Meet the Solutions Engineering leader at the intersection of legal expertise and AI product development
Highlights
- Valerie McConnell bridges legal expertise and AI development for Thomson Reuters CoCounsel.
- The Solutions Engineering team builds tailored workflows for complex firm-specific legal challenges.
- Agentic AI enables lawyers to accomplish multi-step tasks through intuitive conversational prompts.
Valerie McConnell has spent her career moving between two worlds that rarely overlap: the courtroom and the codebase. She studied computer science at Princeton before pivoting to law, then spent 10 years as an intellectual property litigator at Jones Day. From there, she joined Casetext, the startup that built Thomson Reuters CoCounsel from concept to product, working in the legal AI space during the earliest days of large language models. When Thomson Reuters acquired Casetext, McConnell came with it. Today, she leads the Solutions Engineering team within the Legal Professionals’ Customer Success division, a group she describes as sitting at the intersection of what CoCounsel can do and what law firm and government clients can actually use in their practices.
This combination of backgrounds gives McConnell an uncommon lens on legal technology. She understands the pressure of a litigation filing deadline. She also understands what happens under the hood of a large language model.
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Starting with the customer’s problem
From real problems to product features
Agentic AI and what it changes for clients
What changes for customer success
Built to sound like the lawyer, not the AI
Starting with the customer’s problem
McConnell’s team operates both reactively and proactively. On the reactive side, her team assists customers with specific requests and support needs about the product. They schedule time with the firm, listen to the use cases, and show them the clearest path forward.
The proactive work looks a little different. Before a firm is even onboarded, McConnell’s team talks to the sales team to understand why the firm bought CoCounsel, which practice areas they care about, and what return on investment they are hoping to see. From there, they build day-one use cases tailored to that firm’s specific goals.
“If we hear from the firm that one big pain point is that their M&A associates spend way too much time on due diligence, we will come up with a number of due diligence workflows in CoCounsel to help them get that return on their investment.”
Vice President of Solutions Engineering, Thomson Reuters
The goal is to make sure clients are not just using the tool but getting the most out of it.
She is candid that many lawyers are only scratching the surface in using AI. “I’m oftentimes finding they’re not using the full value of CoCounsel. They are using CoCounsel to summarize an email, which isn’t wrong, but there’s just so much more CoCounsel can do.” Her team works to show those more complex, multi-step workflows — not because something is broken, but because the opportunity is there.
From real problems to product features
McConnell’s team has been involved in the next generation of CoCounsel Legal from the ground up, partnering with the product team on use case development with an eye toward solving the most complex problems large firms bring to Thomson Reuters. Those firms came with specific asks: how do we use your AI to handle an M&A due diligence workflow, or a multi-jurisdictional litigation matter? Her team took those problems, tested solutions in the new product, and helped build the beta testing program around them.
One customer story McConnell comes back to involves a lawyer who represents a healthcare provider offering telehealth services. Telehealth is a heavily regulated space that has shifted significantly since the COVID-19 pandemic, with multi-jurisdictional rules that change quickly. This lawyer spent weeks at a time updating telehealth agreements to keep pace. With the new version of CoCounsel, he told McConnell he was able to do in a few minutes what had once taken weeks.
“He was excited because he was able to get back to his client, the medical provider, that much sooner and help them scale their business,” she says. The broader point, she notes, is that updating contracts to keep pace with regulatory changes is now a fundamentally different task. On top of generating text, CoCounsel redlines a contract and cites the specific Westlaw provisions behind every change, so the lawyer can click through and verify the work rather than spend hours checking it manually.
Agentic AI and what it changes for clients
The shift to agentic AI is what makes these workflows possible at a new level of speed and complexity. In the previous version of CoCounsel, solving a difficult use case often required many steps, careful prompting, and skill-stacking. A litigator running document review, cross-referencing Westlaw, and drafting a memo were completing three separate tasks. Now, a lawyer can describe what they want to accomplish and let the agent figure out how to get there.
McConnell describes it from a litigator’s perspective. A trial lawyer she spoke with recently described the frustration of always trying to find the most factually analogous case. With the next iteration of CoCounsel, a lawyer can attach hundreds of documents from their case record and have the agent consider those documents alongside Westlaw content. Rather than just retrieving information, the agent reasons through a legal problem with the full context of that specific matter.
“You don’t have to shoehorn your entire case into a Boolean search string,” McConnell says. “You can attach all these records and really talk to the AI about it and give that context.”
What changes for customer success
The new architecture is also changing how McConnell’s team works with clients after launch. In the previous version of CoCounsel, onboarding took significant time just explaining which skills existed, how to trigger them, and how to construct the right prompts. That time came at a cost.
“We spent a lot of time on ‘here’s how you use our product,’ and frankly, I think not always sufficient time on ‘how do we make the product relevant to you,'” McConnell says. “Lawyers only have so much time for training.”
Because the next generation of CoCounsel is far more intuitive to use, her team can get to what she calls the fun stuff more quickly. Rather than running through a foundational tutorial, they can focus the conversation on a firm’s specific practice, its goals, and how AI can genuinely change the way its lawyers work. “Lawyers should be ambitious about what they can use CoCounsel for,” she says. “There are countless use cases.”
Built to sound like the lawyer, not the AI
One feature McConnell is quick to mention is that CoCounsel is not only connected to Westlaw and Practical Law. It is also built to connect to a firm’s own document management system and to analyze a firm’s precedent when generating output. Drafting agents can reflect a lawyer’s voice, style, and formatting preferences.
“You’re not stuck with AI that sounds like AI,” McConnell says. Firms can work with CoCounsel in order to ensure that the output sounds like them and meets their standards stylistically, in formatting. That distinction matters when work product defines a firm’s reputation.
For McConnell, this is the thread that ties everything together: understanding what a firm needs and meeting them where they are, while making sure the technology is grounded in authority, traceable, and built for the humans depending on it.
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.
