Tech giant OpenAI has announced that it has hired Jason Boehmig, the co-founder of AI contracting platform Ironclad, as product leader for its new legal vertical.
Its diversification into the legaltech market is a significant move, as it will now join rival tech behemoths Anthropic and Microsoft which have pursued the same course.
In a LinkedIn post announcing his new appointment, San Francisco-based Boehmig said that today's legal industry was "a lot more vibrant" than when Ironclad was established 12 years ago.
He noted that law firm leaders were "rearchitecting their firms for the next hundred years. GCs and legal ops leaders are pushing the limits of what’s possible with AI. State bars and pro bono organisations are looking for ways we can responsibly and safely close the access to the justice gap.”
Boehmig added that law schools were rethinking legal education and that there were "thousands of thriving legal tech startups. It’s such an exciting time."
San Francisco-based Ironclad was co-created by Boehmig in 2014 after two years as a corporate attorney for Fenwick and West, alongside Cai Wangwilt, a former software engineer at Palantir Technologies.
Last month, Artificial Lawyer reported that OpenAI’s legal AI tools for lawyers may be branded as ‘Codex for Legal’, where the focus will be on key business verticals, such as in sales and finance.
Its legal AI tools may be formed as plugins, in a similar fashion to Anthropic’s Claude for Legal.
Codex is OpenAI’s rapidly expanding facility for engineers. Its recent ‘Codex for (almost) everything’ blog post said the company planned to release more than 90 additional plugins, which Microsoft Suite and Atlassian Rovo amongst other clients would find useful.
In May, Anthropic announced that it had launched 12 new practice area plugins, courtesy of its Claude AI-agent technology, which followed the seismic February release of legal plugins for Claude Cowork.
Simultaneously, it also finalised agreements to connect Claude with more than 20 major legaltech suppliers.
Meanwhile Microsoft introduced a new AI agent for legal work in Word in April, with its main attributes including analysing documents, drafting edits and checking contracts for compliance, according to the firm’s blog post.
This followed another law related offering in August last year – an e-discovery tool within Microsoft Purview, its data governance and security platform.
Earlier this year, OpenAI entered into a strategic partnership with AI-based legaltech start-up Eudia, with the aim to support legal and acquisition teams in the US Department of War and other US government agencies.
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