Turbocharging legal tasks with CoCounsel generative AI

Swift summaries and contract review

“There’s way more to it now, but the genesis for me was the ability to take a ton of data and summarize it quickly and then spit out a link to where it found that data so you can do your own double checking. That’s what really sparked my interest,” explains Coleman.

He and his team began by giving CoCounsel Core datasets they were familiar with and posing questions to which they already knew the answers. This approach helped them build trust in the accuracy of the outputs, allowing them to accurately gauge how much faster outcomes were being delivered. The results were impressive.

The company’s use of Thomson Reuters CoCounsel GenAI tools demonstrate how powerful they are at scale. In one example, the company was undertaking a mergers and acquisitions (M&A) transaction with 87 different land contracts attached to it and used CoCounsel Core to take a” first pass” at summarizing the documents as part of the due diligence process and organize the insights into a usable format, eliminating the need for a lawyer to read through each one individually. This approach was so successful that the project was completed by a summer law student intern without any help from the lawyers. As a result, the solution facilitated document management and review by making it easier to find the relevant information about a particular deal easily later.

Clever drafting and easy answers

CoCounsel Gen AI solutions are also excellent for details. Century Communities finds them very helpful for drafting specific contract clauses or as a starting point for crafting communications. For example, using CoCounsel Drafting GenAI skills, the legal team can ask it to improve on a clause, rewrite a specific section of a contract, or make a letter more cordial or assertive.

“We were doing a master landlord agreement, and the ability to review a data set and have it provide answers for consideration, I thought was really cool and saved a ton of time on drafting.”

The solutions are also valuable for providing quick, trustworthy answers and insights in areas where the team lacks specific legal expertise. For example, if the legal department is working on a contract that falls outside its usual day-to-day experience, it uses Practical Law Dynamic Tool Set with CoCounsel to suggest clauses and solutions. Or if it needs to understand a statute in a state it is less familiar with, it uses Westlaw Precision with CoCounsel to pull answers to its questions. In both cases, this reduces the need to ask outside counsel for advice.

An invaluable assistant

Coleman likens Thomson Reuters CoCounsel to having a personal assistant that provides gentle prompts to ensure lawyers have considered all the angles. He says, “It's nice when you can't come up with an answer off the top of your head, and it's able to spark something to get you drafting in the right direction. It also provides a nice double check and cuts down on errors. It'll find things that you may have missed when you’re trying to read something cold.”

Century Communities’ legal team has found the solutions intuitive and easy to use. The more their legal team incorporates Thomson Reuters legal solutions into their working life, the more they discover the true breadth of what they can do. And they have learned that the more specific questions they ask of the tools, the better results they generate.

Getting AI to do some of the heavy lifting allows lawyers to be more productive in other areas of their work. In Coleman’s view, “If you're not spending your time reading stuff with a fine-tooth comb and you let it take the first shot at summarizing or reviewing, then you can focus on the exact sections you need to focus on. It adds time back to your day.”

While the company’s work is transactional, as a former litigator, Coleman sees the benefits of Thomson Reuters solutions for litigation work too. He has recommended it to several other legal industry contacts that work in this field. One of the company’s outside counsel acquired it for their firm to review emails on a particular litigation case. “He was telling me how much faster that process went without needing somebody to go through and read 10,000 emails,” says Coleman.

The fact that Thomson Reuters CoCounsel GenAI legal solutions are designed specifically for legal professionals is critical. Coleman worked closely to determine the potential and implementation of AI tools with the company’s IT Director, who was skeptical at first. Then, he points out, “When you see that it draws actual legal answers from Westlaw and Practical Law content, I think that puts people at ease and gives me confidence as well.”

That matters because all the efficiency gains in the world count for nothing if the outputs of AI are not reliable and trustworthy. With smart AI tools embedded in deep, extensive, verifiable legal expertise, Century Communities is leveraging the opportunities provided by Thomson Reuters innovative solutions.