How CoCounsel is more than the automation of routine, mundane tasks; surface real and actionable insights
Highlights
Its integration with other Thomson Reuters products, Microsoft 365, and DMS partners ensures secure and private workflow management
Accuracy in legal work requires “human in the loop” design
Have you stared at a mountain of work in the face and your honest response was something along the lines of:
- “I wish my firm had enough legal assistants so I could get this done today,” or,
- “Can’t I outsource any of this to AI tools?” and,
- “But wait, AI isn’t magic. I’d still need to do the hard part of the work, right?”
AI is definitely not a magic wand. The skills and knowledge you’ve built as a lawyer are still your most valuable asset. But that doesn’t mean you need to do everything the hard way —in fact, you have an ethical obligation as a lawyer to maintain technological competence and understand where AI can support and augment your work.
While lawyers absolutely must master the legal principles and nuances of their practice, AI tools can significantly amplify their capabilities.
Today, legal professionals can safely sit on the cutting-edge with easily verifiable information, rock-solid security, and extensive data privacy safeguards.
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AI use cases to complement core skills as a lawyer
How to choose a trusted AI tool
What is an AI legal assistant
A GenAI legal assistant helps legal professionals reliably delegate simple and complex tasks such as research, drafting, and comparing, analyzing, and summarizing documents.
CoCounsel is the first professional-grade GenAI assistant from Thomson Reuters. It handles a variety of legal tasks in a single, seamless integration across Thomson Reuters products, Microsoft 365, and document management systems (DMS) partners.
Just two years after its launch, CoCounsel and its broad set of legal AI tools — known as skills — are already in use by over 17,000 law firms and legal departments.
AI use cases to complement core skills as a lawyer
In 2024, 79% of lawyers were utilizing AI, a 415% increase from 2023, indicating a rapid acceleration in the adoption and use of AI within the legal industry.
The AI-powered skills below are perfect examples to streamline workflows and tasks that add greater value to work product.
Review Documents
Ask CoCounsel complex questions about a batch of documents, including contracts, and receive a substantive analysis complete with citations.
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.
M&A due diligence, for example, is a monumental and tedious task that can use some automation. Legal teams can focus on more valuable tasks that only a person can handle — the job you were trained to do and the job you enjoy doing.
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!”
Compare documents
Assess similarities, differences, and favorability across multiple documents.
Summarize
Quickly surface and understand relevant information by condensing long, complex documents into clear, succinct summaries.
For instance, many lawyers use an AI tool 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.
Search a database
Pinpoint key documents and information within a large database of your files.
Legal generative AI is supposed to augment what a lawyer does. It’s not going to do legal reasoning, not going to door case strategy. What it’s supposed to do is do repeatable rote tasks much more quickly and efficiently.
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.”
Timeline
Automatically assemble chronologies of events described in your documents.
I’ll have a summary that’s near perfect and a timeline that outlines every significant event contextually in less than seven minutes. It saves us weeks!
Partner, Laffey Bucci D’Andrea Reich & Ryan
Draft
Rapidly draft a wide variety of customized documents and content.
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.
Draft clauses from scratch, modify existing language of a contract, summarize lengthy clauses, and answer questions about their terms.
When we are operating on an average turnaround time of three to four business days for a response, we can cut that down to one to two business days by utilizing the tool to get drafting work done.
Legal Counsel at Systemiq
CoCounsel Drafting
Use GenAI paired with Practical Law content to draft and improve your clause language
Free drafting demo ↗Legal research
GenAI provides a much needed jumpstart on legal research by reducing the time legal professionals must spend sifting through documents and summarizing content. It can produce in moments an informative version of research complete with citations for case law that would have previously taken hours or days.
Lawyers can then apply their expertise to refining the results to ensure that the research output is high quality, thorough, and even more accurate.
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.
Thomson Reuters provides attorneys with the confidence that AI-generated answers are thoroughly supported by essential facts and legal precedent, ensuring reliability in complex cases.
Partner, Larson LLP
Lawyers can use prompts using plain-language queries to get faster answers to complicated legal questions. Since Natural Language Processing (NLP) is used to understand questions and generate meaningful human language, legal professionals can rapidly organize information to help develop successful arguments.
White paper
Spend more time practicing law and less time sorting, sifting, and summarizing with the power of GenAI
Access white paper ↗Accuracy, ethics, and trust
Repetitive and manual processes are prone to human error and can introduce an unnecessary element of risk. AI solutions 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 routine 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%. To mitigate inaccurate responses, GenAI can retrieve critical information from a trusted source with at least 96% accuracy and requires fewer than six hours of hands-on time to meet a 48-hour deadline.
However, 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.
Law firms can be reticent to turn on some AI features because they want to be sure about what they’re going to do. There’s a need to have confidence in how those solutions are being delivered.
Director of AI Strategy and Partnerships, Thomson Reuters Labs
They must stay up to date on technological advancements and understand the benefits, risks, and responsible use of AI such as the ISO/IEC 42001:2023 certification standard for AI management systems.
Ethical responsibility and accuracy are critical when it comes to building and maintaining trust in a professional-grade GenAI solution for the legal workforce.
The AI landscape is transformed with CoCounsel. The power of this technology, deployed in a product that is secure and reliable, is a huge leap forward.
Director of Research & Knowledge Services, Eversheds Sutherland
AI news and insights
Industry-leading insights, updates, and all things AI @ Thomson Reuters
Join community ↗How to choose a trusted AI tool
Guided research for a trusted GenAI solution begins with asking the difference between a professional-grade and consumer-grade tool.
A consumer-grade, or general-use, GenAI tool such as ChatGPT by OpenAI is infamous for making up fabricated answers because they do not have the proper guardrails. However, if you work with a professional-grade solution that only draws on authoritative content and expertise of Westlaw and Practical Law as CoCounsel does, then you can proceed with greater confidence.
Popular consumer-grade models such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, Meta’s Llama, and Mistral AI each feature distinct architectures and training methodologies.
LLMs vary in their ability to handle complex queries, but most are excellent for brainstorming, drafting emails, summarizing text, learning new concepts, generating creative content, writing code, or translating languages.
| Feature | Consumer-Grade GenAI | Professional-Use GenAI |
|---|---|---|
| Focus | General-purpose | Domain-specific |
| Data | Broad, unfiltered internet data | Curated, high-quality professional data |
| Accuracy | Variable, prone to errors | High, minimized errors |
| Security | Lower | Robust |
| Compliance | Limited | Designed for specific industry regulations |
| Customization | Limited | Extensive |
| Support | Limited | Dedicated |
The story doesn’t change with legal-focused LLMs and legal AI chatbots applied to the legal practice.
Decision-makers in legal organizations must perform thorough due diligence on large language models (LLMs) to determine the legal data used to generate responses.
Don’t settle with generic and vague references to sources such as:
- “domain-specific content”
- “legal database”
- “legal text”
You’re a lawyer — ask the questions required in due diligence to clarify what kind of domain-specific, legal information is used. This is a wise and foundational distinction to make.
The research pays off. Set your team up for success and be confident that outputs for certain legal services are more trustworthy and accurate than other legal LLMs.
Thomson Reuters believes the best legal AI companies should go even further with transparency in benchmarking performance for all its AI capabilities such as legal research performance, and long context benchmarks for analysis of very long documents or contracts in depositions transcripts and M&A documents.
Benchmarks, however, come with an important caveat: they should measure products as they are intended to be used and focus on outcomes that are significant to customers.
The value of legal AI — of any technological innovation for that matter — is in how it gets used in the real world and how well all the different components come together to help lawyers do their jobs more effectively.
President, Legal Professionals, Thomson Reuters
Real-world anecdotes
The following case studies highlight the incredible work of attorneys augmented by AI.
Valiant Law
Safa Riadh, Attorney at Law, Valiant Law, is a long-time advocate of Westlaw and now Westlaw Precision with CoCounsel — he uses the game-changing skill, AI-Assisted Research, to serve more clients more effectively and efficiently
Read case study ↗The transformation from books to online research and then online research to AI-Assisted Research through Westlaw Precision with CoCounsel is unreal
Attorney at Law, Valiant Law
Laffey Bucci D’Andrea Reich & Ryan
Partner Guy D’Andrea at Laffey Bucci D’Andrea Reich & Ryan shares the tangible benefits of using Thomson Reuters CoCounsel
Read case study ↗It allows you to hyper-focus on that incredibly important skill set — and less on the everyday monotony of what we sometimes do in the practice of law.
Partner, Laffey Bucci D’Andrea Reich & Ryan
Hawaii Disability Legal Services
Attorney-at-Law Diane Haar of Hawaii Disability Legal Services uses AI-Assisted Research to quickly find answers to her questions, enabling her to do her job faster and more effectively
Read case study ↗When I can take on more cases, these are people that aren’t getting ripped off. These are people who have Westlaw Precision with CoCounsel behind them.
Attorney-at-Law, Hawaii Disability Legal Services
How to use CoCounsel
Students and practitioners can watch free training for litigation and transactional workflows using CoCounsel. Or contact a representative to schedule a free trial.
