Skip to content

Our Privacy Statement & Cookie Policy

All Thomson Reuters websites use cookies to improve your online experience. They were placed on your computer when you launched this website. You can change your cookie settings through your browser.

Artificial Intelligence

CoCounsel helps you know and apply the law

· 5 minute read

· 5 minute read

CoCounsel provides groundbreaking assistance with legal research and know how

← Blog home

Legal professionals are increasingly turning to artificial intelligence (AI) to help them do their jobs more quickly and accurately. A full 81% of professionals believe that AI can be applied to their work, and 58% of in-house counsel expect their outside law firms to use AI.  

It’s no wonder why – with AI, they can streamline legal workflows, enhance decision-making, and handle time-consuming, repetitive tasks quickly. This is especially true when they use tools that integrate with the systems they use every day, like Westlaw  and Practical Law. 

AI news and insights

AI news and insights

Industry-leading insights, updates, and all things AI @ Thomson Reuters

Join community ↗

 

Jump to ↓

AI legal assistant defined


Why use a legal AI assistant


Advance your practice

An AI legal assistant is an AI system that helps legal professionals to reliably delegate a wide range of tasks.  CoCounsel is the industry-leading legal AI assistant that streamlines complex work, delivering results only possible with GenAI grounded in the authoritative content and expertise of Westlaw and Practical Law. With CoCounsel , you can quickly and more accurately complete but time-consuming tasks. This could include finding relevant documents within a large database, drafting correspondence, tracking changes in laws or regulations, generating drafts of legal documents, and more.  

“A task that would previously have taken an hour was completed in five minutes or less. Something that would’ve taken us a couple of weeks to do, now gets back to the business-side in a day or two: that’s huge.” – Jarret Coleman, General Counsel, Century Communities  

A legal AI assistant provides immediate timesavings to legal professionals who are responsible for labor- intensive and detail-heavy work product. They can realize efficiency while maintaining or even improving accuracy and context. They can enjoy greater productivity in a user-friendly and reliable workspace. 

Efficiency and time savings

CoCounsel can read and analyze vast quantities of material quickly and more accurately. For instance, a litigator preparing for a motion to dismiss can use AI-Assisted Research in CoCounsel to quickly surface relevant case law—faster than traditional keyword searches. Instead of manually sifting through dozens of results, CoCounsel understands context and retrieves only the most relevant cases, with AI-generated summaries highlighting key points. 

There are other ways to find dramatic time savings as well. For example:  

  • In preparing for a witness cross-examination, a litigator can quickly pull prior depositions, case law on expert witness credibility, and procedural rules in one place. 
  • A transactional attorney can ensure that corporate transactions comply with updated SEC, FINRA, or IRS regulations without spending hours manually searching a large volume of deal documents to find and check all relevant language. 
  • Attorneys needing to verify procedural rules or evidentiary standards can use CoCounsel to summarize jurisdiction-specific guidance in seconds. This ensures compliance with local court rules, reducing the risk of procedural missteps. 

Accuracy and context

Using a legal-specific AI assistant is crucial to ensure you have accurate information applied properly within the context of legal practice. This helps you minimize hallucinations and get the best outcomes.  

The AI assistant can put your matter in the context of the jurisdictions you or your client are operating in. For instance, with Quick Compare you can analyze how different states or countries interpret key contract terms, corporate governance rules, or disclosure obligations. This makes it easy to determine which jurisdiction’s laws provide the most favorable terms for a transaction. 

You can also stay ahead of emerging legal trends that might affect a deal’s structure with AI-Assisted Research. Confirm that a merger or acquisition agreement complies with antitrust laws, data privacy regulations, and foreign investment rules. 

Enhanced productivity

Legal professionals at all levels – from paralegals to partners in AmLaw 100 firms and Fortune 50 in-house teams – use CoCounsel to produce top-quality work with greater speed and accuracy. Because CoCounsel reduces hands-on time significantly, legal professionals can focus on the rewarding work that machines can’t do. 

Many lawyers use CoCounsel to create concise summaries of legal issues and data sets for their clients and stakeholders. Then they spend time with them answering questions and advancing the strategy rather than sweating over the documents and summaries themselves.  

CoCounsel

CoCounsel

Bringing together generative AI, trusted content and expert insights

Meet your AI assistant ↗

Advance your practice

Legal-specific AI assistants like CoCounsel are a great aid to legal professionals who want to experiment with AI but are concerned about giving up control. Lawyers and legal organizations that embrace AI now will be able to deliver more work and even find themselves on more interesting projects. They may even find themselves shaping the way AI evolves to serve the industry.   

As technology evolves, its role in the legal field will expand, making this an ideal time to integrate tools like CoCounsel into your day-to-day work. CoCounsel can’t do the lawyering for you and your team, but it does set you up with the facts, trends, and insights you need to get to the actual lawyering faster. It does it with the legal tools you already use every day, helping you create work product more quickly, efficiently, and responsively. 

CoCounsel integrates with Westlaw, Practical Law and other legal tools, as well as Microsoft 365 and CoPilot. Find out how these systems together drive significant shift in legal.

GenAI: Your legal research assistant, not your replacement

 

More answers