As client demands rise and traditional staffing models strain, CoCounsel Legal is helping large firms expand capacity, strengthen consistency, and protect profitability at scale.
Highlights
- Global law firms are absorbing more work and increasing matter capacity without increasing headcount using CoCounsel Legal.
- CoCounsel Legal drives quality consistency, talent retention, and improved client satisfaction at institutional scale for large firms.
- The Forrester study documents significant operational, financial, and client relationship benefits for global and large law firms.
There’s a problem that compounds with success at global law firms. As matter volume grows, discovery and research demands intensify, and clients expect institutional quality and responsiveness at a pace that doesn’t slow regardless of scale, the math gets harder.
The traditional answer, hiring more attorneys, no longer scales as the primary lever. It’s slower than the demand curve, costlier than the margins absorb, and more competitive than the lateral talent market has been in years.
The 2026 Forrester study The Total Economic Impact™ Of Thomson Reuters CoCounsel Legal Cost Savings And Business Benefits Enabled By CoCounsel Legal, documents what a different answer looks like in numbers. Large firm attorneys in the study went from handling an average of 36.9 matters per month to 48.2, the largest absolute matter volume gain of any firm-size segment in the research. Same team, substantially more work absorbed, at higher quality and with less operational drag.
Thomson Reuters worked with Forrester Consulting to conduct the analysis independently, and the published study details the methodology, the composite organization, and the firm-leader interviews and survey data behind every finding.
For global and large firms specifically, the results reflect the highest absolute capacity gain of any segment.
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How large firms are increasing matter capacity without increasing headcount
Quality consistency across every practice group
Talent retention at scale: the highest outcome of any segment
The client story at institutional scale
How large firms are increasing matter capacity without increasing headcount
Large firm attorneys in the Forrester study went from handling an average of 36.9 matters per month to 48.2 – the largest absolute matter volume gain of any segment included in the research. The same team absorbed significantly more work.
That is not an incremental efficiency gain. At the scale of a global firm, it represents a material shift in what the firm can deliver to clients without a corresponding increase in fixed costs.
Large firm respondents reported measurable improvements across three critical dimensions:
- 82% reported meaningful time savings
- 75% reduced non-billable write-downs
- 76% saw improved research and drafting quality
Each of those outcomes matters independently. Together, they describe a firm that is doing more, writing off less, and delivering better work – which is exactly the profile that drives both client satisfaction and long-term revenue growth.
When deep research capabilities reshape how attorneys approach complex matters, the compounding effect across hundreds or thousands of attorneys is where large-firm ROI truly differentiates itself from what any smaller firm can achieve.
The Forrester study’s composite organization, a 500-attorney firm, represents the scale at which these benefits become most observable, but the findings from large and global firm respondents reflect outcomes at significantly greater scale than that.
Quality consistency across every practice group
At a global firm, the quality problem isn’t just about the individual work product. It is about consistency across dozens of practice groups, across offices in multiple jurisdictions, and across thousands of matters running simultaneously.
A senior partner’s standard for a brief should not be meaningfully different from what an associate in a different time zone delivers.
CoCounsel Legal raises the floor on work-product quality across the entire firm, reducing partner rework, strengthening argument development, and delivering the consistency that institutional clients expect. When AI-assisted research outputs and drafts are better from the start, partners spend less time reviewing them, and the work that needs senior judgment gets more attention.
The platform’s ability to deliver this quality is grounded in how it is built – on Westlaw, Thomson Reuters’ authoritative legal research database, rather than the open or consumer AI tools that introduce governance risk at exactly the scale where governance risk is most consequential.
Because CoCounsel Legal is backed by Westlaw, I have a level of confidence and certainty in what it’s doing.
Founding partner, Criminal defense
That confidence is especially important when the platform is being deployed firm-wide and when the reputational stakes are institutional rather than personal.
Talent retention at scale: the highest outcome of any segment
For global firms, talent is not a line item. Senior associates and junior partners carry client relationships, institutional knowledge, and revenue streams that cannot be replaced quickly or cheaply. The Forrester study surfaces a finding that should register at the firm leadership level.
CoCounsel Legal improved attorney experience and retention for 66% of large law firm respondents – the highest retention outcome of any firm size segment in the study.
At the scale of a global firm, retaining a senior associate or junior partner is not a morale win. It is a client continuity and revenue protection strategy.
When the human dimension of AI-assisted legal work is part of how attorneys experience their practice, when the late-night document reviews get shorter, and the preparation work that falls to junior attorneys is supported by AI that actually works, the calculus on staying versus leaving shifts. At the scale of a large firm, even marginal improvements in retention rates translate to significant avoided costs and preserved revenue.
The client story at institutional scale
Revenue at global firms runs on client relationships, and those relationships run on trust in quality, responsiveness, and consistency. The Forrester study documents how CoCounsel Legal affects each dimension.
60% of large law firm respondents agreed that CoCounsel Legal improved client satisfaction, and 53% agreed it improved client retention – the highest client retention outcome of any segment in the study.
Better work, delivered faster, by a firm that can also provide a credible and governed answer when clients ask about AI – those are the client relationship outcomes that compound over time.
Sophisticated clients are already asking whether their firms have the tools to deliver legal work efficiently and responsibly. For large firms, the internal capability story and the client-facing capability story are becoming the same story. The Forrester study documents what that story looks like when it is backed by rigorous financial analysis.
Read the full Forrester study to see the complete financial and operational case for CoCounsel Legal and the data behind what responsible AI adoption looks like at scale. ↓
Case study
A Forrester Consulting study of real law firms using generative AI in legal practice today.
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