Corporate legal departments today face a dual challenge — managing a constant stream of contracts, policies, and regulatory requirements while also delivering timely, strategic guidance to the business. Too often, resource constraints, fragmented systems, and unreliable information force legal teams into a reactive posture — keeping up with demands but unable to fully shape organizational strategy.
AI is rapidly changing that equation. In fact, according to the 2025 Generative AI in Professional Services Report from Thomson Reuters, 17% of corporate legal departments have already made AI central to their workflows. The shift is clear — legal leaders are embracing AI not just to keep pace with demand, but to elevate their role as proactive business partners.
This white paper explores how CoCounsel Legal empowers in-house teams to take greater control of their workload, accelerate decision-making, and deliver more value to their organizations. By uniting trusted legal content, agentic AI, and your own documents in a single solution, CoCounsel Legal helps teams move from bottleneck to business enablers — providing transparent, verifiable answers that build confidence across the enterprise.
With CoCounsel Legal, corporate counsel can:
- Empower faster, smarter decisions, with 88% of users reporting greater confidence in their advice
- Accelerate deal-making and operations, drafting contracts up to 60% faster
- Streamline workflows for policies, disclosures, and due diligence, saving time and reducing risk
- Control costs by reducing reliance on outside counsel, while ensuring consistent, high-quality outputs
CoCounsel Legal positions the legal department as a strategic force; delivering better results in-house, today and into the future.
CoCounsel Legal speeds legal services delivery
Built by lawyers for lawyers, CoCounsel Legal from Thomson Reuters is a full-featured AI platform. It brings research, document review, and drafting into a single, efficient workflow, helping corporate counsel deliver more value in less time.
Deep Research
Deep Research mimics the practices of expert legal researchers to deliver thorough, reliable answers. It builds a step-by-step plan, leverages trusted Westlaw tools, and refines results as it works. An insurance provider, for example, can quickly compare how different states interpret “medical necessity” under Medicaid regulations — work that once took hours is now completed in minutes.
Guided Workflows
With agentic AI, CoCounsel Legal plans and executes multistep processes, gathering information and escalating decisions for review when needed. This feature allows legal teams to reach outcomes faster, without constant prompting.
Library
The Cocounsel Library is a collection of skills, workflows, and AI prompts for a broad range of legal tasks, created and tested by Thomson Reuters experts. Expert-written prompts remove the guesswork, so you can immediately get to work, making it easier for AI novices to start using CoCounsel. Curated prompts and workflows are supported by expert guidance for faster legal research, document analysis, and drafting results.
AI Legal Assistant
CoCounsel uses agentic AI and generative AI (GenAI) capabilities to streamline your work. It integrates Microsoft 365, Practical Law, and Westlaw to help with tasks like preparing depositions, reviewing contracts, and summarizing lengthy documents. Together, these capabilities streamline your department’s workflows, reducing time spent on repetitive tasks, and enabling in-house counsel to focus on higher-value strategic work.
From bottleneck to business enabler
CoCounsel Legal shifts legal teams from reactive support into proactive advisors by accelerating contract reviews, standardizing policies, and delivering reliable insights within Microsoft 365.
The result is more than efficiency. By freeing attorneys from repetitive tasks, CoCounsel Legal enables them to shift from reactive support to proactive business advising. Executives exploring a new market can receive a clear, well-sourced risk assessment before the next leadership meeting. Junior staff can rely on prompt libraries to handle routine drafting, while senior counsel focuses on high-impact strategy. Across the department, consistency improves as every document aligns with approved playbooks and authoritative Thomson Reuters content.
For corporate counsel, this means becoming a stronger business partner; delivering faster answers, reducing risk, and scaling legal capacity without increasing headcount. With CoCounsel Legal, the legal department evolves from a bottleneck into a trusted enabler of business growth — delivering standardized, high-quality outputs and credible, strategic advice that drives the company forward.
Efficiency gains across the legal team
The functionality of CoCounsel is impressive, and the results are stunning. According to the Leading the Future of Professional-grade AI report from Thomson Reuters, CoCounsel:
- Reduces the time it takes to perform legal work by as much as 63% for document review, drafting, and reviewing contracts
- Cuts down time needed to draft correspondence by 61%
- Helps corporate lawyers review 60% more contracts compared to previous methods
- Assists customers with finding the information they need 48% faster than with other methods
The legal team at Century Communities adopted CoCounsel and found that it created significant efficiencies. “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,” says Century Communities General Counsel Jarret Colemen. “A task that would previously have taken an hour was completed in five minutes or less.”
He and his team began by giving CoCounsel 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 company’s use of Thomson Reuters CoCounsel AI tools demonstrates how powerful they are at scale. In one example, the company was undertaking a merger and acquisitions (M&A) transaction with 87 different land contracts attached to it. They used CoCounsel 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.
The project was completed by a summer intern, demonstrating how CoCounsel simplifies document management and makes deal insights easy to access later.
From reactive to proactive: How one legal team uses CoCounsel
The legal team at a fast-growing tech company once struggled to keep pace with business demands. Vendor contracts piled up, executives requested market-entry guidance on short timelines, and compliance reporting deadlines loomed — all with limited staff and budget.
When procurement forwarded an urgent SaaS vendor agreement, CoCounsel enabled the attorney to analyze the contract, compare clauses to approved playbooks, and produce a redlined draft in minutes. Instead of slowing down procurement, legal delivered timely, risk-balanced guidance that accelerated the deal.
At the same time, leadership was considering entry into a new region. Rather than spending days piecing together regulations from multiple sources, counsel used CoCounsel to synthesize jurisdiction-specific rules, cite authoritative content, and draft a concise risk memo. For the first time, legal wasn’t scrambling. Instead, they were shaping strategy before the executive meeting even began.
Finally, quarterly compliance reporting tested the team’s capacity. With CoCounsel, junior lawyers produced standardized drafts aligned to regulatory requirements, while senior counsel ensured consistency across five jurisdictions. The team delivered on time, without increasing headcount or sacrificing quality.
By embedding CoCounsel across contract review, research, and compliance, the legal department evolved from a bottleneck into a trusted business enabler, scaling its impact and earning a seat at the strategy table.
How to implement AI in a corporate legal department
When it comes to implementing any new technology in a legal organization, the first question is often, “where do I start?” Then, “how do I get people on board?”
The good news is many professionals are open to AI. According to the Generative AI in Professional Services Report, more than half (55%) of all respondents categorize their sentiment toward GenAI in their profession as excited or hopeful. Meanwhile, the proportion who said they were hesitant, concerned, or fearful fell 12 percentage points over the past year. More than 60% also said GenAI actively should be used for work in their industry, and 89% said they believe they can see GenAI use cases in their own work.
That’s a great starting point for a department leader looking to bring CoCounsel Legal to the team. Still, adopting AI in a corporate legal department requires structure and intention. The Thomson Reuters step-by-step framework provides a useful roadmap. Below is how to apply it, with a focus on piloting and scaling AI effectively.
Getting started: Assess and learn
Begin with a workflow inventory to identify repetitive, high-volume tasks such as reviewing NDAs, analyzing vendor contracts, or drafting standard agreements. Conduct a gap analysis of skills and tools to understand the team’s readiness and infrastructure. Then, select one or two pilot use cases where risk is manageable, and output standards are clear. Early pilots should show tangible, quick wins.
Piloting: Build confidence and capture lessons
A strong pilot includes:
- Core users — general counsel, in-house attorneys — who face the pain points daily
- Legal operations or knowledge management to drive process consistency
- IT and security to validate data governance and compliance
- Optional business stakeholders — such as procurement and HR —to measure impact
Define success criteria up front; time saved, reduction in manual steps, accuracy, and attorney confidence. Use weekly debriefs to capture lessons learned; what worked, what training or workflow adjustments are required, and translate them into playbooks that can guide broader adoption.
From pilot to rollout: Scale with discipline
Move from pilot to rollout by standardizing prompts and templates, sharing results broadly, and expanding in phases from contracts to compliance and litigation support.
Strategic planning: Embedding value
As adoption grows, invest in training and change management so lawyers are comfortable with using AI and oversight practices. Formalize governance for ongoing compliance and model updates.
Current trends suggest that in-house attorneys will be willing to adopt AI tools like CoCounsel Legal. The 2025 Generative AI in Professional Services Report looked at usage trends across the legal industry. Law firms lead legal in terms of organizations “already using” GenAI at 28% compared to 23% for corporate legal. But the habit is stronger in corporate legal versus law firms. About 20% of users in corporate legal use AI more than once a day, compared to 12% of law firms users. This data suggests that corporate legal teams will see the benefit and adopt the tools when a clear organizational policy and use case are in place.
Partner with a leader in legal technology
Successful AI adoption in legal requires more than technology — it demands trusted content, proven expertise, and secure, responsible innovation. Thomson Reuters brings all three.
With Westlaw and Practical Law, maintained by 1,200+ attorney-editors, CoCounsel Legal integrates authoritative content to minimize inaccuracies and ensure confidence. Backed by 225 years of leadership in serving the legal profession, Thomson Reuters combines deep industry understanding with forward-looking vision.
The company has more than 1,000 AI and data science specialists who apply patented methods to professional use cases, rigorously testing products with legal experts. Security and responsibility are central — CoCounsel Legal is achieving SOC 2 attestation in 2025, FedRAMP certification in 2026, and already holds ISO 42001 certification alongside Westlaw products.
Finally, with more than $200 million invested annually and partnerships with Microsoft, Amazon, Anthropic, and OpenAI, Thomson Reuters is not just applying AI, the company is shaping its future.
Trusted industry-wide
The legal industry is not just experimenting on the fringes with AI, it is adopting it at scale, and CoCounsel is already a proven leader.
Today, more than 20,000 corporate legal departments, law firms, and the U.S. courts use CoCounsel — including across the federal system and 94% of state courts. This extensive adoption highlights its role as a trusted AI leader within the legal profession.
Corporate counsel can be confident they are joining a community of peers who are modernizing their legal functions with a trusted, secure, and widely adopted AI solution.
Deliver your best work, at scale
Corporate legal departments that embrace professional-grade AI don’t just increase efficiency; they elevate their entire function. By automating routine, time-intensive tasks and augmenting human expertise with AI precision, in-house teams free capacity to focus on strategic counsel, risk management, and business partnership.
The result is not a replacement for lawyers, but an empowerment of them. Counsel are empowered to deliver their best work at scale, with speed, confidence, and consistency. With CoCounsel Legal, corporate legal departments move beyond keeping up with demand. They become proactive drivers of business outcomes, trusted partners to leadership, and enablers of growth.
The future of corporate legal belongs to teams that embrace AI not as a tool, but as a strategic advantage. With the right partner and the right technology, legal departments can deliver better results in-house — today, and for years to come.
Ready to advance your legal department from a bottleneck into a business enabler? Get in touch to discover how CoCounsel Legal can help your team deliver faster, smarter, and more consistent results while elevating legal’s role as a strategic partner.
