How AI is speeding up the IPO process for lawyers

When a company decides to go public — that means selling shares to the general public on the stock market for the first time — it's a massive undertaking. Lawyers have to review mountains of documents, check for legal issues, and make sure everything is in order. It's time-consuming work that can take months.

Cooley, a major law firm that handles these kinds of deals, has now built a tool called GO Public using ChatGPT (an AI chatbot that can understand and generate text). The tool works like a smart assistant that reads through documents and automatically flags potential legal issues or problems that lawyers need to pay attention to. Think of it as a first-pass reviewer that does the boring, repetitive work so human lawyers can focus their expertise where it actually matters.

What makes this useful is that it saves lawyers enormous amounts of time. Instead of manually reviewing every document line by line, the AI surfaces the most important issues upfront. This means lawyers can make better judgments faster, and companies can move through the IPO process more smoothly. The tool doesn't replace lawyers — it helps them work smarter.

This is a real-world example of how AI is changing professional work. Rather than eliminating jobs, tools like this make expert professionals more efficient and let them focus on the decisions that require human judgment and experience.