Key Takeaways:
- AT&T LegalEdge, AT&T’s in-house legal agency, will serve as the foundation for a new initiative between AT&T Legal and OpenAI focused on responsible, AI-enabled legal workflows.
- The effort combines enterprise legal expertise, advanced AI capabilities, and human judgment to make institutional knowledge more accessible and help organizations realize the promise of AI.
- Human oversight, governance, confidentiality, and legal judgment remain central to every workflow.
AT&T is collaborating as a flagship in-house legal design partner with OpenAI to build the AI-enabled in-house legal department of the future. Together, the companies will design, build, and evaluate practical legal workflows grounded in real-world experience and attorney oversight. The work will focus on making institutional knowledge easier to access, supporting appropriate routine legal work more efficiently and giving legal professionals more capacity for ideation, strategy, and advocacy.
The initiative builds on the foundation of AT&T LegalEdge, AT&T’s AI-first center of expertise. Launched in January 2026, LegalEdge has handled nearly 100 matters in its first six months while helping advance new approaches to legal service delivery, knowledge management, and workflow design across the AT&T Legal Department.
“AI gives legal departments an opportunity to do more than improve individual productivity. It gives us an opportunity to rethink how legal work moves through an organization, how institutional knowledge is retained and how our lawyers focus their time,” said David McAtee, senior executive vice president and general counsel, AT&T. “Together with OpenAI, we are building an AT&T Legal Department-wide capability designed to make our knowledge and expertise more accessible to every AT&T organization we serve. AI can expand what we do and how quickly we do it. Legal judgment remains human.”
The work reflects AT&T’s broader approach to engineering the connected world: using advanced technology to make new services and experiences work reliably at scale, while building trust and responsibility into their design. This effort will apply that approach to legal operations, where confidentiality, accountability, and sound judgment are essential.
Lawyers will determine how AI agents are used. For some tasks, such as frequently asked questions, an agent may provide a response. For others, agents may gather and synthesize relevant information to support lawyers in providing legal advice. Appropriate governance, confidentiality, accountability, and human review will be built into every workflow.
“AI can help in-house legal teams play an even greater role in advancing the business, from evaluating new opportunities to helping teams make informed decisions and act on them,” said Jason Boehmig, GM Legal Industry at OpenAI. AT&T is helping lead the way by rethinking how its legal expertise and institutional knowledge can serve the entire company. Together, we’re exploring how AI can put that knowledge to work across the business, with lawyers’ judgment at the center.”
“Success will not be measured by how much technology we deploy,” said Bill Ryan, senior vice president and chief compliance officer, AT&T. “It will be measured by whether we improve quality, make knowledge more accessible, build reusable capabilities, and give our legal professionals more capacity for the work that requires experience and judgment. This partnership is about doing that responsibly, in real workflows and at enterprise scale.”
The initiative demonstrates how AT&T is applying the same principles that guide its approach to advanced connectivity, reliability, and trust to the emerging era of enterprise AI. By pairing frontier AI capabilities with enterprise governance and human expertise, AT&T LegalEdge is helping define what responsible AI adoption can look like at scale.
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