Cooley’s GO Public is a new, firm-built system that uses ChatGPT Work to accelerate the preparatory phase of initial public offerings (IPOs). The tool analyzes client-provided inputs alongside curated public sources and precedent documents to produce a tailored starting draft for lawyers to review. Central to its design are controls that force attorney validation of key outputs, preserving professional responsibility while shifting the early heavy lifting to an AI-enabled workflow.
The system reflects Cooley’s effort to convert decades of capital markets experience into an agentic process. In 2025 the firm advised on 180 deals globally, totaling more than $51.5 billion in deal volume, and the firm says it has led the U.S. issuer-side IPO market for a decade. That institutional knowledge has been encoded into GO Public as what Cooley terms “baked-in know-how,” with legal engineers, innovation counsel and practitioners collaborating to define which tasks the agents may perform automatically and where lawyer review is mandatory.
ChatGPT Work serves as the underlying technology for GO Public, and Cooley reports a close partnership with OpenAI to align the agentic processes with legal practice and professional obligations. The deployment includes an engineered harness that delineates automated steps, outlines where attorneys must validate outputs and prescribes how results should be assembled for review. By building these constraints into the workflow, the firm aims to balance automation efficiency with accountability and defensible legal outcomes.
The practical effect of GO Public is to change how capital markets teams create initial documents. Where lawyers traditionally started from a precedent for a comparable company and adapted that template to a client’s specifics, GO Public begins with the client itself. It aggregates client inputs, public information and relevant precedents to produce a more customized first draft. That approach is intended to move time away from manual sorting and toward substantive decision-making where lawyer judgment and market experience matter most.
Cooley frames the benefit as “speed to quality”: the objective is not merely to complete routine tasks faster but to reach a strong, review-ready starting point sooner. With initial synthesis and issue-surfacing handled by the system, attorneys can concentrate on disclosures, strategic choices and the high-value decisions that shape an offering. Partners describe the result as a redistribution of effort—less time on data collection and document assembly, more on analysis and negotiation.
GO Public is also positioned to reduce the preparation burden on company management. Preparing for an offering competes with executives’ ongoing responsibilities running active businesses; Cooley says the tool accelerates the intensive preparation steps and returns time to management so they can focus on business strategy and the narrative around the offering. By trimming the operational load of assembling materials and responding to information requests, the system aims to let executives participate in higher-level decisions rather than routine data tasks.
Cooley emphasizes that the system preserves attorney oversight and obligations. The harnessed agentic workflow specifies where automated processing is acceptable and where lawyers must intervene, reflecting the firm’s stance that attorneys remain responsible for legally defensible outcomes. David Wang, Cooley’s Chief Innovation Officer, described GO Public as a way to handle large volumes of information more effectively while directing human expertise to the decisions that matter most. Dave Peinsipp, partner and co-chair of the global capital markets group, called the system part of the firm’s broader vision for the future of capital markets practice.
Looking beyond IPOs, Cooley suggests the approach could be applied across other capital markets transactions, using embedded firm expertise and review controls to streamline workflows while maintaining professional judgment. As the legal industry evaluates AI-driven tools, GO Public offers a concrete example of integrating an agentic system with explicit validation steps and curated knowledge. Whether the technology becomes widely adopted will depend on firms’ ability to combine technical controls, subject-matter expertise and clear accountability in ways that meet regulators’ and clients’ expectations.
Cooley presents GO Public as a pragmatic step toward reshaping how capital markets work is produced: a system designed to surface issues earlier, concentrate human effort on strategic work and return time to lawyers and company leadership. By coupling automation with mandatory attorney review and a curated knowledge base, the firm aims to accelerate IPO preparation without surrendering the professional judgment central to legal practice.
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