How a lawyer at OpenAI uses OpenAI at work

• Inside OpenAI, even the lawyers are starting to build tools for themselves.
• Nicole Diaz is an associate general counsel who uses ChatGPT and Codex to help simplify legal work.
• One tool she built turns jargon-ridden law-firm memos into plain-English policies for employees

Now, Diaz uses Codex agents — artificial intelligence that can carry out tasks with little hand-holding — to help triage. Every day at 5 p.m., the system scans her inbox for emails about conflicts, sorts them by risk, and drafts replies based on her pre-written guidance.

An employee who asks about angel investing might get a standard response. Another who wants to join a trade association that also does lobbying might get a response asking for more information. Higher-risk disclosures are flagged for Diaz’s attention.

The system also keeps a log of the types of disclosures she receives, how she responds, and how long it takes to respond, giving her a better view of where employees are getting stuck and where OpenAI’s policies may need to be clearer.

She’s got (ChatGPT) skills

The tools still need work. One of Diaz’s biggest complaints is that their responses can sound too “lawyerly.” She’s working on an “about me” file that tells ChatGPT how she writes and talks, so she can plug it into different skills and make the output sound more like her.

It’s not the kind of thing they teach at law school. At OpenAI, learning to build seems to happen almost through osmosis.

There is no expectation that every lawyer suddenly becomes a Codex power user. Diaz credits a colleague, Bright Kellogg, with helping lead the legal team through a gentler kind of change management: sharing small lessons each week and highlighting examples of what other lawyers are building.

For Diaz, that peer learning has become part of the fun. Seeing other people’s tools can feel, she said, like trading Pokémon cards: one person has a skill with “really cool powers,” and someone else wants to try it, too.