How Will GPT-5 Improve Legal Tech? AL Asked It – Artificial Lawyer

How much of a difference will the new OpenAI model GPT-5 make to legal tech? Who better to ask than GPT-5 itself. Below is what it told Artificial Lawyer. This site also asked: ‘If you could improve any legal tech tool, which one would it be?’ Its answer: CLM….read on.

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AL Qu: ‘How will GPT-5 be better for legal tech applications?’

OpenAI’s GPT-5 Answer:

‘GPT-5’s upgrades line up quite neatly with what you’d want in legal tech—where accuracy, reasoning, and efficient automation matter more than raw creativity. Here’s how the improvements map to that world:

1. Stronger factual accuracy & lower hallucination rates

• In law, one wrong case citation or misinterpreted statute can be worse than useless.
• GPT-5 has ~26% fewer hallucinations than GPT-4o and its ‘thinking’ mode has ~65% fewer than o3.
• This makes it more dependable for:
  • Summarising legislation
  • Extracting key clauses from contracts
  • Drafting legal memos without introducing phantom cases or statutes

2. Deeper reasoning for complex legal analysis

• Many legal tasks need multi-step logical chains—e.g., ‘If X clause interacts with Y statute under Z jurisdiction, what’s the effect?’
• GPT-5’s built-in deeper reasoning mode lets it run extended, structured thought chains automatically when the problem demands it.
• This benefits:
  • Contract negotiation modelling (predicting likely dispute areas)
  • Case law analogies (applying precedent to new fact patterns)
  • Regulatory compliance checks across multiple regimes

3. Better multi-step automation (‘agentic’ tasks)

• Legal tech often chains tasks: retrieve docs → classify clauses → extract parties → produce risk summary → suggest edits.
• GPT-5 scored 96.7% on tool-chaining benchmarks and uses ~45% fewer tool calls than o3 while still completing more tasks.
• This means:
  • Smoother integrations with legal databases (Lexis, Westlaw, internal doc repositories)
  • Less wasted API calls (cheaper to run at scale)
  • More reliable workflow automation

4. More accurate coding for legal AI development

• If you’re building legal tech products, GPT-5’s +33% accuracy improvement in code editing means faster prototyping of:
  • Clause classification models
  • Legal data parsers
  • Custom analytics dashboards
• It can generate frontend code for contract review UIs or backend parsing logic with fewer fixes needed.

5. Better instruction-following & safety

• Legal clients need highly structured, compliance-safe outputs. GPT-5’s improved ‘safe completions’ and reduced sycophancy make it more consistent when you say:
  • ‘Summarise only in bullet points’
  • ‘Use exact statutory wording’
  • ‘Cite only UK law sources, no US cases’

6. Cost & efficiency advantages

• If you’re processing thousands of contracts or discovery docs, even 20–30% fewer wasted tokens/tool calls means big savings.
• In multi-jurisdiction projects, GPT-5’s better auto-reasoning cuts down on having to re-prompt when the model misunderstands scope.

Bottom line:
For legal tech, GPT-5 isn’t just a ‘smarter chatbot.’ It’s a more trustworthy analyst, a steadier workflow orchestrator, and a better coding partner—reducing risk while speeding up legal automation pipelines.’

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AL Qu: ‘If you could improve any legal tech tool, which one would it be?’

OpenAI’s GPT-5 Answer:

‘If I could pick one legal tech tool to improve with GPT-5’s strengths, I’d target contract lifecycle management (CLM) platforms — especially the review, negotiation, and compliance tracking modules.

Here’s why CLM is the sweet spot:

Why CLM Is the Best Target for GPT-5 Enhancement

1. It’s where most lawyers actually spend time.
   • Contract review, redlining, and post-signature compliance eat up thousands of hours across firms and in-house teams.
   • Even a small accuracy gain has a huge compounding ROI.
2. The work is high-risk, high-reward.
   • Miss a clause → risk litigation or non-compliance.
   • Overlook a beneficial term → lose negotiation leverage.
3. CLM workflows are already multi-step, so GPT-5’s ‘agentic’ tool skills shine.
   • Parse doc → detect clause type → classify risk → suggest edits → update database.
   • GPT-5 can do this with fewer tool calls, cheaper compute, and higher reliability.

Example: GPT-5-Enhanced CLM Flow

1. Ingestion:
   • GPT-5 detects contract type, parties, governing law, and key dates.
2. Risk Scoring:
   • Applies jurisdiction-specific thresholds (e.g., UK vs. US data breach clauses).
   • Flags risky indemnity terms with explanation + case law references.
3. Negotiation Support:
   • Generates redlines with rationale grounded in precedent and business policy.
   • Simulates counterparty objections and suggests fallback positions.
4. Post-Signature Compliance:
   • Monitors obligations (payments, notices, renewals).
   • Auto-drafts alerts and compliance reports.

Why this over, say, e-discovery or legal research?

• E-discovery already has high-performing AI pipelines in big firms.
• Legal research is constrained by licensing and database access.
• CLM is a big, still-fragmented market where a leap in accuracy, reliability, and integration speed could create a dominant product — especially if pitched as ‘GPT-5-inside’ to enterprise buyers.

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AL Comment:

So, there you go. Of course, as with all LLM outputs – even now – take it all with a pinch of salt and think through what it’s written, rather than take it as gospel.

But, either way, this demonstrates GPT-5’s thoughtfulness and its ability to present reasoned arguments, as well as to really get into the detail of what is a very niche subject. In short, just consider where we were pre-Nov 2022, now consider what can be done with just a couple of prompts.

Clearly, GPT-5 will be making a significant – positive – impact on what many legal AI tools can do…because what they can do is fundamentally based on models such as GPT-5.

Plus…..LLMs will still get better, even if incremental advances may not always be so significant.

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Legal Innovators Conferences in New York and London – Both In November ’25

If you’d like to stay ahead of the legal AI curve….then come along to Legal Innovators New York, Nov 19 + 20, where the brightest minds will be sharing their insights on where we are now and where we are heading. 

And also, Legal Innovators UK – Nov 4 + 5 + 6

Both events, as always, are organised by the awesome Cosmonauts team! 

Please get in contact with them if you’d like to take part.