[DigitalToday reporter Yoonseo Lee] A lawyer on OpenAI's legal team is using ChatGPT and Codex to automate internal compliance monitoring. The case involves legal staff with no coding experience building AI tools to draft policy documents, classify emails, draft responses and track processing results.

Business Insider reported on June 1 that Nicole Diaz (니콜 디아즈), who handles corporate compliance work at OpenAI, built her own work tools within a year of joining the company. She is responsible not for products OpenAI provides externally, but for ensuring the company's business operations comply with legal and ethical standards.

The first task she applied it to was drafting internal policy documents. Policy documents sent by law firms often consisted of legal terms and long sentences, and had to be reorganised into a form employees could understand and use. She created a skill inside ChatGPT called Simplify to streamline the process.

How employee inquiries are handled has also changed. A system Diaz built using Codex searches the inbox at 5 p.m. each day for emails that require advice, classifies them by risk and produces response drafts based on prewritten guidelines. Higher-risk matters are flagged so Diaz can review them directly.

The system also records report types, response methods and processing time. This makes it possible to identify where employees often get stuck and which parts of company policy need to be clarified further.

The internal OpenAI case also aligns with trends in the legal technology market. As law firms and corporate legal teams consider adopting specialised legal software, Diaz's case shows that general-purpose AI models can also be used to build legal tools with a considerable degree of customisation.

There are limits, however. Diaz cited as her biggest complaint that AI responses come out as overly "lawyerly". She is creating an "About Me" file that reflects her tone and writing style, and is applying it across multiple values to adjust the outputs.

Diaz's case shows that legal staff without coding experience can use generative AI to build their own tools for repetitive work. Amid a trend of weighing whether to adopt specialised legal software, tailoring general-purpose AI models to fit day-to-day work is also emerging as an alternative for legal automation.