More than half of professionals (53%) say their organizations are already seeing returns from AI investments.
That’s significant progress considering we’re just three years into the era of generative AI (GenAI) ushered in with the launch of ChatGPT. In those early days, professionals asked, “Have you tried AI yet?” and “How can we trust the output?” They wondered, “Will clients think AI can replace us?”
Now, “the future isn’t just about whether organizations should be adopting AI,” wrote Thomson Reuters CEO Steven Hasker in the Future of Professionals Report 2025. “It’s about how they can do so strategically to get the most benefit from advanced technology.”
Hasker went on to call out specific time savings and financial metrics that point to an AI-supported future. “Based on the current predicted pace of AI adoption,” he wrote, “legal professionals we surveyed expect to free up nearly 240 hours per year, up from 200 in 2024. This unlocks an average annual value of $19,000 per professional.”
Where are legal organizations and professionals finding time savings? For many, the first entry into using AI in their practice was through CoCounsel Legal from Thomson Reuters. CoCounsel Legal is a unified legal solution that supports legal research, document analysis, and drafting. This suite of AI-powered tools helps legal professionals handle a range of tasks quickly and accurately.
The power of AI in legal practice
AI won’t replace lawyers. You’ll always need human legal expertise to develop legal strategy, interpret AI output, and ensure proper client representation. AI can’t take on duty of care or argue in court.
Instead, lawyers who don’t use AI may find themselves sidelined by lawyers who do. The efficiency and accuracy gains from using the right AI tools create competitive advantages that lawyers using traditional methods can’t match.
An attorney with Valiant Law knows that some legal professionals are hesitant to dive into AI. “We have a fiduciary duty to spend our client’s money appropriately,” says attorney Safa Riadh. “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.”
Tools within CoCounsel Legal include:
Deep Research in Westlaw
Deep Research in Westlaw mimics the practices of expert legal researchers to deliver thorough, reliable answers. It builds a step-by-step plan, leverages trusted Westlaw content, and refines results as it works. A health care attorney, for example, can quickly compare how different states interpret “medical necessity” under Medicaid regulations — work that once took hours, now completed in minutes.
Guided workflows
Agentic AI plans and executes multistep processes, gathering information and escalating decisions for review when needed. This helps legal teams reach outcomes faster without constant prompting.
Library
The Library contains a collection of skills, workflows, and AI prompts for a broad range of legal tasks, created and tested by Thomson Reuters experts.
CoCounsel, the AI legal assistant
CoCounsel seamlessly integrates across Thomson Reuters products and Microsoft 365, streamlining how legal professionals work. Within familiar tools, CoCounsel helps with tasks such as preparing depositions, reviewing contracts, and drafting and summarizing documents — all backed by trusted Westlaw and Practical Law content.
The powerful CoCounsel Legal solution
These tools are powerful on their own. Used together, they can 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, they can use Deep Research to stay up to date on pertinent regulatory developments or precedents that could affect the deal.
Meanwhile CoCounsel Legal 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 Legal
CoCounsel Legal increases efficiency for legal professionals by rapidly analyzing vast amounts of material and providing actionable insights and first drafts. It doesn’t deliver final documents but does get you close to a deliverable much faster than traditional methods.
For Diane Haar, founder of Hawaii Disability Legal Services, using AI-Assisted Legal Research in Westlaw Precision with CoCounsel has made it possible for her to serve more people in need 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 Legal 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 Legal can analyze vast quantities of material quickly and accurately. For instance, reviewing 100 pages of material manually takes one to four hours, depending on redaction and e-discovery coding requirements. CoCounsel Legal can review those same 100 pages and answer complex questions about them in minutes.
These are significant time savings for 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, included in CoCounsel Legal, 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 AI tools is that they are prone to hallucinations. When you choose a legal AI assistant from a trusted source, you can work with confidence knowing that the output is accurate and secure.
We’ve found that AI can perform tasks more accurately than humans and in less time. For instance, extracting key obligations from 2,000 contracts takes more than 80 hours and is prone to a human error rate of 10 to 20%, according to ELLEgal.
AI retrieves critical information with at least 96% accuracy and requires fewer than six hours of hands-on time to meet a 48-hour deadline. Professional AI solutions ensure high accuracy in identifying relevant sections and issues.
Focus on the most rewarding work
Legal professionals at all levels use CoCounsel Legal to produce top-quality work with greater speed and accuracy. You can use AI to create concise summaries of legal issues and data sets for clients and stakeholders. This frees you to spend quality time answering questions and advancing strategy rather than preparing documents. By significantly reducing hands-on time, you can focus on high-value work that requires your expertise.
One litigation managing attorney explained how his organization used the AI legal assistant. “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.”
CoCounsel Legal supports on-the-job learning and development
While generational changes matter less today, legal organizations continue to adapt to evolving talent and remote work practices. CoCounsel Legal enables more effective learning and development while supporting distributed teams. Here’s how CoCounsel helps bridge these gaps:
- Be a sounding board. When you need to talk through an idea or issue with a colleague who isn’t immediately available, CoCounsel Legal serves as your sounding board. Share documents or queries and see how its analysis aligns with yours. Ask questions and discover new lines of thinking.
For instance, you can see how AI summarizes documents or drafts deposition questions, then merge those insights with your own expertise. This allows you to move forward with confidence. - Help new attorneys get up to speed. New attorneys benefit from tailored resources that fit their specific assignments – but legal organizations can’t create documentation for every scenario. A legal AI assistant helps bridge this gap. For instance, Knowledge Maps in Practical Law Dynamic Tool Set helps you quickly uncover the full scope of new or unfamiliar topics.
Say you’ve been asked to help create a social media influencer agreement. If this is new territory and you don’t have ready access to an expert, you can use a Knowledge Map to get started. It points you to relevant topics, practice notes, toolkits, and standard documents, reducing your dependence on specific colleagues and helping you avoid missing critical information. This puts comprehensive resources at your fingertips, allowing you to spend valuable time with partners and peers on feedback and strategy. - Support responsiveness from anywhere. Clients and business partners want fast answers. Professional-grade AI helps attorneys respond quickly to complex requests. Use Deep Research in Westlaw Advantage or Practical Law to quickly analyze incidents or legal documents. Ask questions in plain language, get contextual results, and access supporting materials for review all in one place. This feature allows you to deliver comprehensive legal summaries in minutes, not 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.” You can summarize contracts or legal documents and validate information quickly, saving time compared to manual review.
Happy clients, stronger reputations
CoCounsel Legal’s AI capabilities redefine how lawyers work. These tools help you gain efficiency, improve accuracy, and deliver better outcomes. You can strengthen client relationships by collaborating in new ways and shifting from hours-based to value-based pricing that reflects true impact.
While CoCounsel brings greater efficiency to his practice, an attorney from Valiant Law Group knows he’s getting more than just saved time. He is already skilled at what he does; using CoCounsel Legal makes him even 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 has reached an inflection point. Legal professionals are saving significant time, reducing errors, and achieving better consistency across teams.
This efficiency and reduction in manual tasks frees up time to provide more strategic counsel and greater value to your organization. The result? Satisfied clients, engaged stakeholders, and happier lawyers with the flexibility to work on their terms.
Explore how CoCounsel Legal can transform your legal practice today
