus, the risk warnings, the financial statements, the contracts. The AI's job is to spot contradictions and missing details early, so human lawyers can concentrate on the hard calls.

Here's why that matters. Taking a company public is a paperwork marathon. Hundreds of pages, dozens of lawyers, weeks of re-reading drafts to check that every number matches and nothing contradicts anything else. That work is expensive — IPO legal bills often run into the millions — and slow. An AI that does the first pass through the documents can shorten the timeline and cut the cost of the grind, while licensed humans still sign off on the actual legal advice.

For you, the knock-on effects are practical. Companies (and the employees and early investors who own their shares) can reach the stock market sooner, and you might see new names in your brokerage app earlier than before. It's also a signal about white-collar work: legal teams aren't disappearing, but the junior-lawyer job of poring over documents is shrinking, and the training path into the profession is changing.

The catch is trust. Law firms are on the hook if something is wrong, and AI can confidently invent details that don't exist. So every flagged issue still gets checked by a person. Cooley hasn't published hard numbers on time or money saved, and this is marketing for its own tool — treat the claims as promising rather than proven.