Highlights
- Discover five proven ways CoCounsel Legal empowers municipal legal departments to do more with less in 2026.
- Learn how AI accelerates contract review, legal research, FOIA processing, drafting, and cross-departmental support.
- See how professional-grade AI helps attorneys meet rising demands without increasing headcount or budget.
Municipal legal departments are facing unprecedented pressure. Caseloads continue to climb, regulatory complexity multiplies, and public expectations for transparency and responsiveness have never been higher. Yet budgets remain tight, hiring freezes persist, and the thought of bringing on expensive outside counsel feels increasingly unrealistic. So how can we meet growing demands without growing resources?
The answer lies not in working longer hours or cutting corners, but in working smarter with professional-grade AI. CoCounsel Legal is helping municipal attorneys transform how they handle everything from contract review to enforcement actions—delivering faster, more thorough results without adding headcount or budget.
Here are five proven ways CoCounsel Legal helps you do more with less in 2026.
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1. Turn contract reviews from days into hours
2. Research complex legal issues across multiple practice areas—fast
3. Handle FOIA requests and public records reviews more efficiently
4. Draft enforcement actions and litigation documents in record time
5. Scale legal support across all city departments without scaling staff
The bottom line: Professional-grade AI built for public sector needs
1. Turn contract reviews from days into hours
Every intergovernmental agreement, vendor contract, and municipal lease that crosses your desk requires careful review. Traditionally, this means hours of line-by-line analysis, tracking redlines across multiple versions and ensuring compliance with your municipality policies—time you simply don’t have when you’re managing dozens of active matters.
How CoCounsel Legal helps:
CoCounsel Legal’s document analysis capabilities help you review contracts in a fraction of the time. Simply upload agreements and ask targeted questions: “Does this contract comply with our procurement policy?” “What are the key liability provisions?” “How does this compare to our standard terms?”
The compare document feature assesses similarities, differences, and favorability across multiple versions, simultaneously identifies non-compliant language, and provides automated redlines to bring contracts into alignment with your requirements.
The result: What used to take a full afternoon now takes 30 minutes—freeing you to provide faster turnaround to departments while maintaining rigorous standards.
CoCounsel Legal acts as a second set of eyes, capturing issues and connections faster than humanly possible—but your expertise and professional judgment remain essential. Always review outputs to ensure they align with your municipality’s specific requirements and the nuanced legal context only you understand. The AI accelerates your work; you provide the final quality control.
2. Research complex legal issues across multiple practice areas—fast
As a municipal attorney, you’re a jack of all trades. One morning you’re researching employment law questions for HR. By afternoon, you’re advising on environmental regulations for public works. You need to stay current across an impossibly broad spectrum of law, often venturing into unfamiliar territory under tight deadlines.
How CoCounsel Legal helps:
CoCounsel Legal allows you to ask legal questions in natural language and get comprehensive answers directly within the Westlaw interface. Using AI capabilities enhanced by Westlaw’s KeyCite citation too, it delivers research reports that include the current state of the law, recent changes, practical implications for your jurisdiction, governing statutes and regulations, and arguments on both sides of the issue—all grounded in trusted Westlaw content with full citations for verification.
The system formulates a multi-step research plan, delivers results in real time as each step completes, and asks clarifying questions to improve accuracy, giving you confidence even in unfamiliar areas of law.
The comprehensive final report includes the current state of the law, recent changes, practical implications for your jurisdiction, governing statutes and regulations, and arguments on both sides of the issue—again, all grounded in trusted Westlaw content with full citations for verification.
The result: You gain confidence in unfamiliar areas of law and dramatically reduce the time spent conducting in-depth analysis, allowing you to provide timely, well-supported guidance across all practice areas your office serves.
3. Handle FOIA requests and public records reviews more efficiently
Public records requests can be time-consuming—requiring document reviews, summaries, and compliance checks. When thousands of pages are involved, they can halt other work.
How CoCounsel Legal helps:
CoCounsel Legal can analyze large sets of documents and identify sensitive content that may require redaction under FOIA exemptions. Upload your document set and ask questions like: “Which documents contain personally identifiable information?” “Do any of these emails discuss pending litigation?” “Summarize the subject matter of these records.”
The Search Database capability helps you pinpoint key documents and information within large databases quickly, while Summarize condenses complex documents into clear, succinct summaries—perfect for preparing materials for public release.
The result: FOIA requests that used to take days of review can be processed in hours, improving your office’s responsiveness and reputation for transparency without monopolizing staff time.
4. Draft enforcement actions and litigation documents in record time
Whether you’re initiating civil enforcement actions, drafting complaints for regulatory violations, or responding to litigation, document drafting is time-intensive work. Every brief, complaint, or formal notice requires careful attention to detail, proper citations, and persuasive legal arguments.
How CoCounsel Legal helps:
CoCounsel Legal can rapidly create customized documents and content, from demand letters to complaints. Describe what you need—for example, a complaint for municipal code violations using uploaded inspection reports and photographs—and receive a well-structured draft incorporating your uploaded evidence and relevant statutory references.
The Drafting suite integrated with Microsoft Word helps you find the best starting point, draft and modify clauses using Practical Law content, and analyze documents for errors including inconsistent definitions, dates, and cross-references.
For litigation preparation, use Prepare for a Deposition to identify pertinent topics and questions, or Timeline to automatically assemble chronologies from case documents.
For litigation preparation, CoCounsel Legal identifies pertinent topics and questions, or automatically assemble chronologies from case documents.
The result: Draft documents in hours instead of days, maintain consistency across your filings, and spend more time refining strategy rather than staring at blank pages.
5. Scale legal support across all city departments without scaling staff
Your legal department serves the entire municipal organization—from police and fire to planning and public works. Each department has ongoing legal needs, from policy questions to contract reviews to compliance issues. Providing timely, high-quality support to all these internal clients with limited staff feels like an impossible balancing act.
How CoCounsel Legal helps:
CoCounsel Legal acts as a force multiplier for your entire team. By accelerating routine tasks across legal research, document analysis, and drafting, each attorney on your staff can handle a significantly higher volume of work without sacrificing quality.
The built-in Library provides expert-created prompts and workflows for common municipal legal tasks—contract review, policy drafting, compliance analysis—reducing the learning curve and enabling consistent results across your team, including your junior associates.
Agentic workflows designed by Practical Law attorney editors suggest and carry out recommended steps for complex projects, from analyzing litigation risk to drafting multi-jurisdictional policies. CoCounsel Legal seamlessly shepherds work from step to step in the background, allowing your team to manage multiple high priority matters simultaneously.
The result: Your team delivers the responsiveness and expertise of a much larger department, improving relationships with internal clients, and demonstrating measurable value to city leadership.
The bottom line: Professional-grade AI built for public sector needs
CoCounsel Legal isn’t about replacing attorneys—it’s about empowering you to focus on the complex, strategic, and interpersonal work that truly requires your expertise and judgment. By accelerating time-consuming tasks, you reclaim hours each week to dedicate to higher-value work: advising elected officials on complex policy decisions, strategizing on significant litigation, building relationships with department heads, and focusing on long-term risk management.
Municipal legal departments using CoCounsel Legal report handling 30-50% more matters with the same staff, faster turnaround to departments, and improved work-life balance for attorneys. The question isn’t whether your office should adopt AI—it’s whether you can afford to wait while your workload continues to grow, and peer jurisdictions gain competitive advantages.
Ready to see how CoCounsel Legal can help your municipal legal department do more with less? Learn more about capabilities specifically designed for government attorneys, or request a demonstration tailored to your office’s unique needs.
