Meet one of the hundreds of attorney-editors who build CoCounsel Legal from lived legal experience
Highlights
- Janet Brown's transactional law experience directly shapes CoCounsel Legal's practical design and functionality.
- CoCounsel Legal combines Westlaw, Practical Law content, and agentic AI for research and drafting.
- Attorney-editors ensure outputs are legally accurate, properly cited, and immediately usable in practice.
When Janet Brown joined Thomson Reuters, she brought with her years of hands-on legal experience as a transactional attorney and in-house counsel. As former vice president of Legal and Risk Management at CEVA Logistics, a global supply chain company, Brown served as regional general counsel for North America, with responsibility for commercial, corporate, litigation, and risk matters, as well as claims for the global organization. Before that, she practiced in the healthcare group at BakerHostetler in Houston. Today, as a Senior Specialist Legal Editor, she channels that experience directly into one of legal tech’s most consequential projects: the development and refinement of CoCounsel Legal.
“My practice experience informs virtually everything I do for Practical Law and CoCounsel,” Brown says.
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A practitioner’s perspective
Citations attorneys can rely on
Keeping pace with rapid change
A practitioner’s perspective
Brown is one of hundreds of attorney-editors and legal specialists at Thomson Reuters whose hands-on practice gives CoCounsel Legal its edge. The platform unites Westlaw and Practical Law content with advanced AI to help attorneys research, analyze, and draft. Its verifiable results are backed by experts who not only understand the law, but how lawyers actually work.
For Brown, that second part carries as much weight as the first. “Having worked as a transactional attorney, I understand the practical pressures that modern lawyers, particularly transactional lawyers and in-house counsel, face every day: tight timelines, high volumes of work, budget constraints, and the need to provide clear, commercially sound advice quickly.” That viewpoint shapes how she evaluates every output, workflow, and feature she touches.
“I bring that perspective to my work by focusing not only on whether Practical Law and CoCounsel provide legally accurate answers, but also on whether those answers are useful in practice.”
Her contributions to CoCounsel over the past three years have been wide-ranging. In the product’s earliest phase, Brown tested search and summarize capabilities, assessed how well the AI surfaced and synthesized Practical Law content, and gave development teams a ground-level view of how transactional attorneys think, draft, review, and advise clients. She has since moved deeper into the product’s architecture by developing and testing prompts for the Prompt Library, creating gold data for agentic functionality, and evaluating outputs for accuracy, tone, and appropriate context.
The move toward agentic AI
The work that excites her most right now is the move toward agentic AI. The next generation of CoCounsel Legal is built so that an attorney can describe a general outcome and let CoCounsel take the steps needed to reach it, much the way a skilled transactional attorney would approach a complex matter. A client gives a general idea of what they want, Brown notes, and the attorney figures out how to get there.
“What has been exciting about the agent models is that they begin to bring those pieces together in a way that feels much closer to how transactional attorneys actually work,” Brown explains.
Citations attorneys can rely on
She is also focused on ensuring CoCounsel shows its work, with outputs that cite authority, user documents, and research materials in ways attorneys can rely on and share with confidence. “The goal is for CoCounsel to reduce work for attorneys, not create an additional layer of interpretation before the output can be used.”
Right now, Brown is developing a subscriber training on Tabular Analysis, one of the most powerful features built into CoCounsel. It lets attorneys run as many as 100 custom questions across a set of up to 10,000 contracts at once, then returns the answers in a sortable, filterable table with citations back to each source contract. The use cases are broad, from due diligence and contract audits to portfolio summaries and lease abstracts. “It’s a tool I wish I had when I was in practice,” she says. The project is a sign of how her role spans both product development and practitioner adoption.
“I try to ensure that both Practical Law and CoCounsel deliver guidance that is not only legally sound, but also practical, efficient, and responsive to the context and realities of modern legal practice.”
Senior Specialist Legal Editor, Thomson Reuters
Keeping pace with rapid change
Brown is candid about what makes this work genuinely interesting: the pace. “CoCounsel has improved dramatically every year, sometimes every quarter, not incrementally, but in leaps and bounds.” It’s a pace she’s well-suited for. Her years managing a law department inside a fast-moving global company built exactly the kind of resilience this moment demands.
The legal industry, Brown notes, may change more in the next 20 years than it did in the past 200, and there is “no playbook or treatise to turn to.” But that is not a reason for caution. It is a reason to keep learning.
“A growth mindset helps me to learn quickly and stay open to new possibilities as we reimagine legal work.”
The next generation of CoCounsel Legal is scheduled to launch later this year. Learn more about how we’re building the future of legal AI.
