Doing it all with GenAI

Transformation is a broad term that describes how organizations adapt their practices to achieve optimum success. It can be a sweeping, upending change, or it can be a methodical, systematic conversion. For legal professionals, utilizing a fully integrated artificial intelligence (AI) package is a powerful way to enhance workflow and reform their daily practices.

When technology is disruptive, as with artificial intelligence, adapting to change isn’t optional. In today’s competitive legal environment, clients expect fast turnaround, limited fees on routine tasks, and comprehensive work products. AI can deliver on those expectations. As technology advances at an exponential rate, the benefits for early adopters will continue to multiply. Conversely, those who delay adoption will find themselves increasingly behind.

Fear not

According to 2024 research by Thomson Reuters , 81% of professionals believe they can apply generative AI to their work, and 79% of leaders expect GenAI to drive substantial transformation over the next three years. But stories of AI mistakes and hallucinations can give pause to legal professionals who depend on precision in their work.

Trust comes in AI training and management. If you’re using platforms trained on the universe of Wikipedia content and forums like Reddit, you are right to have reservations. But if you’ve used products like Westlaw, you’ve already used AI trained on industry-leading legal content, unmatched editorial enhancements, and over 150 years of legal industry expertise. The trust is in the training.

The introduction of ChatGPT has brought a fundamental shift in the kinds of things we comfortably ask AI to do. In the legal realm, that includes writing, rewriting, or summarizing documents; searching for clause language; or proofing modifications against an original. The most revolutionary change in workflow is allowing machines to assist in creating actual work product.

Consider these examples: 

• Reviewing a 100-page document could take a legal professional between one to four hours, depending on the level of redaction and e-discovery coding. GenAI can do the same task — accurately and completely — in about three minutes. That’s the kind of radical change that artificial intelligence can bring to a legal environment. 
• Extracting chief obligations from 2,000 contracts could take more than 80 hours, with a human error rate of up to 20%. GenAI can retrieve critical information with about 4% accuracy with less than six hours of hands-on time. 
• Lawyers offering alternative fee arrangements understand the difficulty in predicting the time required to complete even standard tasks. GenAI can accomplish common tasks like contract review predictably faster, so lawyers can give their clients a more accurate spend estimate.

Regardless of the skill, efficiency, and best efforts of the humans involved, GenAI can do these tasks faster. It’s like completing advanced mathematic equations by hand versus using a calculator. AI never tires, it never gets bored, it never gets interrupted. 

An integrated legal package

Legal work is detailed and precise, and interruptions in flow can cause delays and errors. If you’ve ever jumped from Word to client documents to SEC filings to a search tool, you probably wished for a more integrated flow. The essential parts of a lawyer’s work, including research, drafting documents, understanding existing law, and reviewing and summarizing, are most efficient within an integrated platform. An example is CoCounsel by Thomson Reuters. CoCounsel is the GenAI suite that powers the most advanced versions of Westlaw and Practical Law, as well as the advanced GenAI assistant for lawyers and other professionals.

A legal AI assistant

Legal assistants are invaluable team members who take on routine legal tasks, manage schedules and calendars, and provide a go-to point of contact for internal and external clients. Their work frees time for higher-paid attorneys and provides clients with accessibility. Legal AI assistants, harnessing the power of GenAI, can free time for both attorneys and assistants, making team efficiency even greater.

A GenAI-based legal assistant can automate essential work with groundbreaking thoroughness and speed. It can increase the quality of work by reading, analyzing, and summarizing documents at a postgraduate level. Given natural-language commands, a legal AI assistant like CoCounsel can accomplish foundational legal tasks, including: 

Review a document. Ask complex questions about a batch of documents or contracts and get nuanced answers with citations.

Compare documents. Rapidly identify similarities and differences between documents, including whether one agreement or settlement is more favorable to a given party.

Summarize documents. You can create succinct summaries of complicated documents for easy understanding.

Prepare for a deposition. GenAI can identify pertinent topics and questions to prepare for a deposition.

Search a database. Digital tools can quickly find relevant documents from a large database. 

Check contract policy compliance. To be sure your work is in compliance, a legal AI assistant can flag non-compliant language and provide automated redlines.

Draft correspondence. GenAI can create customized letters and emails for your review and finalization.

Create a timeline. Ask your legal AI assistant to create a timeline, and it will automatically assemble chronologies of events described in your documents. 

Utilizing a legal AI assistant is like having a paralegal at the ready to take time-consuming but critical tasks off your plate. 

Legal research

Just as online legal research evolved to replace printed law books, using generative AI within your online research is now the benchmark for efficient legal work. It starts with a well-trained and well-managed AI information platform, combined with expert content like that found in Westlaw Precision with CoCounsel . Powerfully elevate your research with more pinpoint precision, accuracy, and reliability: 

Jumpstart your legal research. Using an everyday language prompt, GenAI can help you discover important case attributes, enabling you to search, filter, and browse more efficiently. You can run a search that gathers all the potentially relevant cases and then filter your results by legal issue, fact pattern, motion type, outcome, and more.

Simplify claims research. Whether you are identifying claims, counterclaims, or risks to a client, a GenAI tool like Claims Explorer can help you find the strongest arguments for your matter and avoid missing those relevant to your case. 

Find hidden connections. GenAI can help you find connections between cases that are traditionally difficult to uncover. Products like KeyCite Cited With help to quickly identify related cases that have a pattern of being together, even if neither case cites the other.

The power of GenAI in legal research is in doing things that were previously impossible. Want more accurate results with lightning-fast speeds? The answer is yes with GenAI tools built on trusted content and architecture.

Actionable resources

A full-featured legal know-how tool can provide a distinct advantage to lawyers across practice areas and organization sizes. Such tools get lawyers up to speed quickly on unfamiliar matters and include checklists, how-to guides, templates, interactive matter maps, quick comparisons, and market analytics. Add artificial intelligence to this storehouse of information, as with Search & Summarize Practical Law , and finding answers becomes even easier: 

Accelerate your answers. All the knowledge in the world won’t help if you can’t access it easily. Ask natural-language questions to find answers quickly. Generative AI provides concise responses and highlights the resources used to generate them. The system retains the context of the original inquiry so that you can ask follow-up questions in the same request.

Boost efficiency. You don’t have to comb through hundreds of results pages when GenAI can do it for you. You receive summarized and synthesized search results based on expertise, connecting you to supporting resources for deeper insights. 

Rely on trusted content. Like other legal tools, a GenAI know-how resource is only as good as its content. Make sure it’s finding accurate answers based on intelligence that experts have created and curated.

Go back for more. You can download the entire conversation and supporting materials for a question. You can revisit your conversation history to find resources you’d like to retain for future work. 

Legal drafting

Take a critical look at your workflow. If there’s one place most lawyers could use GenAI, it’s when drafting documents. Research shows that lawyers spend between 40% to 60% of their day writing and rewriting documents, and much of this is repetitive from previous work. Finding a starting point is especially challenging. GenAI drafting tools like CoCounsel Drafting can make the drafting process more efficient. When you know you have a document to use as a template, GenAI can find it in your own repository based on keywords or clauses. Or, it can choose a new one from your integrated know-how resource. Plus, it aligns with firm or client playbooks for greater continuity — and you can do it all without leaving Microsoft Word. 

The process of improvement

GenAI offers a multitude of benefits to lawyers, such as boosting speed, providing more comprehensive results, and carving out more time for client-facing, high-strategy tasks. GenAI can profoundly affect a lawyer's workday, from core assistant skills and research to legal know-how and document drafting. Compounding this efficiency is when all of these tools work together. With the Thomson Reuters CoCounsel suite of GenAI tools, that means moving effortlessly among the products you already know and use regularly, including Westlaw, Practical Law, and the Microsoft Office suite. The time savings and familiarity in connecting these workflows are potent. 

Don’t wait. Your clients expect it; over 6,000 of your peers and competitors in the legal market are already leveraging GenAI solutions.

Don’t fall behind. The gap will only widen as GenAI continues to innovate and enhance work processes.

Don’t settle. Not all GenAI is created equal. Select a GenAI partner with the right technology, support, and expertise to ensure your success. 

GenAI isn’t coming to the legal field — it’s already here. It’s the fast, intelligent standard for today’s legal workflow. Enhance your workflow, boost efficiency, and stay ahead in the competitive legal landscape. Explore how CoCounsel can revolutionize your legal tasks today.