GenAI: Your legal research assistant, not your replacement

The buzz is on about legal artificial intelligence (AI) assistants. Are they coming for your job? No. Legal AI assistants are productivity tools that streamline tedious elements of legal work and free up time for strategy and counseling clients.

According to an attorney and user it, "lets me spend more time on what my clients hired me to do – think about their cases and then put my thoughts into action.” 

Legal organizations of all sectors and sizes are looking for a transformation, a way to reduce costs on the client side and still receive payment for the value they provide on the services side. And all legal professionals are looking to spend more time lawyering and less time sifting, compiling, or summarizing.

The industry is discovering that generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) offers significant support. With a trusted legal AI assistant like CoCounsel from Thomson Reuters, legal professionals can dramatically reduce the time they spend on review, analysis, drafting, and other time-intensive tasks.

Legal AI assistant defined

A legal AI assistant is a GenAI system that helps legal professionals to reliably delegate both simple and complex tasks. With CoCounsel as your legal AI assistant you can quickly and accurately complete tasks like the following:

• Review documents: Provide documents or contracts and CoCounsel will read every word to answer complex questions.
• Compare documents: Rapidly identify similarities and differences between documents, including whether one agreement or settlement is more favorable to a given party.
• Summarize documents: CoCounsel will read every word of your document to prepare a summary. You can even get an English summary of a non-English document.
• Extract contract data: Obtain precise information about the content of contracts
• Monitor contract policy compliance: Quickly identify noncompliant contract language and receive annotated redlines to bring the contract into compliance. 
• Draft correspondence: Use CoCounsel Core to draft legal correspondence, as well as questions for depositions and other proceedings
• Assemble timelines: Automatically assemble chronologies of events described in your documents.
• Prepare for a deposition: Easily identify pertinent topics and questions for investigative projects of all kinds.
• Search a database: Set up a database in CoCounsel Core. From there you can more efficiently search your organization’s documents.

CoCounsel sits on a foundation of authoritative content by Thomson Reuters; industry-leading generative AI legal capabilities, platforms, and security; and integrations into third-party applications and data.

“CoCounsel can provide you with a work product that I haven’t seen in any other platform,” said a senior attorney at the Employment Law Center of Maryland.

Benefits of a GenAI legal assistant

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 100 pages accurately and completely and be able to answer complex questions about them in three 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!”

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 based in fact. If you choose a legal AI assistant from a trusted source, you can have confidence that the output is more accurate and secure.

We’ve found that GenAI can do some tasks even more accurately than a human can, and in less time. 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.

“I can double-check it very easily and become confident very quickly that it is providing me with good, accurate information,” a partner at Fisher Phillips LLP said.

Enhanced productivity with a legal AI assistant

Legal professionals at all levels—from paralegals to partners in AmLaw 100 firms and Fortune 50 in-house teams—use legal AI assistants 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 rewarding work that machines can’t do.

Many lawyers use their legal AI assistant 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. And it doesn’t just read, it interprets—that’s the game-changer.”

User-friendly and reliable

Eighty-one percent of professionals believe that GenAI can be applied to their work. Within legal specifically, 58% of in-house counsel expect their outside law firms to use GenAI. GenAI is transforming the way work gets done. Using a comprehensive GenAI assistant like CoCounsel is a better experience for users than trying to learn different systems and move between them as the task demands.

CoCounsel customers find the AI legal assistant reliable and effective. They appreciate that it's integrated across Thomson Reuters solutions and select third-party products, showing up where they're already working.

How legal professionals use their assistants

Legal AI assistants have a wide range of uses for legal professionals. Getting the work done faster and with less human error will ultimately benefit the organization or client at the center of the matter. It also has benefits for you as the attorney. You can cut the tedium that sometimes comes along with legal practice and spend more time on true lawyering – finding the insights, crafting a strategy, counseling clients, and negotiating terms.

Over time, you’ll find that you’re able to enable higher growth by providing faster, higher-value service with CoCounsel. And you might enjoy your work even more.

“CoCounsel is an outstanding product,” said an immigration attorney at Siskind Susser PC. “It’s like having an associate lawyer ready to take on an endless number of delegated tasks and deliver it all in minutes.”

Legal AI assistants for transactional law

Transactional attorneys are often sifting through mountains of data looking for issues, patterns, and anomalies. CoCounsel Core helps with document review and analysis, contract drafting and management, and compliance across transactional practice areas. There are some key tasks transactional attorneys look to CoCounsel for. These include:

Automate contract review

CoCounsel can search a set of contracts for relevant clauses. For instance, we had CoCounsel review 1,732 pages of contracts to determine compliance and redline them as necessary. In general, manual contract review is prone to a human error rate of 10% to 20%. Using CoCounsel reduced the hands-on time for the attorney to less than six hours and retrieved the information with about a 4% error rate.

Identify risk and ensure compliance

CoCounsel finds relevant clauses, contracts, and risks when comparing contracts to required policies. You can ask it complex questions about a batch of documents and receive nuanced answers complete with citations. This helps you identify your risks and look for opportunities to improve compliance.

Summarize complex legal documents

Interpret and condense critical data faster than humanly possible – without missing key details. This can help with your understanding of the document, but it can also help you explain relevant materials to your client or colleagues and brief them on your strategy based on the elements of the document.

Transactional attorneys also use CoCounsel to track critical dates and deadlines, create risk assessments and red flag reports, re-paper contracts, redline third-party contracts, evaluate potential liability, and easily find contractual precedent.

How litigators use a legal AI assistant

What do all these tasks mean for a litigator? How can you put them to use on your matters?

Legal research

Identifying and understanding the relevant cases, codes, and court documents is critical to your case strategy, drafting, and negotiation. Instead of spending hours reviewing and interpreting legal documents, ask CoCounsel for a summary in simpler terms and get it in a fraction of the time. This summary can help you communicate with clients and colleagues as you explain your approach and their options.

Document review and e-discovery 

This is one of the most expensive aspects of litigation. CoCounsel helps litigators work smarter and faster – with greater thoroughness and accuracy – during discovery, cutting time and costs.

You can upload a set of documents into a database and ask the GenAI legal assistant to identify documents and synthesize information. For instance, you can ask questions about your materials and get a fast analysis that helps make sense of them, allowing you to draw meaningful conclusions and build stronger cases or conduct more thorough internal investigations.

You can also review document production requests to determine which documents are responsive to specific questions or request a first draft of answers to interrogatories.

Deposition preparation and review

Depositions generate a lot of information, from the preparation to the review. You can develop a winning strategy for your deposition in a fraction of the time. Simply provide information about your deponent and case and receive a list of topics with pointed questions.

Come out of depositions able to quickly identify and summarize key points. A legal AI assistant can review deposition and trial transcripts, pointing you to all testimony or objections on a specific issue or that pertain to a specific question. You can also use it to summarize key testimony in deposition and trial transcript.

Drafting routine motions and pleadings

Knowing where to start is often the trickiest part of a drafting project. You can use CoCounsel to search through prior work product and quickly find briefs or documents addressing a particular topic, client, or claim.

Stringent security to protect your data

Using a legal AI assistant means putting sensitive data in someone else’s hands. Or at least in their cloud servers. Thomson Reuters has established strict security and privacy practices that protect your data and the confidentiality of your sensitive work. Some of these practices include:

• Customer data is never used to train large language models
• All user access is protected by industry standard, role-based authentication
• Perimeter firewalls block unauthorized ports and protocols
• Customer instances and data are logically separated
• All access to data sources, queries, and results is logged and audited

Join the movement

GenAI will augment legal professionals' work, not replace them. It could be said, though, that legal professionals who use GenAI will have an advantage over those who don’t. A legal AI assistant helps lawyers be more efficient, cut costs, and spend more time solving legal challenges, rather than sorting and sifting through big sets of data and complex documents.

With 79% of leaders expecting GenAI to drive substantial transformation over the next three years - and 31% expecting it in less than one year, the industry is moving fast. Thomson Reuters is committed to leading the movement, with ethical and practical AI solutions that continue to enable professionals to apply their wisdom while streamlining mundane tasks.

A legal AI assistant like CoCounsel can revolutionize the way you work. Future generations won’t recognize the way we work today. The lawyers of tomorrow will be even more efficient and have access to even more powerful data and insights at their fingertips.

We’re building that future today, with industry leaders like Thomson Reuters innovating alongside our customers, building the tools that enable even greater efficiency in the practice of law. You can help build this future by embarking on your own GenAI transformation.