On September 17, 2026, OpenAI introduced Astra for Law, a configuration that combines the GPT‑6 Astra model with legal-specific settings, a large legal search index and integrations aimed at professional legal work. The product is intended for law firms and legal technology companies to build applications and workflows around firm expertise.
Capabilities and data
Astra for Law integrates GPT‑6 Astra with a legal search index that can search U.S. case law, statutes, regulations, court rules and administrative decisions across a corpus of more than 230 million URLs, with sources added daily. The work with Free Law Project and CourtListener brings a collection covering more than 99.9% of published U.S. precedential case law into the research experience. OpenAI says the configuration also complements licensed content from providers such as Thomson Reuters.
Benchmarks and controls
To evaluate the configuration, Astra for Law’s complete setup was tested on 200 U.S. legal research questions from the private validation set of Vals AI’s Legal Research Bench. At the highest reasoning effort, Astra for Law passed the benchmark’s overall correctness check on 54.0% of questions, compared with 38.7% for GPT‑6 Astra using web search alone — a 40% relative improvement, according to the published results. OpenAI reports Astra for Law found 24% more reference cases on case-law-focused questions and retrieved up to 54% more relevant passages from the correct opinions at the same reasoning effort.
The offering includes governance features for eligible firms through a Trusted Access Program, Zero Data Retention (ZDR) on the API, and ChatGPT Enterprise usage excluded from human review by default. OpenAI says it is working with Latham & Watkins on information permissions, ethical walls and firm oversight; Michael Rubin, Chair of Latham’s AI Strategy Committee, is quoted on the collaboration.
Integrations, partners and availability
OpenAI launched 26 partner-built plugins that connect ChatGPT to legal tools such as Relativity, Clio, iManage, Intapp and DeepJudge, plus nine community plugins and 47 custom skills from LegalQuants, LECG and Skills.law. Firms including Sullivan & Cromwell, Ropes & Gray and Cooley provided examples of custom applications: an agreement analyzer, a deal diligence system and a capital markets tool called GO Public. Early API customers named include Harvey and Legora.
Astra for Law will appear in ChatGPT’s model picker as “GPT‑6 Astra Law” and in the API as gpt-6-astra-law. The configuration is initially offered to selected firms through Trusted Access and will be made available on the API in coming weeks, while ChatGPT for Word is reported as generally available for lawyers to use in drafting.
Original source: OpenAI News