Overview of legal-focused generative AI tools and how CoCounsel constitutes the most comprehensive set of critical legal tasks
Sometimes you stare a mountain of work in the face and know that only you can complete it. Because a more senior lawyer is counting on you, or because you are the expert and you need to own a project from start to finish. Sometimes there simply isn’t another person who can lend a hand.
What the industry is discovering is that generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) can more than lend a hand. With a trusted AI legal assistant like CoCounsel from Thomson Reuters, legal professionals can dramatically reduce the time they spend on review, analysis, drafting, and other time-intensive tasks.
Highlights:
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What is an AI legal assistant?
| How is AI used in the legal profession? |
| Ethical implications |
| Trust and accuracy concerns |
 CoCounsel Drafting Powered by professional-grade GenAI for legal professionals
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What is an AI legal assistant?
An AI legal assistant is a GenAI tool that helps legal professionals to reliably delegate simple and complex tasks. CoCounsel is the first professional-grade GenAI assistant from Thomson Reuters. It handles a variety of legal tasks in a single, user-friendly interface. With CoCounsel as your legal assistant you can quickly and accurately complete tasks like the following:
- Prepare for a deposition
- Search a database
- Review documents and contracts
- Summarize long, complex documents
- Extract contract data
- Monitor contract policy compliance
- Draft correspondence
- Assemble timelines
Explore these tasks in further detail below with specific use cases in the legal profession.
AI use cases
The use of AI at law firms has transitioned from a mere desire to an essential requirement. It is changing the way we do business, much the same way as email did in the 1990s. As digital transformation continues to advance, AI will become ubiquitous and an indispensable assistant to practically every attorney and legal professional, freeing up time for tasks that add greater value such as thinking and advising.
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Search and summarize
Creating, reviewing and sending various documents forms a large part of an attorney’s daily tasks that can be drastically improved with GenAI. 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. Legal professionals can focus on the rewarding work that machines can’t do because CoCounsel reduces hands on time significantly,
For instance, many lawyers use their AI tools 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.
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Zach Warren
Manager, Technology and Innovation, Thomson Reuters Institute
One litigation managing attorney told us that “CoCounsel helps improve the quality of our representation. It finds things in 2,000- page police reports and transcripts that humans miss. And it doesn’t just read, it interprets—that’s the game-changer.”
Data and contract analysis
CoCounsel can read and analyze vast quantities of material quickly and accurately. For instance, it will take a person one to four hours to review 100 pages of material, depending on the level of redaction and e-discovery coding. A GenAI tool like CoCounsel reads a hundred pages in their entirety and can answer complex questions about them in three minutes.
With the power of AI in your legal tech tools, you can sort files rapidly and seamlessly without needing to manually examine them. The range of assistance offered by legal-focused generative AI improves the legal firm’s or department’s output by facilitating the legal professional’s ability to apply their higher-level expertise to the work at hand.
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Accelerated legal research
GenAI provides a jumpstart on legal research by reducing the time legal professionals must spend sifting through legal documents and summarizing content. These tools can produce in moments an informative version of research complete with citations for case law that would have previously taken hours or days.
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Zena Applebaum
Global VP, Product Marketing for Research Products for Thomson Reuters
 Westlaw Precision with CoCounsel Get relevant answers to your legal questions with AI-assisted research that taps into Practical Law and Westlaw content and expertise by professional-grade GenAI for legal professionals
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Lawyers can then apply their expertise to refining the results to ensure that the research output is high quality, thorough, and even more accurate.
Legal drafting
Need to find the best starting points with trusted contract language and legal document templates? According to Thomson Reuters research, lawyers can spend up to 56% of their time drafting documents, they still take more than 15 minutes just to find a good starting point for their draft.
Now you can transform how you draft documents with a secure, GenAI-enabled solution integrated directly into Microsoft Word that leverages Practical Law and your own repository. Legal-focused GenAI can draft clauses from scratch, modify existing language of a contract, summarize lengthy clauses, and answer questions about their terms.
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Streamlined M&A due diligence
M&A due diligence is a tedious task that limits your time and ability to innovate and creatively problem-solve.
Using AI tools for analysis and review of documents saves time and allows you to focus on more valuable pursuits, which facilitates enhanced creativity and allows you to focus exclusively on the tasks that only a person can handle – the job you were trained to do and the job you are passionate about.
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One knowledge management counsel in an AmLaw 200 firm used CoCounsel and told us, “When I was a junior associate doing M&A contract due diligence, I remember spending so much time in the data room doing manually what CoCounsel can do in minutes. [This is] really amazing stuff!”
Improved knowledge management
GenAI can help legal teams stay organized and share information via cross-functional tools. Better and faster methods of saving, indexing, identifying, and disseminating lawyers’ prior work and collective expertise helps legal firms and departments solve legal and business problems more effectively.
Enhanced onboarding and learning
Demonstrate the value of your legal team by delivering better advice faster than ever before. Legal-focused GenAI tools help users get up to speed quickly without extensive training, whether they are new to a firm or gaining knowledge about an unfamiliar area of law.
These tools also help users learn new skills in a hands-on way as they work, reducing the need for as many formalized skill-development interventions, saving time and money.
Plain-language prompting to navigate complexity
Those unfamiliar with a given area of law may struggle to know where to start or which language is most applicable in searching for resources.
Generative AI tools that can be prompted using plain-language queries allow users to access faster answers to complicated legal questions. Since NLP (Natural Language Processing) is used to understand questions and generate meaningful human language, legal professionals can rapidly organize information to help develop successful arguments.
Ethical implications
Using AI in legal work raises significant ethical concerns. Attorneys must ensure they fully understand the technology they use, as required by their duty to provide competent representation, which includes staying updated on technological advancements and understanding the benefits and risks of AI. This is crucial because failing to verify the accuracy of AI-generated content could lead to ethical violations.
Trust and accuracy
Repetitive and manual processes and are typically prone to human error and can introduce an unnecessary element of risk. AI models developed and backed by expert human oversight give you a competitive edge by improving accuracy and thus reducing risk.
We’ve found that GenAI can do some tasks even more accurately than a human can, and in less time. For instance, extracting key obligations for 2,000 contracts takes more than 80 hours and is prone to a human error rate of 10-20%, according to ELLEgal. GenAI retrieves critical information with at least 96% accuracy and requires fewer than six hours of hands-on time to meet a 48-hour deadline. The AI assistant ensures high accuracy in identifying relevant sections and issues.
One of the challenges with widely available GenAI tools is that they are incredibly prone to making up an answer that isn’t based in fact. AI assistants are as reliable as the information they analyze. Many general-use GenAI tools are known for making up answers that aren’t based in fact because they do not have the proper guardrails. However, if your GenAI legal assistant only draws on legal information, as CoCounsel does, you can have confidence.
Legal organizations should perform due diligence to find out which data sets are used to train the LLM (large language models) used to enhance the accuracy of work product. By understanding the quality and scope of the training data, they can be confident that their output will be more trustworthy and accurate than other LLMs.
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Join the movement
Did you know that 79% of leaders expect GenAI to drive substantial transformation over the next three years? And 31% say it will happen in less than one year. Today, eighty-one percent of professionals believe that GenAI can be applied to their work. Within legal specifically, 58% of in-house counsel expect their outside law firms to use GenAI.
Things are moving fast in technology and in your workload. Efficiency and accuracy are crucial. And as more clients adopt GenAI, your use of modern tools will become even more important. Using a comprehensive assistant like CoCounsel is a better experience for users than trying to learn different systems and move between them as the task demands.
Feedback from early adopters of CoCounsel tells us that they find it reliable and effective. They appreciate that CoCounsel provides a single access point. It retrieves products and documents as needed. Users find that getting work done will take the form of an ongoing “conversation” with their GenAI assistant.
In the not-too-distant future GenAI will be in every lawyer’s toolkit. You can take advantage of the benefits in these early days and help shape your organization’s GenAI transformation.
The power of a GenAI legal assistant is just a few clicks away. Find out more about CoCounsel and request a demo today.
Originally published August 30, 2023.
