Perfection is the expectation, but time is the constraint
Legal professionals face lofty, and seemingly impossible, expectations; every answer must be accurate, citations must be current, and analysis must be bulletproof. Yet the desired output in legal research often stretches far beyond what time allows. Rising caseloads and increasing complexity leave little room for mistakes, while traditional methods such as shuffling among fragmented platforms, toggling tools, and manually verifying findings consume valuable time and introduce risk. Legal professionals need a way to go beyond conventional research methods. They need a way to perform deep research that’s both fast and reliable.
Layered onto this pressure is unease about AI’s role in legal research. AI tools, particularly those that use generative AI (GenAI), frequently rely on public web data rather than validated legal content. This can lead to AI hallucinations that deliver fabricated or misleading citations. One California judge labeled such output “bogus AI-generated research,” imposing sanctions after nonexistent cases were cited. In another case, an attorney was fined $5,500 and required to attend AI ethics training after presenting fictional AI-generated caselaw. Media coverage and professional scrutiny underscore a broader concern: AI can offer speed, but unless it also offers built-in safeguards, it may compromise accuracy and undermine trust.
Lawyers are increasingly adopting AI for straightforward tasks such as case summarization or drafting, reflecting the pressure of rising workloads. Yet caution persists, since many tools can generate results that sound convincing but are not supported by reliable sources.
A new standard for legal research
If skepticism about AI is understandable, it also points to what legal professionals need — an AI research tool that is explainable, verifiable, and designed specifically for legal work. That’s what Deep Research, grounded in Westlaw and available in CoCounsel Legal, provides.
Deep Research is an agentic AI capability that emulates how expert legal researchers operate. Unlike traditional AI tools that simply generate answers, an agent takes action on your behalf; it sets goals, selects tools, and navigates multiple steps to complete a task. Deep Research formulates a plan, executes a multistep process using trusted tools, adjusts its approach based on new findings, and produces a detailed report with cited authority and a clear record of its process. Because an agent must make independent decisions at each step, it depends on high-quality, reliable content. That’s why Deep Research is built on Westlaw.
Foundation
Deep Research draws on Westlaw’s verifiable content and tools including KeyCite, the Key Number System, and professionally maintained annotated statutes. These sources are supported by more than 1,200 full-time attorney-editors who continually curate, validate, and organize the content legal professionals rely on. This jurisdiction-specific, comprehensive material ensures that every output is grounded in valid, up-to-date law. These resources are not available in generic AI tools, which often rely on unverified web data. By building on Westlaw’s trusted foundation, Deep Research delivers results using the content and tools legal professionals already depend on.
Transparency
Each report includes a research log that outlines which questions were explored, what sources were used, and what conclusions were reached. Legal professionals can see the steps taken and review citations directly, allowing them to evaluate and refine results based on their own expertise. As Colleen Nihill, Chief AI & KM Officer at Morgan Lewis, explained in a recent Thomson Reuters announcement, “Deep Research stands out for its ability to reason through legal questions rather than simply return search results. When faced with a complex issue, it can generate a research plan, explain its logic, and deliver a structured report. This level of transparency is essential to maintaining the oversight and trust lawyers need to confidently adopt AI in practice.”
Legal research questions are often more complex than they first appear. The right answer can depend on factors like jurisdiction, context, or competing interpretations. Deep Research is designed to navigate this complexity by reasoning through ambiguity in collaboration with the user. It asks clarifying questions and adapts its research plan based on user inputs and new information uncovered during the process.
Human expertise
Deep Research was developed through close collaboration between legal and technical experts. It was built in partnership with attorney-editors and extensively tested by our AI and product teams. This cross-functional development approach ensures the system reflects how legal professionals actually think and work. It also reflects more than 225 years of legal expertise applied to modern legal research, and extends the scale and credibility of Westlaw, which is relied on by more than 48,000 law firms and 6,000 government agencies, including many courts across the U.S. federal court system.
How Deep Research works like a legal expert
AI-Assisted Research marked an important step forward by helping legal professionals quickly generate answers from trusted sources. Deep Research builds on that foundation by advancing from fast answers to complete reasoning and structured task execution. It’s built on an agentic AI framework, meaning it not only executes tasks but actively manages them, planning, adjusting, and delivering results with clear logic at every step.
When a user enters a legal research question, Deep Research doesn’t jump straight to an answer. It creates a multistep plan tailored to the question. It determines which tools and content types to use, whether case law, statutes, or secondary sources. Then it runs iterative searches, evaluates the relevance of results, and builds a synthesis, revisiting prior steps when new insights emerge.
For example, if a statute is central to a question, Deep Research uses Westlaw’s exclusive tools, such as the Key Number System, KeyCite, and professionally marked-up statutes and annotations, to explore related authority. It recognizes KeyCite validity signals, like red or yellow flags, and factors them into its analysis. This allows the agent to determine when a case might be overruled or treated negatively. Because it works across Westlaw’s curated content set, Deep Research can identify relevant insights, filter out noise, and guide its research accordingly.
This self-correcting, logic-based process mirrors how expert researchers work. It’s not just about finding what exists — it’s about building an answer that makes sense, holds up to scrutiny, and reflects the complexity of the law. By reasoning through multiple stages of research and incorporating new information along the way, Deep Research helps legal professionals evaluate both the results and the logic behind them.
Where legal teams find value, fast
Legal research is rarely a one-size-fits-all task. Some questions require deep statutory interpretation. Others demand a thorough analysis of the law to support a legal argument or a rapid assessment to inform a client conversation. Deep Research is built to flex across these contexts, delivering fast, high-quality outputs for the types of questions legal professionals face every day.
Whether you’re working in a law firm or a corporate legal department, Deep Research accelerates your ability to generate insights, identify risks, and support decision-making with confidence.
Common ways legal professionals use Deep Research:
- Early case assessment. Identify strengths and weaknesses of a potential case based on the current state of the law.
- Memo development. Turn a complex legal question into a structured, citation-backed framework that supports drafting, team discussion, and strategy.
- Rapid response. Assess the legal landscape and respond quickly to a client or colleague.
- Case strategy. Expand your strategy for winning a case by uncovering fresh angles that were previously too time-intensive to explore.
- Motion practice. Identify potential arguments with supporting authority and counterarguments, with authority that may need to be distinguished.
- Statutory interpretation. Understand how courts interpret statutory language and how a statute is applied in practice.
In each of these scenarios, Deep Research saves time and augments your expertise with precision, speed, and transparency, so you can focus on crafting and refining your work.
Start simply, build confidence quickly
Legal professionals don’t have time for complex onboarding or steep learning curves. That’s why Deep Research is designed to be intuitive from the start. You can begin with a single research question and compare the results to your current process. From the first use, many professionals notice how it streamlines research and supports a faster path to higher-value work.
There’s no need to reengineer your workflow. Deep Research complements the way you already work, offering structure, clarity, and speed without requiring major changes. It integrates with familiar Westlaw content and tools, so you don’t need to learn a new system or abandon the processes you trust. Instead of switching between fragmented platforms, you can ask your question once and follow the steps through a single report. Because the research process is documented clearly, you retain visibility and control over the results.
It’s also flexible enough to support both quick lookups and more complex projects. Whether you’re assessing a motion, preparing for a client meeting, or conducting a jurisdictional review, Deep Research can surface citations, explain reasoning, flag conflicting authority, and suggest clarifying questions to guide next steps.
As with any new tool, trust builds through use. Deep Research makes that process straightforward by showing its reasoning step by step and providing citations that can be independently verified. Each interaction becomes an opportunity to test the output against your own expertise, refine the question, and see how the system adapts. This process helps professionals grow more confident in the answers, and in how those answers were developed.
The best way to start is simple — ask a real question. Submit an issue you’re actively working on and see what Deep Research returns. Each use provides an opportunity to evaluate how it supports your workflow and where it adds value.
The future of legal research is here
Deep Research provides a smarter way to meet the legal profession’s demand for precision.
Deep Research is available in Westlaw Advantage, which is part of CoCounsel Legal, our most advanced AI legal solution to date. CoCounsel Legal moves beyond single-task automation to deliver guided legal workflows that combine reasoning, transparency, and human oversight. It integrates research, drafting, and document analysis into one seamless experience, creating continuity across tasks and reducing the need to move among multiple tools.
The demand for perfection will never change. What can change is how you meet it. With Deep Research, you gain the speed, structure, and trust you need to move confidently from research to strategy.
Learn more about Deep Research in Westlaw Advantage within CoCounsel Legal.
See how Deep Research fits into your workflow by requesting a free trial.
