Everywhere you are: Legal productivity with CoCounsel

The power of AI in legal practice

GenAI is unlikely to replace lawyers. That’s because you’ll always need a human with legal expertise to develop legal strategy, interpret the output of a GenAI tool, and ensure the organization or client is represented properly. GenAI will never have a duty of care to its clients or be able to argue in court.

Instead, lawyers who don’t use AI may find themselves sidelined by those who do. The efficiency and accuracy you can gain with the right digital assistance create competitive advantages more analog lawyers won’t be able to compete with.

An attorney with Valiant Law knows some legal professionals hesitate to dive into AI. “We have a fiduciary duty to spend our client’s money appropriately,” he says. “If I know there are tools out there to help me do my job better and more efficiently, then I should be using those tools.”

CoCounsel is a suite of AI-powered tools that help legal professionals handle a range of tasks quickly and accurately. Users can choose different capabilities to work with depending on the needs of their practice. These include:

• Foundational legal tasks like reviewing documents, writing correspondence, and preparing for a deposition 
• Research and know-how assistance with AI-Assisted Research on Westlaw Precision with CoCounsel and Practical Law Dynamic Tool Set
• Drafting capabilities to help you find a starting point, select clauses, detect deviations, and clean up formatting
• Collaboration tools for due diligence, document automation, and spend management

These capabilities integrate with other Thomson Reuters products for legal professionals, like HighQ, Westlaw, Practical Law, Contract Express, and Legal Tracker. CoCounsel also integrates with Microsoft Office 365 applications to simplify the way you work and reduce switching between applications.

The powerful CoCounsel bundle

These tools are each powerful on their own. Used in combination, they help legal professionals create more cohesive, efficient workflows — ultimately delivering better, faster legal services.

For instance, a corporate attorney managing multiple transactions can use HighQ as a central dashboard to track deal progress, upload and share documentation, and assign tasks to team members. Then, that attorney can use Westlaw Precision’s AI-Assisted Research to stay current on pertinent regulatory developments or precedents that could affect the deal.

Meanwhile, CoCounsel Core can highlight past deal summaries and playbooks to streamline current work. This connected setup promotes better decision-making, reduces project delays, and facilitates knowledge sharing.

Benefits of using CoCounsel

CoCounsel and other legal AI assistants increase efficiency for legal professionals, whether they’re working in the office, in transit, or from home. That’s because CoCounsel can rapidly analyze vast amounts of material and provide actionable insights and first drafts of work product. It’s not delivering final documents, but AI gets you close to a deliverable much more quickly than doing it yourself.

For Diane Haar, founder of Hawaii Disability Legal Services, using AI-Assisted Legal Research in Westlaw Precision with CoCounsel has allowed her to serve more people without increasing personnel. She’s aware of issues, such as hallucinations, but she’s also tech-savvy and knows how to use AI effectively. “AI is like working with another associate,” she says. “You always need to double-check the work. You still have to read the cases.”

The benefits of using CoCounsel include efficiency and time savings, accuracy and context, the ability to focus on the most strategic work, and alignment between clients and outside counsel.

Efficiency and time savings

CoCounsel can read and analyze vast quantities of material quickly and accurately. For instance, it will take a person one to four hours to review 100 pages of material, depending on the level of redaction and e-discovery coding. A GenAI tool like CoCounsel can review the same 100 pages and answer complex questions about them in minutes.

These are dramatic time savings in a busy legal practice. One knowledge management counsel in an AmLaw 200 firm used CoCounsel and told us, “When I was a junior associate doing M&A contract due diligence, I remember spending so much time in the data room doing manually what CoCounsel can do in minutes. This is really amazing stuff.”

J.J. Ball, legal counsel at Systemiq, agrees. He uses CoCounsel Drafting — part of the CoCounsel suite — which has been found to help decrease drafting time by up to 50%.

“There are substantial time savings when using CoCounsel Drafting,” Ball said. “When we are operating on an average turnaround time of three to four business days for a response, we can cut that down to one to two business days by utilizing the tool to get drafting work done.”

Accuracy and context

One of the challenges with widely available GenAI tools is that they are prone to making up an answer that isn’t fact-based. If you choose a legal AI assistant from a trusted source, you can have confidence that the output is accurate and secure.

We’ve found that GenAI can do some tasks even more accurately than a human can and in less time. For instance, extracting key obligations for 2,000 contracts takes more than 80 hours and is prone to a human error rate of 10% to 20%, according to ELLEgal. GenAI retrieves critical information with at least 96% accuracy and requires fewer than six hours of hands-on time to meet a 48-hour deadline. The AI assistant ensures high accuracy in identifying relevant sections and issues.

Focus on the most rewarding work

Legal professionals at all levels use CoCounsel to produce top-quality work with greater speed and accuracy. Because the legal AI assistant reduces hands-on time significantly, legal professionals can focus on the high-value work machines can’t do.

Many lawyers use their legal AI assistants to create concise summaries of legal issues and data sets for their clients and stakeholders. Then, they spend time with them answering questions and advancing the strategy rather than sweating over the documents and summaries themselves.

One litigation managing attorney told us that “CoCounsel helps improve the quality of our representation. It finds things in 2,000-page police reports and transcripts that humans miss. It doesn’t just read, it interprets — that’s the game-changer.”

Alignment between corporate clients and their law firms

Using GenAI in legal practice will likely accelerate conversations between clients and their law firms about the billable hour. As corporate legal teams get more efficient and take on more work in-house, law firms will feel the pressure to operate as efficiently as possible. They’ll also need to defend the value they provide in terms of legal strategy and expertise.

“Ultimately, law firms will need to align their practices with what their clients desire,” says Zach Warren, Manager of Enterprise Content for Technology & Innovation at the Thomson Reuters Institute and author of the Future of Professionals Report. “Those clients are looking for more cost-conscious providers — 48% of corporate legal respondents named improving internal efficiency as one of their top 5 strategic priorities, while 39% of clients cited reducing external spend as a top 5 strategic priority.”

Law firms and clients will want to navigate this shift toward AI-driven efficiency together. That might mean more fixed-fee arrangements, but it could also mean firms start using tools that increase efficiency without compromising results. They could reduce the time spent on legal research, discovery, or drafting and increase the time spent on case strategy and negotiations.

CoCounsel support for the remote and hybrid workforce

Beyond these universal advantages, CoCounsel also enables more effective remote work, particularly as the overall office and collocation culture of the organization shifts. CoCounsel can fill some gaps in remote work by:

• Being a sounding board. Ask questions and receive feedback, just like you would with a colleague. When you need to talk through an idea or issue, you may feel isolated when you can’t just walk down the hall to see who’s available. Use CoCounsel as a sounding board by giving it documents or queries and seeing how its analysis lines up with yours. You can ask it questions and see what new lines of thinking it opens.
  You can see how it summarizes documents or drafts deposition questions, for instance, and merge that with your own thinking. From there, you can move forward with confidence.
• Helping new attorneys get up to speed. Bridge the gap between new attorneys and experienced peers. For instance, Knowledge Maps in Practical Law Dynamic Tool Set help you quickly uncover the full scope of a new or unfamiliar topic. Say you’ve been asked to help create a social media influencer agreement.
  If this is a new task for you and you don’t have ready access to an expert, you can use a Knowledge Map to get started. It will point you to topics, practice notes, toolkits, and standard documents that reduce dependence on specific colleagues, lower time spent deciding where to start, and guard you against missing important information. It reduces the isolation you might experience without immediate access to peers and experts.
• Supporting responsiveness from anywhere. Maintain productivity, even with complex requests. A legal AI assistant helps remote attorneys respond quickly. You could use AI-Assisted Research on Westlaw Precision to provide a quick answer when someone wants to understand the significance of an incident or legal document. The conversational search prompts, results delivered with context, and supporting material for review will help you provide a summary of the legal issue in minutes rather than hours.

According to Andrew Bedigan, counsel at Larson LLP, “The ability to type a question, get an answer, and have all the supporting resources right underneath that answer so you can ensure it is supported by case law within Westlaw is very important.” By summarizing contracts or legal documents and validating the information quickly, professionals save time compared to manual review.

Even when associates or newer members of the in-house team are working in the office, they might not always have a more senior colleague there with them. This Thomson Reuters report found more senior attorneys have the flexibility to work remotely than newer attorneys. Equipping the team with a legal AI assistant can be especially helpful for those days when more senior team members are away.

Happy clients, stronger reputations

The CoCounsel suite of AI capabilities has the potential to transform the way lawyers work, both in the office and away from it. These tools create significant opportunities to gain efficiency and improve accuracy and outcomes. They can even strengthen relationships between clients and outside counsel as they create new ways to collaborate and enable a shift in pricing from hours-based to value-based.

While time savings bring greater efficiency to his practice, an attorney from Valiant Law Group knows he’s getting more than that. He is already very good at what he does; using CoCounsel makes him better. “When I can solve somebody’s problem quicker, not only is my client happy with me, but my reputation in the community is strengthened,” he says.

AI-powered legal work is about to hit an inflection point as legal professionals experience enormous time savings, reduced errors, and better consistency across their teams. That efficiency and reduction in manual tasks free up time to provide more strategic counsel and even greater value to your organization, leading to happier clients, stakeholders, and lawyers working where they want to, when they want to.

For more insights, explore how CoCounsel can transform your legal practice.