How AI-powered discovery rewrites the economics of litigation

The economics of litigation often depend on how effectively a legal team manages the time and costs of discovery. It’s more than just a line item; it’s the main factor influencing schedule, expenses, and strategy.

Discovery is critical to client outcomes and it often means navigating massive volumes of data to find what matters. With millions of documents, emails, chats, and metadata to review and analyze, traditional reviews can be slow and prone to errors.

As clients’ digital presence expands — including public activities like blogs, websites, and social media, as well as internal data such as texts, messaging, and code — the amount of information available for discovery continues to increase.

AI-powered litigation tools speed up discovery by scanning diverse data sources, flagging relevant communications, and surfacing patterns that might indicate fault. By putting technology to work on the most detail-driven tasks, attorneys move toward strategy faster and firms improve profitability across their entire litigation portfolio.

Transforming discovery workflows

AI-powered legal tools change how firms handle the heavy lifting of a case. Using natural-language processing and large-language models trained on legal datasets, these platforms can sort through documents at speeds that would be impossible for human reviewers alone.

Because AI can process both structured and unstructured data, legal teams get a more complete picture of the evidence. By ranking documents by relevance, AI directs attorneys to the most important material first, speeding up review and freeing them to focus on analysis rather than manual sorting.

Rapid batch analysis of documents

By “batching” thousands of documents in just minutes, AI-powered discovery tools can identify entities, dates, issues, and relationships, thereby providing the factual backdrop of a matter long before a manual review could. Attorneys can begin shaping case strategy almost immediately — which is invaluable for cases with tight timelines.

As more documents become available, they can be quickly classified, indicating possible relevance and surfacing irregularities that might warrant closer review. This capability reduces late‑stage surprises and allows the legal team to be more proactive in case management.

Automated extraction of key facts, issues, and evidence

AI-powered discovery tools convert unstructured data into structured intelligence by extracting critical facts, summarizing communications, and surfacing hidden patterns. For example, they can detect unusual transaction volumes, communication spikes, or documents that deviate from standard business practices.

By simplifying the creation of timelines and issue maps, these AI tools give litigators an immediate understanding of the case's story arc. This step allows them to bypass manual data entry and move to strategic analysis, significantly improving accuracy by minimizing manual extraction and case-file organization.

Quick generation of defensible discovery responses

Defensible discovery must be grounded in documentation. AI streamlines the creation of defensible discovery responses by generating well‑founded drafts drawn from the underlying documents and prior filings. By removing the blank-page barrier, AI can give legal professionals a starting point to build on, ensuring responses begin with an evidentiary foundation rather than a generic template.

By quickly generating defensible discovery responses, legal teams can consistently meet deadlines while maintaining a legally coherent, evidence-driven position.

Reducing routine workloads

Legal AI acts as a smart filter, tagging documents by importance or topic. It also handles routine groundwork by creating timelines, summaries, and fact sheets. This head start makes deposition preparation more focused. It helps teams identify which witnesses matter most, which lines of questioning will be productive, and where vulnerabilities or leverage points may exist.

AI-powered tools also distill depositions and document sets into concise summaries, all while drafting potential counterarguments for motion practice. They allow legal teams to stress test these arguments, strengthen weak points, and shape a more cohesive position. This shift improves motion practice and the overall quality of the legal strategy.

Strategic intelligence that builds a competitive edge

As legal AI moves from optional to indispensable, many firms see it as a strategic asset. Thomson Reuters CoCounsel Legal is a comprehensive AI solution built specifically for legal work, supporting attorneys and legal teams with research, document review, and analysis while maintaining alignment with legal standards.

CoCounsel Legal combines generative and agentic AI with authoritative content from Westlaw and Practical Law, validated by a team of more than 2,500 expert attorney-editors who ensure outputs are grounded in verified, dependable sources. Litigators can reduce time spent on document-review-related tasks by an average of 55%, which translates to 240 hours saved annually per attorney — equivalent to six full work weeks.

“It levels the playing field and gives us a huge competitive advantage, especially against other defense firms that aren't using technology like CoCounsel," says Ross DiBono, a shareholder at Zarwin Baum.

Work confidently with discovery gap analysis

Lawyers can use CoCounsel Legal to identify gaps in discovery or conflicting testimony. Litigators can leverage these findings to justify targeted follow-up production requests and subpoenas, or to provide concrete evidentiary support for their positions during meet-and-confer sessions.

Assurance through validation and verification

Even the best AI output needs human review. CoCounsel Legal generates well-founded drafts of discovery responses based on underlying documents and prior filings, which attorneys review, refine, and approve. Every output is linked to the source material, enabling attorney validation at the exact document location. This verification-first design reflects a core professional obligation. As practitioners note, they have an ethical duty to double-check everything. 

CoCounsel Legal also provides built-in authentication through features like dual-screen footnoting and source tabs that allow attorneys to instantly validate answers and catch misquotes or suspect citations before they reach the courtroom. Its citation verification system links directly to the precise passage relied on for an argument. Because it’s fully integrated with Westlaw content, CoCounsel Legal gives legal teams confidence that their citations to legal authorities are accurate.

Addressing billing pressure

What legal client wouldn’t want lower bills and faster turnaround? AI can provide both. Some firms fear that accelerating discovery could mean fewer billable hours. But not according to firms using CoCounsel. Nolan Thomas of Thomas & Thomas LLC says, “While these tools are an investment, they allow us to manage 10 more clients a month.” That’s a meaningful amount of business for the two-attorney firm.

Jessica Klander, Chief Operating Officer of Bassford Remele, agrees. “I think one of the misconceptions I hear from people who are hesitant to take on technology tools is that they need to bill that time. The reality is that, if you give your client work faster, they send you more in return,” she says.

Spending too much time on discovery or motion practice can undermine a matter’s economics with write‑offs and billing disputes. Flat‑fee arrangements for tasks like drafting complaints or motions are becoming more common, but they only work when firms have consistent, standardized workflows.

Meeting tight deadlines

Litigation moves quickly — and deadlines can completely change the direction of a case. Missing even one can lead to serious consequences, such as sanctions, dismissal, or allegations of malpractice. For attorneys, paralegals, and staff, maintaining organized timelines isn’t just a best practice; it’s a core part of protecting clients and keeping a case on solid footing.

CoCounsel Legal helps speed up the creation of case timelines and streamline deposition and hearing preparation, thus reducing administrative strain. These efficiencies create more consistency, helping legal teams estimate the time needed to meet a deadline. That efficiency then translates into stronger profitability and improved client service, as routine tasks become faster, more consistent, and less resource intensive.

Strengthening integration and oversight

CoCounsel Legal integrates seamlessly with Microsoft 365 and other firm‑critical systems. That means litigators don’t have to jump between platforms or rebuild work in multiple places. Drafts, research, timelines, and summaries flow directly into everyday tools like Word, Outlook, Teams, and SharePoint. Nothing gets lost in translation and no time is wasted copying, pasting, or reformatting.

This kind of integration also keeps matters organized. Documents stay in the right folders, communications stay linked to the right cases, and collaboration happens in real time without extra steps. The result is a smoother workflow and better communication among the team.

Compliance with ethics and security standards

Strong security and ethical safeguards are vital in legal discovery. Free, consumer-grade tools often rely on user data for training, creating risks that don’t align with legal security requirements. But CoCounsel Legal is built with SOC 2 and ISO certifications to ensure confidentiality. Strict data-use limits prevent privileged material from being used to train models or shared with other users. These protections address one of the biggest concerns in handling sensitive documents with AI.

Essential infrastructure for modern litigation

Using AI for discovery is becoming a daily practice in litigation firms. Incorporating these tools now bolsters a firm’s competitive standing and reduces learning-curve hurdles as the technology advances.

Building a firm’s digital infrastructure with intention means embedding systems, training, and culture that support success today and in the future. Platforms like CoCounsel Legal that reliably accelerate routine work while integrating with other workflow tools are an important part of a modern tech stack.

Your next move: A practical path to AI adoption

For litigators, the path to adopting AI begins with a focused self-assessment:

• Start by defining use cases by identifying the workflows where time loss is highest, such as document review or discovery drafting, and prioritize those first.
• Confirm legal expertise and training by selecting a platform purpose-built for litigation, not repurposed from general-purpose AI.
• Ensure data security and confidentiality by verifying SOC 2 and ISO certifications and confirming that the tool never retains firm data to train its underlying models.
• Determine accuracy and reliability by asking whether every output is grounded in authoritative legal content with source citations included.
• Address ethical concerns and potential biases by confirming the provider maintains a dedicated trust team and a transparent code of ethics governing AI output.
• Finally, evaluate costs, scalability, and integration with existing workflows to ensure the solution expands with your practice within the tools attorneys already use.

After your law firm has completed a self-assessment for AI solutions, it’s time to think about which questions to ask a potential AI provider. Download our comprehensive worksheet to learn more about choosing the right AI partner for your firm.

Partnering with Thomson Reuters provides firms with AI capabilities and decades of embedded legal expertise — enabling attorneys to proceed with confidence rather than caution.

Learn more about CoCounsel Legal, AI purpose-built for the demands of litigation and backed by the authoritative content attorneys rely on to win.