Cooley speeds up IPO processes using ChatGPT

Preparing a company for an initial public offering requires lawyers to sift through thousands of documents, disclosures and regulatory requirements.

Cooley, an international law firm that advised on 180 deals worth $51.5 billion in 2025, has long been a leader in U.S. issuer‑side IPO work.

In 2025 the firm launched GO Public, a proprietary AI‑driven service built on OpenAI’s ChatGPT Work platform.

GO Public is designed to surface issues early, streamline workflows and give clients a faster route to market.

AI‑enabled workflow for IPO preparation

The system combines client‑provided information, public data sources and curated precedent filings into an agentic harness that performs the first analytical pass.

Lawyers then review and validate the AI‑generated output, ensuring professional responsibility while benefiting from a pre‑filtered knowledge base.

David Wang, Cooley’s Chief Innovation Officer, explains that “for our lawyers, it’s always very busy” and that an IPO “has thousands of things that need to be done constantly.”

He adds that ChatGPT Work “is changing legal work by bringing intelligence to every step of the process faster, more effectively, and more democratically.”

The harness defines which steps the AI can execute automatically and which require human sign‑off, creating a controlled workflow.

Embedded “baked‑in know‑how” from previous analyses guides the AI toward the firm’s proven capital‑markets methodology.

Cooley’s legal engineers, innovation counsel and practitioners collaborated to translate two decades of IPO experience into the proprietary system.

Partner and co‑chair of the global capital markets group, Dave Peinsipp, says “an IPO is one of the most consequential moments in a company’s life, and it can consume enormous management attention.”

He notes that 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.”

Impact on lawyers, clients and the speed‑to‑quality metric

Before GO Public, teams typically started with a precedent from a comparable company and manually adapted it to the client’s circumstances.

The new tool allows Cooley to begin with the client’s own data, producing a more customized starting point for review.

Wang observes that the AI “brings intelligence to this very large array of information that had to be manually sorted before.”

By handling the first cut, the system lets lawyers concentrate on high‑value tasks such as challenging disclosures and strategic issue‑spotting.

Peinsipp describes this as “speed to quality,” emphasizing that the goal is not merely faster execution but an earlier strong foundation for judgment.

For management teams, the benefit extends beyond legal drafting to freeing senior leaders to focus on business decisions during the IPO window.

Cooley works closely with OpenAI to align subject‑matter expertise with AI engineering, ensuring that the process produces the intended outcomes.

The partnership illustrates how a traditional professional services firm can adopt large‑language‑model capabilities while preserving human oversight.

Early adopters of GO Public report reduced turnaround times on initial document packages, though the firm has not disclosed specific percentages.

The approach signals a broader trend of law firms embedding generative AI into core service delivery to stay competitive in capital‑markets work.

While AI handles repetitive synthesis, the ultimate responsibility for legal accuracy and strategic advice remains with the attorneys.

As IPO timelines tighten, Cooley’s AI‑enhanced workflow aims to deliver a strong, client‑specific starting point sooner, allowing human expertise to focus on the most consequential aspects of the transaction.

Why This Matters: Cooley’s use of ChatGPT Work demonstrates that AI can accelerate the early phases of IPO preparation while preserving lawyer oversight, potentially reshaping how capital‑markets legal services are delivered.