OpenAI launches Astra for Law for legal research and workflows

OpenAI has introduced Astra for Law, a legal-focused foundation that combines GPT‑6 Astra with settings, tools and context designed for professional legal work. API customers including Harvey and Legora will be able to build on it, while selected law firms will get initial access through Trusted Access in ChatGPT and Codex before the model comes to the API as gpt-6-astra-law.

The system includes a legal search index covering U.S. case law, statutes, regulations, court rules and administrative decisions across a corpus of more than 230 million URLs. OpenAI said Free Law Project’s CourtListener collection adds more than 99.9% of published U.S. precedential case law to the research experience. In testing on 200 U.S. legal research questions from Vals AI’s Legal Research Bench, Astra for Law passed the overall correctness check on 54.0% of questions, compared with 38.7% for GPT‑6 Astra using web search alone, a 40% relative improvement.

OpenAI is also adding governance features for confidential client work, including Zero Data Retention (ZDR) on its API for eligible firms and default exclusion of ChatGPT Enterprise usage from human review. The launch includes 26 new ecosystem plugins, integrations with tools such as Relativity, Clio, iManage, Intapp, DeepJudge and Thomson Reuters HighQ, plus 9 community plugins and 47 custom skills for legal practitioners.