OpenAI has launched Decisions, its own decision system which will compete with the likes of Jev (see here). It could potentially reduce AI costs for bulk doc review and provide other benefits to lawyers.

First, what is Decisions? The short version is that it’s a ‘sorting system’ that uses AI, but in a much more limited way compared to tapping the full resources of an LLM. You can call it ‘AI lite’ perhaps.

Why would lawyers want to use this? The first reason is cost – see tables below. Because these decision approaches are not digging that deeply into the LLMs they use, the token costs are much lower. For example, for now with Decisions (which relies on GPT-6-Luna) the input costs are $0.10 per 1M tokens. You pay only for input tokens: there are no cache-read, cache-write, or output-token charges. That is a big reduction in price.

All well and good, but what can it do? It’s best at simple classification and really is not for complex language understanding or legal reasoning. So, you could feed in 10,000 documents and get it to sort them via a range of categories. It also handles images very well – but that’s less useful to lawyers.

As OpenAI explained: ‘The Decisions API [which is in public beta] evaluates text, images, or both and returns typed answers about 10x faster than the Responses API.…

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