New Cooley platform provides AI legal help for startups

Palo Alto-based law firm Cooley built a platform that intends to help startups make legal decisions without a lawyer. Users can ask it to analyze nondisclosure and contractor agreements, locate proper business forms, and ask legal questions about company documents. Built with legal AI startup Legora and trained on Cooley’s data, the platform will roll out to the summer batch of Y Combinator startups first.

Cooley says the product serves as an extension of legal aid to a group of smaller businesses that wouldn’t typically seek counsel at their stage, rather than replacing the work of its 1,400 lawyers on staff. Meta, Snap, and other tech companies ran into legal disputes over decisions made in their early years, including Legora’s own CEO Max Junestrand, a software engineer, who wrote early contracts with ChatGPT and left the company open to huge potential damages, Business Insider reported. Whether the platform can help startups dodge their next big lawsuit remains to be seen. But it suggests legal services are becoming a standard for anyone with access to AI, forcing lawyers to rethink who their customers are and what they will pay for.