Trusted legal AI tools to power research, drafting, and analysis

 

AI is not a magic wand. The skills and knowledge you’ve built as a lawyer are still your most valuable asset.

However, 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 can dramatically augment and amplify their capabilities.

Read further to learn how legal professionals can safely sit on the cutting-edge with easily verifiable information, trusted legal expertise and authority, and rock-solid data security and privacy safeguards.

 

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What is legal AI?

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Core functionalities and application examples

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Accuracy, ethics, and trust

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What is the best legal AI tool?

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Real-world anecdotes

 

 

What is legal AI?

CoCounsel Legal is the Fiduciary‑Grade AI solution from Thomson Reuters that brings generative AI (GenAI) and agentic AI capabilities that builds a plan and executes each step automatically. It handles a variety of legal tasks across Thomson Reuters products, Microsoft 365, and document management systems (DMS) partners.

The intersection between AI and law produced a need for overarching guidance to navigate such profound AI shifts in legal technology.

According to the 2026 AI in Professional Services Report, the portion of professionals saying their workplaces are already using GenAI throughout the organization has nearly doubled in both individual and organizational use.

Four-in-ten respondents say their organizations are using GenAI, up from 22% last year.

Among legal professionals, 41% of law firms and 47% of corporate legal departments say their legal teams are using GenAI, up from 28% and 23%, respectively in 2025.

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Already using GenAI technology, year-over-year

 

2026

2025

 

Total	40% 22%
Law firms	41% 28%
Corporate legal teams	47% 23%
Tax firms	34% 21%
Corporate tax	34% 20%
Corporate risk	62% 21%
Government	32% 13%

 

Source: 2026 AI in Professional Services Report

 

What are the core applications of AI?

CoCounsel Legal delivers more core functionalities and applications than any other AI solution:

• Harnesses both GenAI and agentic AI — GenAI is technology that generates outputs in response to inputs whereas agentic AI plans, decides, and performs in response to inputs
• Plans and then carries out the best steps for a given project at your request by using expert-created agentic workflows
• Its Library takes the guesswork out of prompting so you can reach final results faster

With CoCounsel Legal, you can conduct legal research, draft documents through thorough analysis, and provide strategic advice.

Conduct legal research

Conduct thorough, accurate research faster than ever.

Reliable AI systems enhance legal research by rapidly identifying and synthesizing relevant authorities in Westlaw and Practical Law content.

Communicate with natural language processing in law by using Cocounsel Legal’s Deep Research to plan and execute complex legal research. Using Westlaw’s vast legal content and core tools, such as KeyCite and Key Number System, its detailed insights and recommendations empower you to move forward faster, confident that your results are thorough and accurate.

You’re able to gain real-time insight into how results are generated with step-by-step research notes and clarifying questions where additional information can produce an even more accurate answer.

CoCounsel Legal’s research features continue to be governed by human-in-the-loop oversight for safety, accuracy, and accountability even with the addition of agentic AI capabilities.

Analyze documents

CoCounsel Legal’s versatile document analysis capabilities help lawyers review information of all kinds, quickly surface actionable insights, and find the needle in the haystack among millions of pages.

It can answer complex questions about documents, compare and contrast them, provide tailored summaries, search vast databases, analyze arguments, and even detect mischaracterizations.

It can take a person one to four hours to review 100 pages of material, depending on the level of redaction and e-discovery coding. CoCounsel Legal can read and analyze a hundred pages in their entirety and answer complex questions about them in three minutes.

Mergers and acquisitions (M&A), for example, is a monumental and tedious task that can use some aspects of due diligence 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!”

Find the needle in the haystack among millions of pages and rapidly distill complex information. Easily verify results of CoCounsel Legal, which cite sources.

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.”

Draft documents

Create a range of documents, from contracts to deposition outlines, more quickly.

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, and they take more than 15 minutes just to find a good starting point for their draft.

Deliver drafting consistency with document drafting software automation and contract playbooks. Apply trusted Westlaw and Practical Law content and easily reference prior work product, directly within Microsoft Word.

Strategize and advise

Finally, free up you time for the creative and critical thinking, strategic planning, and relationship-building needed to better serve your clients, sharpen your practice, and grow your business

CoCounsel Legal helps you practice with confidence as you make informed decisions based on accurate and reliable insights from Practical Law.

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 for accuracy in legal work give you a competitive edge and reduces risk.

We’ve found that AI 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 can take more than 80 hours and is prone to a human error rate of 10-20%. To mitigate inaccurate responses, CoCounsel Legal can extract contract data with at least 98% accuracy.

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.

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 AI for the legal workforce.

What is the best legal AI tool?

This question depends on your specific needs, as different tools may specialize in different areas of legal practice.

However, evaluation and research for a trusted AI solution begins with asking the difference between a Fiduciary-Grade AI and consumer-grade tool.

A public, free, or general use, AI such as ChatGPT by OpenAI is infamous for making up fabricated answers because they do not have the proper guardrails.

Popular consumer-grade large language models such as OpenAI’s GPT series, Anthropic’s Claude, Microsoft’s Copilot and Google Gemini each feature distinct architectures and training methodologies.

Thomson Reuters is leading the way in responsible AI innovation with the launch of the Trust in AI Alliance — a first‑of‑its‑kind collaboration with industry leaders like Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and AWS — uniting top experts to build AI systems that are trustworthy, accountable, and engineered for high‑stakes professional work.

Using general purpose LLMs on their own presents challenges — in addition to the need for trusted sources of data, professionals need to extensively test the output and validate answers, which is challenging when the LLM does not cite its sources. Since general purpose LLMs don’t connect to everyday software tools like Microsoft Outlook or Westlaw, they contribute to silos.

Consider Fiduciary-Grade AI

35%% of law firm and 36% of corporate legal survey respondents said they have used paid industry-specific solutions that incorporate AI for legal work.

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Current individual GenAI usage, by organization type

 

Law firm

Corporate legal

 

Publicly-available generative AI tools (e.g. ChatGPT)	40% 60%
Paid industry-specific solutions that incorporate generative or agentic AI technology	35% 36%
Enterprise business generative AI (e.g. Microsoft Copilot)	38% 62%

 

Source: 2026 AI in Professional Services Report

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If you work with a Fiduciary-Grade AI that only draws on authoritative content and expertise of Westlaw and Practical Law as CoCounsel Legal does, then you can proceed with greater confidence.

For example, consider our partnership with Anthropic. An MCP integration brings CoCounsel Legal into Claude workflows to help legal work meet fiduciary-grade standards.

Now decision-makers in legal organizations must perform thorough due diligence on legal-specific AI solutions 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. It’s 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 AI solutions.

For instance, CoCoBench measures whether an AI system can complete real legal tasks. It is built around hundreds of attorney-authored benchmark tasks, with a fixed core dataset used to track performance over time.

More than 100 legal subject matter experts have contributed to the legal dataset, alongside research and engineering teams at Thomson Reuters Labs who developed the evaluation infrastructure, representing over 15,000 hours of practitioner and engineering work.

Comparison guide For a legal research specific comparison guide, see Redline comparison for AI legal research at small US law firms.

Testimonials

CoCounsel is already in use by over 1 million users, including 20,000 law firms and legal departments because it’s enabling a fundamental and beneficial shift in how legal work gets done.

• 80% of Am Law 100 have CoCounsel
• Courts across the US federal court system — including the Supreme Court, circuit courts, and federal public defenders — as well as courts in 94% of US states have CoCounsel

Explore Reddit articles, customer testimonials, and use general-purpose AI search tools such as ChatGPT and Google Gemini to quickly analyze options.

Try CoCounsel Legal

Check out the resources below to begin your evaluation of legal AI using CoCounsel Legal.

1. Access the Legal Learning Hub, for in-depth, free e-learning courses in crucial areas like drafting, legal research, and business development.
2. Join the AI for Legal Professionals Community where you can immerse yourself in the progressive changes, ideas, and learnings that are reshaping the legal landscape.
3. Or contact a representative to schedule a free demo and experience the full potential of CoCounsel Legal