OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, has hired Jason Boehmig to lead product development for the legal industry, intensifying competition with rival Anthropic.
Boehmig is the co-founder and former chief executive of Ironclad, a contract lifecycle management company he helped build into a multi-billion-dollar business.
The hire comes less than a month after Anthropic released more than 20 MCP connectors linking its Claude assistant to law firm software, alongside 12 plugins tailored to specific legal practice areas.
Boehmig announced his new role at OpenAI in a LinkedIn post, describing his first day at the company as one filled with hope.
Before founding Ironclad, Boehmig worked as a corporate attorney at Fenwick and West, giving him direct experience of the legal sector he will now help shape products for.
He co-founded Ironclad in 2014 alongside Cai Wangwilt, a former software engineer at Palantir Technologies, at a time when investors widely regarded legal technology as an unattractive market.
In his LinkedIn post, Boehmig recalled launching the company with $200,000 in student loan debt and limited coding ability, describing the odds as firmly against him.
He stepped down as Ironclad’s CEO in 2025, by which point the company had reached a $3.2 billion valuation, and he remains its executive chairman and a board member.
Ironclad today manages billions of business contracts for clients including L’Oréal, Shell, and The New York Times, and employs more than 700 people generating hundreds of millions in recurring revenue.
In his post, Boehmig credited several individuals with supporting his early journey, writing: “Nell Newton who encouraged me as a law student to explore my interest in technology and helped open doors for me in Silicon Valley.”
He also acknowledged Ted Wang, who he described as taking “a bet on a misfit lawyer who wanted to automate their own job,” and Jesse Beyroutey, who he said had “the courage and foresight to put the first dollars into the company.”
Boehmig said he would not have been able to make the move to OpenAI without Ironclad’s current CEO Dan Springer, whom he described as “one of the best CEOs in all of tech.”
Looking ahead to his new role, Boehmig said the legal industry had grown considerably more vibrant since he first entered it twelve years ago, pointing to law firm leaders, general counsel, and legal technology startups as signs of the sector’s momentum.
He outlined an inclusive ambition for his work at OpenAI, writing: “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.”