Thomson Reuters and Smokeball: AI meets practice management

Soon, firms will be able to access Westlaw Deep Research directly within Smokeball, connecting legal research and matter management in one workflow.

AI is raising the bar for legal work in ways that are hard to ignore. Clients expect faster answers, tailored insights, and work product that reflects real understanding of their case. Yet 70% expect productivity gains from their outside counsel, while only 6% believe most firms are delivering them. For small and mid-sized firms, the pressure isn’t just to adopt AI, but to use it well.

Picture a typical day at the office. An attorney opens their practice management system to review a matter, then switches to another platform to run AI-powered research or document analysis. Before that work can be trusted, files need to be re-uploaded, confirmed as the latest version, and checked for accuracy. The technology is powerful, but the systems around it can’t keep pace.

That gap is exactly what Thomson Reuters and Smokeball are closing. Joint customers can already automatically retrieve Smokeball files within Thomson Reuters® CoCounsel Legal, and later this month, Westlaw Deep Research will be available inside Smokeball’s practice management platform. It’s a shift from stitching together separate systems to working from one shared source of matter information.

Now, firms will be able to move from reviewing a matter to researching it without leaving their workflow. By bringing Thomson Reuters Westlaw Deep Research directly into Smokeball, and connecting their documents with CoCounsel Legal through complementary integrations, there’s no more re-entering data, manually moving documents, or re-checking work at every step. Attorneys can move faster and get real value from AI in their daily work.Emily Colbert, Co-Head of Legal Products, Thomson Reuters

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The growing gap between AI and legal workflows

How the Thomson Reuters and Smokeball integration works

What’s next for legal AI and practice management

The growing gap between AI and legal workflows

Most law firms rely on a mix of systems to manage their work, from practice management and document storage to legal research tools. While each serves an important purpose, moving between platforms creates friction in everyday legal work.

Manual processes make this problem worse. Documents must be downloaded, uploaded, and checked multiple times for accuracy and consistency. At the same time, many AI tools lack access to trusted legal content or matter data, forcing attorneys to spend additional time validating outputs. As a result, firms often struggle to realize the productivity gains AI promises.

Meanwhile, intake, scheduling, and client management continue to compete for attorneys’ time. Without the budget or IT resources of larger firms, many practitioners are caught between low-cost do-it-yourself legal tools and losing work to their better-resourced competitors.

How the Thomson Reuters and Smokeball integration works

Smokeball provides a practice management platform designed specifically for small and mid-sized law firms. It provides matter management, document automation, billing, and client communication all in one, helping firms stay organized and manage their operations more efficiently.

CoCounsel Legal, from Thomson Reuters, delivers AI-powered legal research, document analysis, and drafting. These capabilities are grounded in trusted content from Westlaw and Practical Law, ensuring outputs are accurate, defensible, and relevant to real legal work.

Smokeball and CoCounsel Legal integrate in multiple ways, letting attorneys connect matter context to Fiduciary-Grade AI™ in both platforms. Fiduciary-Grade AI is the Thomson Reuters standard for AI in high-stakes professional work, grounded in authoritative content and designed to produce verifiable outputs. Here’s how that works in practice.

Within Smokeball: Embedded Westlaw Deep Research lets attorneys ask a legal research question directly within Archie, Smokeball’s AI matter assistant, and receive a structured, citation-backed report grounded in Westlaw content without leaving their workflow. The report stays attached to the matter, so it’s part of the context Archie draws on going forward.

Within CoCounsel Legal: For firms managing larger document sets, a document connector moves files directly from Smokeball into CoCounsel Legal, reducing manual uploads and helping maintain version consistency. Attorneys can then apply CoCounsel Legal’s research, analysis, and drafting tools directly to those matter documents for faster, more informed results.

And when attorneys aren’t sure where a file lives, CoCounsel Legal’s Knowledge Search lets them search Smokeball documents, Westlaw and Practical Law content, and other repositories all at once, quickly pinpointing what they need.

What’s next for legal AI and practice management

The integrations between CoCounsel Legal and Smokeball mark an important step in a broader vision for the future of legal technology. Additional phases of the integration are already in development, with a long-term goal of eliminating the friction between legal work and firm operations. This will give legal professionals seamless access to the information, tools, and AI capabilities they need without leaving their workflow.

People-lawyers have always had to do more with less, and that’s exactly where this partnership delivers value. Thomson Reuters brings deep legal content and trusted AI, and Smokeball delivers the practice management platform firms already run their business on. Together, attorneys get everything they need in one place. They’re not stitching together separate systems or settling for tools that weren’t built for their needs. This is legal technology that finally matches the pace of legal work.Hunter Steele, CEO, Smokeball

This vision extends to the next generation of CoCounsel Legal, engineered to work at the level of a senior associate. It’s the only legal AI that reasons from Westlaw, Practical Law, and a firm’s own knowledge, handling research, analysis, and drafting from a single query. Every step of that reasoning is visible, and every citation is linked, so attorneys can verify the work themselves.

Together, Thomson Reuters and Smokeball are laying the foundation for a unified legal technology experience that helps firms adapt to evolving client expectations, embrace new ways of working, and deliver better outcomes for the clients they serve.

See how Thomson Reuters and Smokeball can help your firm bring legal AI and practice management together to deliver better client outcomes.