The legal industry is turning into a battleground for the two dominant frontier AI companies.

Less than a month ago, Anthropic — developer of the Claude AI assistant — took a major step into the legal market, releasing more than 20 MCP connectors linking Claude to the software that law firms and legal departments run on, along with 12 plugins tailored to specific legal practice areas.

Now, its biggest competitor, Open AI, developer of ChatGPT, has hired Jason Boehmig, the cofounder and former CEO of contract lifecycle management company Ironclad, to lead development of products for the legal industry. 

(Boehmig announced the news yesterday in a LinkedIn post.)

A former corporate attorney at Fenwick & Westin, Boehmig cofounded Ironclad in 2014, together with Cai Wangwilt, a former software engineer at Palantir Technologies.

Boehmig was a guest on my LawNext podcast in 2021.

He stepped down as CEO in 2025, but not before seeing his company grow to a $3.2 billion valuation. He remains Ironclad’s executive chairman and a member of its board, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Here is the text of his LinkedIn message:

Today I am filled with hope.  It’s my first day at OpenAI, leading product for the legal vertical. 

I feel lucky to be here.  Twelve years ago I quit my job as a law firm associate to start a company called Ironclad.  I was a solo founder with $200,000 in student loans hanging over my head, and on top of that I could barely code.  I was also working in a space that investors considered a wasteland – building legal technology, selling to lawyers.  It felt like the odds were against me.

But I had one great advantage, a small group of people that believed in me. Nell Newton who encouraged me as a law student to explore my interest in technology and helped open doors for me in Silicon Valley. Ted Wang who took a bet on a misfit lawyer who wanted to automate their own job. Jesse Beyroutey who had the courage and foresight to put the first dollars into the company, before anyone thought it was a good idea. 

Today, Ironclad manages billions of business contracts for industry leaders as diverse as L’Oréal, Shell, and The New York Times.  It’s scaled from my old apartment in Potrero Hill to a global company of 700+ amazing teammates, doing hundreds of millions in recurring revenue, and growing as fast as ever by deploying AI across data and workflows.  It also has one of the best CEOs in all of tech in Dan Springer. I wouldn’t have been able to make this leap without him and the team doing such a good job.

When I look at the legal industry today, it is a lot more vibrant than it was twelve years ago. Law firm leaders rearchitecting their firms for the next hundred years.  GCs and legal ops leaders pushing the limits of what’s possible with AI.  State bars and pro bono organizations looking for ways we can responsibly and safely close the access to justice gap.  Law schools rethinking legal education. And thousands of thriving legal tech startups. It’s such an exciting time.

In many ways, what I want to do at OpenAI is believe in this ecosystem the same way that Nell, Ted, and Jesse believed in me.  It’s a mistake to believe that any one player can do it alone, even a frontier lab.  So I want to hear from you, the builders.  I’ve always admired the creativity and civic mindedness that lawyers possess.  I know that together, we can harness the power of AI to be a force for the good of all society, not just the top.

I can’t think of anything I’d rather work on.

Photo of Bob Ambrogi Bob Ambrogi

Bob is a lawyer, veteran legal journalist, and award-winning blogger and podcaster. In 2011, he was named to the inaugural Fastcase 50, honoring “the law’s smartest, most courageous innovators, techies, visionaries and leaders.” Earlier in his career, he was editor-in-chief of several legal publications, including The National Law Journal, and editorial director of ALM’s Litigation Services Division.