Meet the Senior Associate Editor with Practical Law testing the next generation of CoCounsel Legal from a lawyer's perspective
Highlights
- Elaine Cedrone tests CoCounsel Legal using real litigation workflows, not isolated features.
- Practical Law attorney-editors provide feedback on citations, precision, and legal reasoning for product improvement.
- Repeated testing shows measurable progress in consistency and user-friendliness over time.
Earlier this year, Elaine Cedrone and a group of fellow Practical Law attorney-editors sat down with a stack of real court filings from a Pennsylvania property dispute and started building a case, as though they represented the defendants. The exercise, which her team nicknamed the “Break It” project, was designed to test CoCounsel Legal against an actual legal matter rather than a hypothetical one.
The assignment started with the questions any attorney faces at the outset of a case: what research to run, what documents to draft, what information to request from the client. From there, the team used CoCounsel Legal for legal memoranda, client communications, pleadings, discovery requests and other work product, following the same sequence of steps that plays out in an actual litigation matter, rather than testing each capability on its own.
“We were actually using CoCounsel Legal the way real attorneys would in practice,” Cedrone says.
That approach matters because it surfaces problems a single-feature test would miss. A citation might look correct on its own but fall apart once it has to support an argument three steps later in a memo. Working through a full matter, start to finish, is the only way to catch that kind of issue, and it is exactly the kind of testing Cedrone has built her role around.
As a Senior Associate Editor with Practical Law, Cedrone spends much of her time testing the next generation of CoCounsel Legal from the perspective of a lawyer with a caseload, not a product demo. Before joining Thomson Reuters in 2019, she clerked for a judge in the Chancery Division, General Equity/Probate Part in New Jersey and later practiced litigation at a midsize firm, handling matters from contract disputes to estate litigation. That experience now shapes how she reviews one of the company’s most closely watched products.
“I think it really does require a lot of practical experience and learning how an attorney would use the product,” Cedrone says.
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From obvious errors to legal nuance
Watching the product change over time
Building toward how lawyers actually work
From obvious errors to legal nuance
Lawyers read documents differently than most people do. A detail that looks minor to a layperson can draw immediate scrutiny from an attorney, and Cedrone says that instinct shapes much of the feedback her team provides.
The attorney-editors log their findings in detailed spreadsheets, compare outputs across product versions, and meet regularly with the teams building the next generation of CoCounsel Legal. Their reviews touch on citations, source references, formatting and legal reasoning, the details that determine whether an attorney trusts a piece of work enough to put a client’s name on it.
“We’re looking at it from a lawyer brain,” Cedrone says. “If this is the output, it really needs to look a different way for attorneys to feel comfortable with it.”
That kind of scrutiny looks different than it did when Cedrone started testing the product. Early on, her team spent much of its time flagging basic citation errors, the kind any first-year associate is trained to catch. As the product matured, those flags became rare, and her team’s feedback moved on to something harder: precision. Today the focus is pinpoint citations, correct page references, accurate summaries of case holdings, and a clear line between a holding and dicta.
“We’ve really been reiterating how important it is to have those pin cites. Precision is such an important part of legal practice.”
Senior Associate Editor, Practical Law
“You don’t want to just get the big things correct,” she adds. “You got to get the whole thing for attorneys to be able to use the product.”
Watching the product change over time
Some of the clearest proof of that progress comes from tests Cedrone has repeated over time. In an earlier round of testing, she ran the same legal question through CoCounsel Legal twice and got two different memos back: an inconsistency her team flagged immediately. Consistency became one of the things her team tracks most closely from version to version, and when they reran the same test months later, the two outputs matched.
“We could really see a noticeable difference,” Cedrone says. “It felt very black and white.”
Building toward how lawyers actually work
Looking ahead, Cedrone is most interested in the connection between legal research and drafting. Attorneys have always moved back and forth between researching an issue, reviewing authorities, drafting a document and returning to research again. She would like to see legal technology reflect that same back-and-forth.
“Drafting is not more separate than legal research,” Cedrone says. “It’s all one task really.”
For Cedrone, the story behind the next generation of CoCounsel Legal is ultimately one of collaboration between lawyers and the people building the product. Attorney-editors bring years of practice into that process, helping identify what matters most to customers and where the product can become even stronger. Every test, spreadsheet and comment feeds into a product built around how legal work actually gets done, from the first research question to the final draft.
It is also a story about what steady, attorney-led testing can do over time. The kind of fix Cedrone saw play out with catching inconsistencies is quiet and repeatable progress that doesn’t always make for a dramatic headline, but it is exactly what attorneys are looking for in a tool they plan to rely on.
Asked what she would want customers to know about the next generation of CoCounsel Legal, Cedrone points to something simpler than any single feature: consistency they can count on.
“It’s a much more user-friendly product,” she says. “You’re not going to spend so much time figuring out the product.”
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.
The next generation of CoCounsel Legal
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