Willkie today announced a collaboration with OpenAI that it says will accelerate the development and deployment of “next-generation AI solutions” across the firm’s legal and business operations, including a firmwide rollout of ChatGPT Enterprise.
Willkie is among the first international law firms to join forces with OpenAI to focus on accelerating the development and deployment of proprietary AI platforms and solutions within its own environment. As we wrote in December last year, others include Dentons.
The collaboration builds upon Willkie Works, the firm’s AI and innovation organization, which is focused on developing proprietary technologies and integrating them into legal and business workflows.
Through Willkie Works, the firm has developed a portfolio of proprietary AI platforms, including:
- Wendell Intelligence – Willkie’s enterprise AI platform, providing a unified interface to AI-powered legal and business workflows
- Wendell Financial Insights – a firmwide financial and matter intelligence platform supporting operational and client-service decision-making
- Wendell Horizon – an AI-powered professional development and attorney training platform
- Wendell Private Funds Secondaries Platform – a specialized solution supporting complex private funds and secondaries workflows
- Wendell Class Action Claimant Platform – a technology-enabled platform supporting claimant analysis and litigation workflows
Willkie says that OpenAI’s frontier models will help power the next generation of these platforms, enabling Willkie to accelerate the design, testing and deployment of new AI-driven capabilities across legal and business functions.
Thomas Cerabino, Willkie’s chairman said: “AI is changing the practice of law. We have been through pivotal transformations before and are embracing this generational shift, supporting our position as a leader in the AI evolution. The opportunity AI presents is not simply to work faster, but to rethink how legal services are delivered, how institutional knowledge is leveraged and how clients are served. At Willkie, we are achieving this through combining exceptional legal talent with transformative technology to best meet our clients’ needs.”
The collaboration also extends to OpenAI Codex, which Willkie expects to integrate into its AI development environment through Willkie Works. These capabilities will help accelerate how the firm’s AI engineers design, test and deploy the next generation of proprietary platforms, workflows and client solutions.
“The future of legal will be shaped by firms that can put the power of coding directly into the hands of their lawyers and technologists,” said Jason Boehmig, head of product for the legal vertical at OpenAI. “With OpenAI’s frontier models and Codex, Willkie can turn its expertise and ideas into tools designed around how its professionals work and serve clients. That ability to build is genuinely new, and we’re excited to support their innovation.”
The collaboration comes as law firms increasingly look at whether they should be adapting off the shelf legal AI tools or building their own. A key differentiator for firms now is how the firm’s knowledge is structured; how it is connected to workflows; how lawyers validate and improve outputs; and what proprietary client experience the firm builds on top of the models. If underlying LLMs are increasingly a commodity, the firm’s advantage lies in the orchestration layer and the domain expertise wrapped around it. This is with the big caveat that with AI companies moving to a consumption model for tokens, the costs may end up being prohibitive.
