How Cooley is accelerating IPO work with ChatGPT

Cooley is an international law firm with a reputation for helping companies navigate capital markets and initial public offerings (IPOs). In 2025, the firm advised on 180 deals globally, totaling more than $51.5 billion in deal volume. Cooley has a decade-long track record at the top of the US issuer-side IPO market and has advised on more venture-backed IPOs than any other firm over the past 20-plus years.

Capital markets involve huge amounts of information that need to be synthesized and analyzed. “For our lawyers, it’s always very busy,” explains David Wang, Chief Innovation Officer at Cooley. “When there’s an IPO, there are thousands of things that need to be done constantly.”

Cooley developed GO Public, a proprietary AI product offering built on ChatGPT Work. Its agentic harness analyzes information so lawyers can review and validate the work. The workflow comes together into a tailored starting point for an IPO.

The harness provides a controlled workflow for agents that lays out which steps agents can perform automatically, where lawyers must review or validate the work, and how it all comes together. Information curated from previous analyses provides what Wang calls “baked-in know-how.” Cooley partners closely with OpenAI to combine subject-matter expertise and AI engineering knowledge to ensure the right processes produce the right outcomes.

“An IPO is one of the most consequential moments in a company’s life, and it can consume enormous management attention,” says Dave Peinsipp, partner and co-chair of Cooley’s global capital markets group. “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 — where judgment, market experience and strategic thinking matter most.”

Before GO Public, teams often began with a precedent from a comparable company and adapted it to fit the client’s circumstances. GO Public allows Cooley to begin with the client itself, bringing together the information provided, relevant public sources, and carefully curated precedents to create a more tailored starting point for lawyer review.

“Everybody understands that as the leading capital markets firm, we know what to do in an IPO,” Wang says. Cooley’s legal engineers, innovation counsel, and practitioners worked together to translate the firm’s capital markets experience into a proprietary agentic system. “With GO Public and the agentic harness that we built using OpenAI’s technology, we were able to bring this forward into the AI era,” Wang says.