Breaking news: OpenAI unveils Astra for Law

In a major announcement involving players from across the legal tech ecosystem, OpenAI today (17 September) unveils Astra for Law – it’s most powerful large language model to date configured into a new foundation for law firms and legal technology companies to build on.

Astra for Law combines GPT-6 Astra with settings, tools, and context tailored for professional legal work. It also launches with 26 partner plugins from providers including Thomson Reuters, Intapp, Harvey, Legora, DeepJudge and iManage.

One of the new tools is a new legal search index, through which users can search for case law, statutes, regulations and court rules. OpenAI has long collaborated with the Free Law Project and this latest move makes its caselaw collection available through the platform.

OpenAI has tested Astra for Law on 200 U.S. legal research questions from the private validation set of Vals AI’s Legal Research Bench. It shows a 40% improvement in correctness compared with GPT-6 Astra using web search alone. On case-law-focused questions, Astra for Law found 24% more reference cases than GPT-6 Astra using web search alone at the highest reasoning effort.

There is no benchmark available comparing it with leading legal research providers, and OpenAI notably suggests that the new functionality “complements the licensed content and specialist products firms rely on from providers such as Thomson Reuters.”