Cooley builds GO Public on ChatGPT Work to accelerate IPO preparation

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.

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

“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.

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.

With GO Public, Cooley can redirect more lawyer and management time toward the substantive work that drives an IPO. “The amazing thing about integrating ChatGPT Work into GO Public is that it brings intelligence to this very large array of information that had to be manually sorted before,” Wang says. “Once you do that first cut, you’re able to really concentrate the human effort and expertise on the highest value surface areas.”

“That’s what we mean by speed to quality,” Peinsipp says. “The point isn’t simply to do the same work faster. It’s to get to a strong starting point sooner, so our lawyers can spend more time applying judgment, challenging the disclosure and thinking strategically about the issues that matter most to the company.”

For management teams, the benefit extends beyond the legal work itself. IPO preparation competes for the attention of executives who are also running fast-moving businesses.

ChatGPT Work allows us to move more quickly through intensive preparation and give valuable time back to management. We want their attention focused where only they can add value — on the business, the story and the decisions that will ultimately shape the offering.

“Traditionally, the legal industry has been relatively change-averse,” Wang says. But AI is giving Cooley an opportunity to rethink how capital markets work gets done while preserving the professional judgment and accountability clients depend on.

“As attorneys, we have professional duties and obligations to make sure that the best, most legally defensible outcome occurs for our clients, and that just takes a lot of work,” Wang explains. GO Public, powered by OpenAI, is designed to help lawyers consider more information while directing their expertise toward the decisions that matter most.

Peinsipp sees GO Public as the beginning of a broader shift in how capital markets work is delivered.

“GO Public is our vision for the future of capital markets practice,” Peinsipp says. “Our collaboration with OpenAI has allowed us to rethink how this work gets done. We see enormous potential not only for IPOs but for capital markets transactions more broadly.”