OpenAI’s Deep Research: In-Depth Reports at Your Fingertips

Technology has come so far that chatbots handling basic tasks and answering questions are no longer a novelty. But generating comprehensive, in-depth research reports in minutes? That’s something AI hasn’t fully delivered—until now.

On February 2, 2025, OpenAI launched Deep Research, an AI agent built to generate detailed reports on complex topics with remarkable speed. It’s already turning heads among economists, researchers, and even legal professionals. But what does this mean for law firms—and how can lawyers use it to their advantage? 

In this blog post, we’ll cover what you need to know about Deep Research, how it applies to the legal industry, and what it could mean for the future of your practice. 

What is Deep Research?

Deep Research scans vast amounts of text, images, and PDFs across the internet—analyzing and summarizing sources to produce comprehensive reports on virtually any topic. Think of it as a highly efficient research assistant that can complete in-depth analysis in minutes, rather than hours or days.

How does Deep Research work?

Currently, Deep Research is available to ChatGPT Pro users for $200 per month (with plans to expand to other tiers soon). 

To get started, select “deep research” from the message composer, and enter your query along with any specific guidelines. For added context, you can even attach text, images, PDFs, or spreadsheets. 

Once submitted, Deep Research scours the web, analyzes data, and synthesizes its findings into a structured report. Users can track progress in real time through a sidebar that displays sources, data points, and updates as the AI works. 

The entire process typically takes between five and 30 minutes, allowing you to focus on other tasks while the report is being generated.

Can you use Deep Research for legal work?

Deep Research can be a helpful tool for professionals—but it holds particular promise for lawyers looking to accelerate legal research. With the ability to analyze case law, statutes, regulations, and legal commentary, it can generate concise yet comprehensive reports on specific legal issues. 

What sets Deep Research apart is its clear citations and transparent methodology, making it easy to verify accuracy. It’s also particularly effective at uncovering niche insights and patterns that might otherwise go unnoticed.

But don’t just take our word for it. Here’s what lawyer Mitch Jackson has to say about Deep Research’s impact on legal strategy: 

“AI in law isn’t just about efficiency—it’s about possibility. At our firm, we’re using OpenAI’s Deep Research to think bigger, strategize smarter, and win in ways others won’t see coming. 

Most lawyers see AI as automation. We see it as a competitive edge. Deep Research analyzes rulings, judicial tendencies, and opposing counsel’s behavior—spotting patterns most lawyers miss, in minutes, not days. It doesn’t just process data; it predicts disputes, uncovers persuasive arguments, and builds game-changing strategies. 

Winning cases isn’t just about facts—it’s about perception, psychology, and knowing which invisible levers to pull. It took me 30+ years to master this. WIth the right approach and prompt, Deep Research can help new lawyers do the same almost instantly. 

Linear thinking is dead. Deep Research eliminates limits, making us smarter, faster, and ready for what’s next. We’re using it to predict outcomes, spot unseen patterns (based around trending news and local societal issues), and build strategies that we think will leave opposing counsel scrambling. I even used it to correctly predict the Eagles winning the Super Bowl and, just for fun, posted the 19-page research article on LinkedIn. 

In my opinion, Deep Research provides lawyers with a new way to think—and we’re just getting started.”

What are the risks of using Deep Research?

While the capabilities of Deep Research are impressive, it’s important to acknowledge the technology’s limitations. Like any AI tool, it can generate inaccurate or misleading information—a phenomenon known as “hallucinations”. 

OpenAI has noted that Deep Research may struggle to differentiate between authoritative sources and misinformation. It can also fail to express  uncertainty when it lacks confidence in its findings.

That said, Deep Research has already proven to be significantly more reliable than many other AI tools. OpenAI’s recent evaluation, Humanity’s Last Exam—which evaluates AI across a wide range of expert-level subjects—found the model powering Deep Research had a 26.6% accuracy rate (for comparison, ChatGPT-4o scored just 3.3%).

As OpenAI continues to refine the technology, these issues may improve. But for legal professionals, Deep Research should be seen as a tool to augment—not replace—legal professionals’ expertise.

Are there alternatives?

Legal work needs something narrower than the open web. Authority matched to your jurisdiction. Confirmation that the authority is still good law. Context from the matter in front of you. And an environment where client data stays put.

Clio Work is built for exactly that, and its design answers each risk above directly.

It starts with your matter. Clio Work analyzes large volumes of case files at once and reads across your entire matter to establish what happened, where things stand, and what matters most. It surfaces key facts and claims, builds a chronological matter timeline from your documents, and flags weaknesses and missing information before they become a problem. A general-purpose tool starts from your prompt. Clio Work starts from your case.

Every result is grounded, current, and verifiable. Authority is matched to your jurisdiction automatically. Every output links back to its source, so verification is a click rather than a research project. And a built-in citator confirms every authority is still good law before it reaches you, which addresses the exact failure mode behind the sanctions decisions above.

It pressure-tests your thinking. Clio Work will test your position against opposing arguments, compare how different interpretations affect your outcome, and give you a defensible direction, whether you are advancing a claim, challenging a position, or advising a client.

It gets you to stronger drafts. Motions, briefs, memos, and client communications, grounded in your case facts and the law, with gaps and weak reasoning identified rather than glossed over. With Clio for Word, that work happens where you already draft.

Confidentiality is never a question. Clio Work is certified to SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, GDPR, and HIPAA standards. Nothing leaves its secure environment, gets shared, or is used to train AI models.

As Melissa Hamilton, Partner at Williams & Hamilton, puts it:

Clio Work lets me handle everything securely inside Clio without stripping data for external AI tools. In one morning it analyzed a minute order, drafted a notice of hearing, reviewed a trust consent, and researched a trust petition issue – and that was a slow day.

Research and analysis are one part of the workload. The administrative follow-through is another, and that is where AI in Clio Manage does the work: turning court documents into calendar events and deadlines, converting matter activity into drafted client updates, and turning time and expenses into approval-ready invoices, each with a review checkpoint before anything is finalized.

Used together, Clio Work handles the analysis and strategy, and AI in Clio Manage handles the follow-through the analysis creates.

The bottom line

Deep Research made in-depth AI research reports ordinary, and every major AI assistant now offers a version of it. For legal professionals, that shifts the work from producing research to verifying it, and the past 18 months of sanctions decisions show what happens when that step gets skipped.

Clio Work closes that gap. It understands your cases, their context, and the law, so the analysis arrives grounded in verified authority, traceable to its source, and built from the matter in front of you. That is the difference between AI that produces text and AI you can practice on.

Ready to bring AI into your practice on solid footing? Try Clio Work for free today.