Law firms know more clients are asking chatbots for advice before ever calling a lawyer. So legal giant Cooley is building technology that it hopes founders will use instead.
Cooley plans to give select startups access to Cooley Go Lab, an online portal where founders can upload files and ask questions about their documents, Matt Bartus, global cochair of Cooley's emerging companies and venture capital practice, told Business Insider.
To build it, Cooley teamed up with Legora, a fast-growing legal technology startup that sells to law firms and corporate legal departments. Last year, Legora entered a new line of business with what it calls "portals" — white-labeled workspaces where law firms and their clients can work together on legal matters.
Cooley Go Lab is aimed at catching a common startup problem early, Bartus said. Founders often handle routine contracts themselves to avoid outside counsel's hourly rates. That can leave startups with a trail of messy agreements that their first in-house lawyer has to unwind later.
Legora founder Max Junestrand knows the problem well. When he started the company at age 23, he said he used an early version of ChatGPT to rewrite contracts. Junestrand, a software engineer, not a lawyer, said he let some early contracts include an unlimited liability clause — a provision that can leave a company exposed to damages far beyond the value of the deal.
"When our general counsel started, she freaked out," he said.
Cooley is now trying to give the next crop of founders a way to use artificial intelligence to move faster, but with a law firm's guardrails around it.
Cooley Go Lab will have a limited rollout to start. It will be available first to startups in Y Combinator's summer cohort.
Much has changed for startups since Legora's turn in the famed startup accelerator. Teams can write code and release technology faster with coding agents. They are signing customers and growing revenue earlier, and the hottest companies seem to be raising funding nonstop. But moving faster also means legal work that once came later in a startup's life is being pulled closer to the beginning.
At Y Combinator, partner Gustaf Alströmer is seeing that shift play out in real time. In the last batch, a record 14 startups reached $1 million in annual recurring revenue — the amount of revenue a company expects to collect over a year. Alströmer said giving founders access to tools like Cooley Go Lab could help them keep that pace without creating contract-slop.
The portal includes features that review documents like nondisclosure and contractor agreements and flag issues for founders to consider. The tool also draws on Cooley Go, the firm's central hub of standard startup forms, templates, and guidance.
If you can't beat 'em, join 'em
Law firms like Cooley are facing a new reality. The better the frontier models get at legal work, the more founders and in-house lawyers may decide they can handle situations themselves rather than send them to outside counsel. Anthropic is trying to make that easier with new tools built for contract review and drafting.
Law firms are now figuring out how to stay relevant as more legal work becomes software-enabled. Some are building their own tech. Kirkland & Ellis has tapped Palantir to help it build tools to manage parts of the firm's private funds practice, while Freshfields is working with Anthropic on software that could eventually be sold to other law firms. Harvey, a leader in legal technology, says it's getting into training custom models for law firms.
Taken together, the moves point to a new attitude spreading across Big Law: If clients are going to use artificial intelligence anyway, law firms want to shape how they use it.
Bartus doesn't seem especially concerned about losing business to in-house legal departments. Cooley has been on a hot streak. Profits rose 6.7% to $922 million last fiscal year. The firm also scored a fair use win for Meta in a copyright case involving its model Llama last year, and it advised Jony Ive's hardware startup Io in a $6.5 billion sale to OpenAI.
Bartus is confident that companies will continue to depend on law firms for the important work. Cooley Go Lab, he said, is meant to help founders handle routine legal work more cleanly, not replace lawyers.
Cooley says the tool is not protected by attorney-client privilege, so founders will need to be careful about what they upload because those materials could be turned over in litigation.
"If you want actual legal advice," he said, "you need to talk to a lawyer."
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