Lawyers at firms of every size and in-house counsel share how the new CoCounsel Legal holds up on real research, drafting, and review, and why their judgment still leads.
Highlights
- Customers trust research from CoCounsel Legal because it draws on Westlaw and Practical Law, with sources they can check.
- Instead of writing careful prompts, customers describe tasks in plain language and keep research and drafting in one conversation.
- Customers review output from CoCounsel Legal like an associate's first draft, because the final work product is theirs.
Ask a lawyer how they size up a new tool, and you’ll hear some version of the same answer: show me the work. You wouldn’t cite a case you haven’t read. So why would you trust a legal AI tool you haven’t seen in action?
That’s why we went straight to the people using it. Over the past year, attorneys at small firms and Am Law 100 firms, in-house legal teams, courts, and public defenders tested the new CoCounsel Legal on real matters.
Their answers lined up with four questions most lawyers ask before they trust any AI tool. We’ll start with the one that matters most.
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Do you have to learn to write prompts?
Can it handle the whole assignment?
Who’s responsible for the final work product?
What this means for your practice
Can you trust the research?
If the research is wrong, nothing else matters. So the first thing most customers talked about wasn’t speed. It was where the answers come from.
CoCounsel Legal draws on Westlaw and Practical Law. That matters because source quality determines AI reliability in legal work. When it points to a case or statute, you can click through and read it yourself, the same way you’d check an associate’s memo.
Melissa Geller, a partner at Duane Morris, says that has changed where she starts her research:
The next generation of CoCounsel Legal integrates linkable case law in its response, coupled with the conversational functionality and has changed how and where I begin a project.
Getting the law right also means not making things up. Amber Simon, an attorney at Polsinelli, noticed that it flagged an anti-assignment issue she hadn’t raised yet. “It wasn’t making anything up, it was simply surfacing the right extra issue,” she said.
Hear why Polsinelli is choosy about the AI tools it brings in.
Trust gets a tool in the door. But a tool that’s hard to use won’t get used. That brings us to the second question.
Do you have to learn to write prompts?
Short answer: no.
Earlier versions of CoCounsel asked you to pick a skill from a library and write a careful prompt. The new CoCounsel Legal works more like handing an assignment to a colleague. You explain what you need in plain language, and it figures out the steps. It’s part of a bigger shift in how AI is learning to work like a senior associate.
Jerry Johnson, Chief Privacy Officer and Vice President, Corporate Counsel at Teladoc Health, described it in terms any supervising attorney will recognize:
You don’t have to be a prompt engineer to get what you want out of it. You talk to it just like you would … a junior associate.
That ease changes how people use it. Matthew Wurstner, managing partner at Carlson & Blakeman, LLP, says he uses it “like a sounding board the way I would a colleague.”
Once lawyers stop worrying about how to ask, they start asking it to do more. Which leads to the third question.
Can it handle the whole assignment?
Most legal work doesn’t stop at research. Next comes the analysis, then a memo, a motion, or a client email. Customers told us the new CoCounsel Legal keeps all of that in one conversation, a shift that’s especially clear in how CoCounsel Legal is changing the drafting game.
Serafina Concannon, a member of the Bankruptcy and Complex Litigation Practice Groups at Caplin & Drysdale, saw this firsthand when she had a stack of motions to get through over a weekend:
I just plugged them all into CoCounsel Legal—it helped me redraft sections, analyze arguments, review for inconsistencies, and understand provisions.
The same holds at smaller firms. Brice Wilkerson, a partner at North City Law, PC, used to run research and documents through a separate chat tool to pull everything together. Now, he says, “it is all in one place.”
The more work a tool can take on, the more the last question matters.
Who’s responsible for the final work product?
You are. Good practice requires it, and so does the ABA. In Formal Opinion 512, issued in July 2024, the ABA said lawyers need a reasonable understanding of the generative AI tools they use and must independently review what those tools produce.
Customers don’t see that as a burden. They treat CoCounsel Legal’s output like an associate’s first draft. It’s a strong start, but it still gets their review.
That review is easier when the supporting research is right in front of you. Claudia Salinas, a staff attorney at The Innocence Center, explained:
My favorite feature is the secondary research memos it provides to support the final work product. Having that additional research readily available made it much easier to verify authorities and continue building my arguments.
For Michael Yancey, managing attorney at Consumer Justice, careful review is what makes bigger jobs possible. With the work split into separate chats, and “if critically reviewed by a careful eye,” he said it can outline, research, draft, and cite-check an entire brief. If you’re setting up your own review process, start with these 8 steps every attorney must follow before using AI on a client matter.
What this means for your practice
Put those four answers together, and the takeaway is simple.
Lawyers trust CoCounsel Legal because they can check the authority behind its answers. They use it more because they can talk to it like a colleague. They get more done because research and drafting happen in one place. And they stay in charge of the final product, which is where their judgment belongs.
If you’re weighing legal AI, ask the question these lawyers answered for themselves: does it make your work better, not just faster? Young Conaway made that same decision. Here’s why the firm chose CoCounsel Legal.
The best way to know is to see it on your own work. See for yourself ↓
