Two customer success managers at Thomson Reuters share what makes adopting professional-grade AI work
Highlights
- Customer success managers guide law firms through AI adoption with tailored onboarding strategies.
- CoCounsel Legal builds trust through verified legal databases and transparent, auditable AI outputs.
- Early leadership involvement and practical workflow integration drive measurable AI adoption success.
Adopting AI at a law firm only succeeds when a great majority of professionals use it. Without broad buy-in from lawyers, firms risk making a costly purchase that fails to deliver productivity improvements or boost client value.
That’s why as soon as a law firm decides to adopt CoCounsel Legal, Thomson Reuters’ customer success teams move into action. From day one, dedicated managers help lawyers learn how to use the comprehensive AI solution at their own pace — preparing them to take advantage of the tool, setting clear expectations, and showing them what they stand to gain.
This team also addresses any concerns about AI to new users. Two customer success managers, Alkmini O’Brien and Joshua Reifler, work to convey the value that CoCounsel can provide. They aim for having new users quickly experience that value, empowering them to benefit from CoCounsel within days of using it.
AI Customer Success Manager, Thomson Reuters
As O’Brien says, “AI only becomes a substantial next step if you have the right guardrails and your return-on-investment measurement plan is in place.” It’s important to begin by concentrating on “first steps, first tasks, repetitive tasks — research, contract work, e-discovery, drafting, litigation support, compliance,” she says. This builds a strong foundation for broader AI-driven practice.
Reifler notes that the legal industry stands “on the cusp of AI being considered no longer optional but regarded as a core competency for modern legal work.”
“Could an attorney work without it? Yes, in the way that you could work without a smartphone,” he says. “But if you want to stay competitive and meet your clients’ expectations, you need to understand how to integrate AI into your workflow.”
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AI as an ally, not a replacement
Enablement that fits your workflow
Getting leadership on board from the start
Preparing your firm for what’s next
Your partner in transformation
AI as an ally, not a replacement
One obstacle that customer success managers will face is when a legal professional fears they’re being asked to train on an AI system that will replace them.
“I respond by telling them that the human factor remains very much part of the equation,” O’Brien says. “After several conversations, the user gains a greater understanding — that the AI is going to help them with repetitive tasks, freeing up time for them to do more substantive work and to take on more clients.”
Another common concern users have: AI ultimately means more work, as they’ll need to double-check and verify everything a system produces. They may wonder what the point is of learning something that they can’t completely rely on.
“Whenever I hear this, I tell them that AI isn’t here to replace your judgement,” Reifler says, noting that it is essential that users have a baseline of confidence in their AI’s outputs.
“One way that we build trust in CoCounsel is to ask a user to find something they already know the answer to, and have the AI do the same work,” he says. “Validate the output and see how the AI reasons and look at its footnotes. That’s how you build trust.”
Compared to open large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, CoCounsel Legal is specifically tailored to the legal industry and backed by verified proprietary databases of legal information.
Our product is made by attorneys for attorneys. Our content is grounded in Westlaw and Practical Law. We have that workflow fit. CoCounsel is embedded in legal tasks where many other LLMs aren’t. CoCounsel’s outputs are auditable and centered on authoritative content.
AI Customer Success Manager, Thomson Reuters
“We’re making CoCounsel show its work,” Reifler adds. “Part of that is the retrieval augmented generation (RAG) process. Each of CoCounsel’s skills is engineered for a specific legal task, and evaluated in a controlled environment before anything reaches a customer. We force the AI to create gold-standard answers by creating millions of simulations. Nothing is left to chance. Whereas with something like ChatGPT, so much depends on how you prompt it. You might get wildly different outputs depending on what you ask.”
Enablement that fits your workflow
Many legal professionals already feel stretched for time. If they need to spend 10 hours a day to cover their workload, when will they find time to learn how to use an AI solution — particularly if they feel like they’re not tech-savvy?
Customer success managers aim “to make enablement work for overworked lawyers,” as Reifler says. “Instead of expecting everyone to be an AI expert, we focus on getting practical early wins. We help you identify the right use cases and build a roadmap for getting value from CoCounsel right away.” Customer success managers act as consultative advisors, guiding firms through onboarding with one-on-one coaching, use case workshops, and tailored initiatives like hackathons that solve real challenges.
It’s about having that flexibility, reflecting that every attorney has a different amount of time to learn and a different approach. We’re here to help you structure your onboarding in a way that fits your practice and delivers measurable results. That’s where we add value.
Senior Customer Success Manager, Thomson Reuters
Getting leadership on board from the start
What’s essential? Getting the right stakeholders involved on day one. It’s not ideal when a law firm’s point-person for a new AI system is someone who “wasn’t present in the whole sales process, and who doesn’t know all the reasons why the firm purchased the product and what they should be measuring,” O’Brien says.
Say that a lawyer turns on their computer one morning and reads an email from a legal administrator whose name they don’t recognize. The email notes that the firm now has access to an AI system and only has a few instructions on how to log in, along with a link to a training module. There are no suggestions of how best to start, and no list of early goals. If this is the case, would the lawyer leap into learning the new AI system, or move on and read the next email?
Consider an alternate scenario. A lawyer gets an email from their firm’s managing partner that clearly and precisely explains how the AI system works. It outlines where the system is integrated into current workflows, what lawyers will specifically gain from it, and recommends a series of steps to begin using it. This email carries far more weight and spurs far greater onboarding.
That’s why it’s vital for managing partners and other higher-ups at a law firm “to attend the initial meeting, to hear the conversations about strategic goals, and to learn which use cases and workflows will get their firm those quick wins,” O’Brien says. “They’ll get an understanding of what onboarding will look like and walk away with an agreed-upon joint action plan. I can go as far as drafting that first email for the partner to send out; I can put all the context in there, all of what they want their firm to be doing.”
Preparing your firm for what’s next
Getting customers to those important early productivity wins is key, because AI systems keep growing in complexity. Two years ago, users were amazed to see a system that summarized a document. Now AI is becoming more agentic, with AI tools being designed for more intricate processes that will require multiple applications.
“AI is very good for drafting, pattern matching, and summarizing,” Reifler says. “Now we’re starting to incorporate more deep research. As these models mature and as we move from learning models to reasoning models, CoCounsel will feel less like a smart AI tool and more like a second-seat lawyer that you can debate. One that can challenge you, one that can present its own cases.”
One thing lawyers may be surprised to find is how well CoCounsel can understand context: “Knowing what’s between the lines of a document, not just the words on the page,” Reifler explains. “They may consider it at first to be a fancy keyword search and then the AI will surface a concept that wasn’t explicitly stated, explaining intent or tone, or summarizing the underlying culture at an organization. Sometimes we’ve even seen its ability to detect sarcasm.”
AI tools are growing better by the day “at conceptual pattern spotting and piecing together scattered details into a narrative,” he says. “It’s getting to the point where it’s becoming a coordinated legal assistant. It knows where to go, it does that multi-step analysis, and shows all of its work. That’s what’s going to take AI from a ‘nice to have’ to a ‘must have.'”
Your partner in transformation
The difference between purchasing an AI solution and achieving measurable results comes down to partnership. Customer success managers understand that technology alone doesn’t drive change — people do. Their approach focuses on making each attorney’s first experience with CoCounsel a moment of genuine value, whether that’s instantly generating a table of authorities, summarizing lengthy discovery documents, or conducting research that once took hours.
“Rather than thinking we need to be experts in all the ways you could handle a task,” O’Brien says, “we need to be experts in knowing which way will be best for that particular customer, and then having the expertise to advise on that one specific way.”
CoCounsel Legal isn’t just an AI tool — it’s a partnership that begins on day one and grows as your firm’s needs evolve. With the right guidance and strategic approach, what starts as a new system becomes an indispensable part of how your firm delivers legal work.
Explore how CoCounsel Legal can work for your firm, then connect with our customer success team to develop a tailored onboarding strategy.
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