The complete AI solution for attorneys general

The People’s Lawyer has never had it easy. That may be even more true today.

Demands on state attorneys general have not lessened, and across the country their offices are facing staffing shortages, lack of resources, and a host of other intractable challenges — all at the very moment serving the public has never mattered more.

It does not have to be this way.

CoCounsel Legal provides your office, your state’s primary legal adviser and advocate for the public, with a means to get more and better work done faster. The next generation of CoCounsel Legal has been rebuilt from the ground up — engineered to work at the level of a senior associate. It is the only legal AI that reasons from Westlaw, Practical Law, and your organization's own knowledge. In short, it is Fiduciary-Grade AI™ built to the standard the profession demands.

CoCounsel Legal is a solution to many of the obstacles — a lack of staff, tight budgets, and tangled workflows — that prevent The People’s Lawyer from doing the best work possible. In this white paper, we will walk you through how CoCounsel Legal makes work better and more efficient, with applicable, true-to-life use cases that show rather than tell how it can improve work — and life — in any attorney general’s office.

Why CoCounsel Legal beats disconnected point solutions

Disconnected tools are not a mere inconvenience. They are structural bottlenecks, and they make it more difficult for you and your staff to meet your goals. Consider this:

• Disconnected tools make it difficult to uniformly conduct good work in an efficient way and thus limit your office’s overall productivity and ability to serve the public.
• Disparate tools for every task create needless expense. With vendor fragmentation, separate systems for research, document review, drafting, and collaboration create opportunities for error or mistranslation at every step.
• Everyone in your office can’t be equally good at using every tool. This difference leads to training burden, uneven quality in work product, and frustration among hard-working staff.
• Disconnected tools also fragment the context of legal work. Research may live in one place, matter documents in another, templates somewhere else, and prior office positions in yet another system. That separation makes it harder to maintain consistency, verify reasoning, and produce work product that reflects the standards and institutional knowledge of the office.

CoCounsel Legal solves these problems and more with a single AI experience that reasons across the matter. CoCounsel Legal develops the legal approach, works through each step, and delivers polished work product with citations. No prompt engineering. No skill selecting. No switching between tools. Let’s consider a hypothetical workflow familiar to most attorneys general.

Use case: Consumer protection investigation workflow with CoCounsel Legal

To illustrate what we talked about in the previous section, let’s look at a real use case, where research leads to document review and, finally, the drafting of a complaint. Think of an assistant attorney general (AAG) on your consumer protection team analyzing consumer protection statutes across 10 states, as well as guidance from the FTC. This is an assignment many in your office would be familiar with — and one with a lot of legwork that CoCounsel Legal can reduce.

The work below is described in stages, but CoCounsel Legal supports it as one connected matter experience, carrying the same legal authority, matter context, and reasoning through each step.

Stage 1: Research and guidance

At the outset of this workflow, your team needs to quickly and easily find the statutes and FTC guidance they need to thoroughly and efficiently review. Proper groundwork must be laid so that the project can have a strong foundation.

With CoCounsel Legal, your team can describe the task in plain language and have the tool develop the legal approach from the beginning. It reasons from authoritative Westlaw primary law, trusted Practical Law guidance, and your office's own matter materials. That work is saved within a CoCounsel Legal workspace, where the matter context is ready for the next step with no need to rebuild the foundation. This feature eases the burden of tedium and eliminates a transition where misses can too easily happen.

Furthermore, your staff can use KeyCite verification to ensure that every case they plan to cite is still good law before it becomes part of a public enforcement position. That is an invaluable benefit, given how high-profile and how important your office’s work is to the public.

All in all, your team working on this project can see significant research efficiency improvement thanks to CoCounsel Legal.

Stage 2: Document review

In the second stage of this workflow, your office receives 5,000 pages of business records, consumer complaints, and correspondence in response to a civil investigation demand — not an uncommon volume of material for what attorneys general offices handle with regularity.

Using CoCounsel Legal, your staff can employ AI document review, which analyzes the document production considering the legal approach already developed from Westlaw, Practical Law, and the matter materials in the workspace. There is no re-entry of search terms and no re-establishing of the legal framework, and timeline creation pulls key dates and events from documents automatically.

Since accuracy is critical above all else, the reasoning path is visible as it works, and every source is linked, so attorneys can click through and verify the work themselves. That ability is essential for public accountability.

Now CoCounsel Legal’s value is even more apparent. In this project and others like it, document analysis can be up to 68% more efficient, enabling your office to handle significantly more investigations without adding headcount.

Stage 3: Drafting

In the third stage of this workflow, your team drafts the complaint and creates a timeline of alleged violations.

Creating this complaint in CoCounsel Legal employs AI drafting grounded in trusted legal authority, Practical Law guidance, document review insights, prior office positions, and the matter-specific context already developed in the workspace — no exports, no switching systems. Furthermore, Practical Law consumer protection-complaint templates provide structural scaffolding, and every suggested citation and legal argument is anchored to authoritative legal sources that the associate attorney general can verify and stand behind.

In other words, the culmination of their work up until this point is a lot easier thanks to CoCounsel Legal, and they do not have to sacrifice any quality, accuracy, or integrity of work product.

CoCounsel Legal makes drafting as much as 50% faster. You read that correctly — 50% faster.

Stage 4: Coordination

It does not happen every time, but often, a project like this spans beyond a single attorney general’s office and becomes a multi-state coordination project with other attorneys general—no easy feat when the stakes are high, staff are busy, and there is precious little margin for error.

Here, HighQ — an add-on to CoCounsel Legal — really saves the day. It offers a centralized matter workspace with role-based access for all participating states, version control, and secure document sharing. Research, matter documents, drafts, and work product from CoCounsel Legal can be shared through the centralized HighQ workspace. That means participating states build on the originating office's work rather than duplicating it.

Seamless collaboration like this really pays off. With the add-on of HighQ, better cooperation means there is as much as a 48% gain in efficiency.

Efficiency comparison

CoCounsel Legal's trusted legal foundation — Westlaw, Practical Law, and your office’s knowledge

With any form of technology, the resources it draws from are an often overlooked but critical feature. The expression “garbage in, garbage out” comes to mind. Without a reservoir of solid, accurate, and up-to-date material, any given technology will struggle to be useful.

CoCounsel Legal does not have that struggle because it reasons from Westlaw and Practical Law, the trusted legal authority and expert practice guidance attorneys already rely on. For AG offices with heavy research needs like appellate, multistate analysis, and complex regulatory work, that foundation delivers critical capabilities.

Because CoCounsel Legal reasons from Westlaw and Practical Law throughout every matter — not just during research — insights from the earliest stages of a matter flow directly into document analysis and drafting. There is no re-entry of search terms, no re-establishing of the legal framework. The reasoning builds continuously, so your team can focus on what matters.

Use case: 50-state consumer protection analysis with CoCounsel Legal

Now, let’s take the previous workflow and kick it up a notch. As we do, we will see just how much value CoCounsel Legal provides, especially when it matters most.

This time, your office’s investigation into online marketplace fraud requires comprehensive statutory and case law analysis across all 50 states. Here is how CoCounsel Legal’s integrated approach saves that office effort, money, and that most valuable of all resources — time.

• Multi-state research that might take two to three weeks manually can be completed in two to three days.
• KeyCite verification ensures all authority is current and valid before it becomes part of a public position.
• Practical Law's consumer protection guidance provides enforcement strategy scaffolding.
• Because CoCounsel Legal carries the legal reasoning forward throughout the matter, research findings flow directly into complaint drafting — no re-work, no re-entry.

Think of how the smoothness and efficiency of that workflow would benefit the research-intensive aspects of your office. Attorneys general offices with appellate divisions, multistate coordination, or complex regulatory work gain particular value from CoCounsel Legal's capabilities. Beyond speed, there are meaningful quality improvements; a consistent analytical framework reduces the risk of overlooking jurisdictions or inadvertently relying on superseded authority.

AI-powered document work with public accountability

Lawyers view AI with a mix of enthusiasm and hesitation.

AI’s powers are nothing short of formidable, but consumer-grade tools have shown their limits. Attorneys general are users of AI at the same time they are regulators of it — they investigate its misuse, in discriminatory hiring practices, for example, or unfair algorithmic pricing, while simultaneously employing it to ease the burden on their staff and improve their work. That means attorneys general have to solidly justify their use of AI to their superiors, legislatures, and the public at large.

A major distinguishing factor is what a given AI tool was developed to do and for whom. Consumer-grade AI tools are opaque in their creation of work product and cannot provide the audit trails public legal work requires. That is why we still see headlines about disapproving judges reprimanding lawyers for citing nonexistent cases.

In case it needs to be said, your office simply cannot use an AI tool that hallucinates citations, invents case law, or leaves confidential information vulnerable to exposure. The risks there — professional, legal, and political — are too numerous and too great.

CoCounsel is not a consumer-grade AI tool. It was developed specifically for government legal work, grounded in Westlaw and Practical Law, which makes every output traceable to a specific, verifiable, authoritative source. It was built with input from government legal professionals and technology experts, and designed to meet the standard the profession demands.

CoCounsel’s purpose-built structure and guardrails are not just a nice-to-have. The AI regulatory environment has become significantly more urgent. In December 2025, President Donald Trump signed an executive order requiring the attorney general to establish an AI Litigation Task Force to identify and challenge state AI laws inconsistent with federal deregulatory policy. That executive order places AG offices directly in the middle of a live federal-state AI conflict.

The AG paradox: Policing AI while using it

Your office may be investigating algorithmic discrimination in hiring or deceptive AI pricing practices — while simultaneously defending your own AI adoption to skeptical legislators. This paradox demands a vendor who can survive public scrutiny. CoCounsel Legal's grounded AI architecture, reasoning from Westlaw and Practical Law with complete audit trails, is the solution you can defend in any political environment — because every output traces to verifiable, authoritative legal sources, not open-internet training data.

To put it simply, the choice of AI vendor is no longer purely a technology decision for AG offices. It is a legal and political one, and one that must be made with the utmost care.

Use case: Environmental enforcement

To provide another use case example, consider your office’s investigation into an industrial facility for alleged Clean Water Act violations. The team working on the matter has over 10,000 pages of compliance reports, correspondence, and internal memos — as well as a public that needs to know if its water is safe to drink. This is where the efficiency and trustworthy audit trail within CoCounsel Legal really demonstrates its value.

Here is how document review in a matter like this could unfold with CoCounsel:

• First, CoCounsel analyzes the full 10,000-page production and surfaces the most relevant documents — flagging discrepancies between reported and actual discharge levels, identifying internal communications acknowledging compliance failures, and extracting key dates into an automated timeline of violations.
• Then, every document flagged by the AI features of CoCounsel Legal is accompanied by an explanation grounded in Westlaw legal authority. This means your staff is not saddled with a list of documents but rather receives an AI-reasoned analysis they can evaluate, verify, and stand behind.
• Ultimately, this laborious project can be up to 68% faster thanks to increased efficiency and speed in the document analysis phase. That means it could take just over a week, rather than the month it might take otherwise.

The audit trail advantage

In the scenario described above, every AI decision is logged and traceable. Here is why that matters:

• When defense counsel challenges the basis for the investigation, your office can produce a complete audit trail showing exactly how evidence was analyzed, what legal authority grounded each finding, and how the enforcement decision was made.
• When a state legislature questions why your office spent resources on a particular enforcement action, the audit trail provides a transparent, documented record that consumer-grade AI tools cannot match.
• Last but far from least, your office can provide a transparent explanation of how evidence was analyzed with a full audit trail and legal authority citations.

The federal AI landscape: An urgent new dimension

In the December 2025 executive order requiring the U.S. Attorney General to establish an AI Litigation Task Force, that task force was specifically tasked with identifying and challenging state AI laws inconsistent with federal deregulatory AI policy.

As a result, AG offices that have enacted or are considering state-level AI regulations now face potential federal legal challenges — and no small ones, either. Every AG office that uses AI tools internally must be prepared to defend those choices in a politically charged environment where AI has become a partisan issue at the federal level.

Once again, the built-in safety and accountability of our tools demonstrate their value and necessity. CoCounsel Legal — built on more than 175 years of trusted legal content and designed with government-grade compliance from the ground up — is the AI platform that attorney general offices can defend in any political environment.

Security and compliance: Built for public accountability from day one

As both AI regulators and AI users, AG offices face unique scrutiny. CoCounsel Legal addresses this tension with government-grade security architecture that you can defend to legislatures, courts, and the press — not retrofitted compliance, but purpose-built public sector AI.

It is well worth mentioning specifically that CoCounsel Legal has intentionally designed compliance features that government clients will appreciate. They include:

Data sovereignty

Government data and citizen information is processed within approved jurisdictions, not routed through commercial cloud infrastructure designed for private-sector use.

Complete audit trails

Every AI action is logged and retrievable for FOIA compliance — a core architectural requirement, not an optional feature.

Role-based access controls

Permissions align with government security protocols, ensuring confidential investigation files are accessible only to authorized personnel.

Section 508 accessibility

Compliance for government users with disabilities, which is a legal requirement for government technology procurement and an inclusivity feature we are proud to offer.

Privacy Act compatibility

Data handling is built to meet federal Privacy Act requirements at the outset, not retrofitted to approximate compliance.

FOIA compatibility

Document management and audit logging designed with public records obligations in mind from the start.

Multistate coordination: HighQ to the rescue

CoCounsel Legal is a complete solution for the vast majority of attorney general office workflows, but the tools we make for efficient, smarter business do not end there. HighQ is an add-on for offices where multi-state coordination is a core operational reality.

Without dedicated coordination tools, multistate attorneys general litigation creates:

• Email chains with dozens of participants, creating noisy “conversations” where vital information is too easily lost.
• Version control chaos, resulting in a process anyone would be hard-pressed to call actually collaborative.
• Duplicate research across states and inconsistent work product in a resource-strapped environment where little effort can be wasted.
• Security vulnerabilities as sensitive documents move through commercial email systems.

HighQ is purpose-built for legal work with government-grade security standards that commercial collaboration tools like SharePoint or Dropbox cannot match. When added to CoCounsel Legal, HighQ creates a centralized coordination infrastructure where all research, documents, and drafts from CoCounsel Legal are accessible to all participating states in a single, secure workspace.

One thing to note is that HighQ does not replace CoCounsel Legal. Rather, it extends CoCounsel Legal's capabilities into a multi-state coordination context.

Use case: Multistate consumer protection litigation coordination

Let’s now look at another scenario many attorneys general will find very true-to-life. Fifteen AG offices are coordinating an investigation and possible litigation against a technology company they believe undertakes deceptive trade practices affecting consumers in all those states.

Without HighQ, the coordination in such circumstances quickly becomes nightmarish:

• Email chains with 50 participants across a dozen state offices quickly spiral out of control.
• Teams wrestle with control of master documents and struggle to know who has added what to the same complaint draft and whether it can be considered final.
• Duplicate research adds up as each state independently investigates the same legal questions, not realizing other team members are undertaking similar tasks.
• Different offices apply different analytical frameworks, creating mismatched work product of uneven quality and thoroughness.
• Security vulnerabilities rear their heads as sensitive investigation documents move through commercial email, quite possibly with the senders and recipients not knowing what risks they are creating.

With an integrated approach enabled by HighQ, the same circumstances are considerably less tangled and inefficient.

• HighQ’s centralized matter workspace offers role-based access for all 15 participating states, making it easier to understand who is responsible for what.
• The shared research repository means that Westlaw research from CoCounsel Legal is accessible to all participating states. With that visibility comes greater awareness and a significant reduction in duplicate research. All participating states can now build on the same authoritative legal foundation.
• The Document Library in HighQ comes with version control and audit trails. In other words, no more email chain chaos.
• HighQ’s workflow automation ensures complaint drafts move through a consistent review and editing process across all 15 offices. That means work product is of more consistent quality, and there are not 15 slightly different versions.
• Secure communication channels replace fragmented email threads, wiping out security vulnerabilities and coordination failures.

The efficiency gains that come with the use of HighQ are considerable. In a workflow as we have described, there can be up to a 48% collaboration efficiency improvement.

Practice areas where HighQ delivers the most value

The addition of HighQ to CoCounsel Legal delivers outsized value in several practice areas that will be most familiar to attorneys general.

Multistate consumer protection

Technology, financial services, and retail cases affecting consumers across many states with coordinated document productions and joint complaints

Antitrust enforcement

Merger challenges and market competition cases where multiple states join federal enforcement actions or file independent but coordinated challenges.

Opioid and pharmaceutical litigation

Complex, long-running matters with dozens of participating states, massive document productions, and settlement-coordination requirements.

Environmental enforcement

Cases involving facilities or practices that cross state boundaries, requiring coordination between multiple states and federal agencies.

The integrated ecosystem for multistate attorney general work

When multiple attorneys general are cooperating on the same unwieldy task, the integrated ecosystem of CoCounsel Legal keeps things streamlined and on-point.

• CoCounsel Legal brings together authoritative Westlaw primary law, trusted Practical Law practice guidance, and your organization's own matter materials — all of it accessible to participating states through a shared workspace.
• Multistate research with KeyCite verification, AI document review and drafting grounded in trusted legal authority, and practice-area templates are all part of how CoCounsel Legal works — not separate tools to be assembled.
• Complete audit trails satisfy each participating state's public accountability requirements.
• HighQ, an add-on, extends that foundation into a centralized matter management environment with secure document sharing, version control, and workflow coordination across all participating states.

ROI framework for every size of office

In addition to being purpose-built for legal work, CoCounsel Legal is a scalable solution that can be tailored to the size of an attorney general’s office. Here, we illustrate the value it provides, no matter how small or big the office is:

Small office

In the case of an AG office with around 75 attorneys, CoCounsel Legal can:

• Enable your office to handle 25 cases a year, rather than 15. That is a 68% increase in efficiency.
• With Westlaw Advantage, save 15% of the time spent on research. That adds up to 2,340 hours annually.
• Provide a fast on-ramp to proficiency of between six and eight weeks. If such a level can even be reached with disconnected tools, it may take up to six months.
• Save between $750,000 and $1.5 million each year thanks to efficiency gains and cost avoidance.

Medium office

When an AG office has around 200 lawyers, CoCounsel Legal proves its value with:

• Seamless coordination between teams, reducing friction and redundancy.

• Standardized work product, because every attorney in the office is reasoning from the same trusted legal foundation

• A savings of between $2 and $3 million each year thanks to reduced wheel-spinning and extraneous expenses.

Large office

For AG offices with 500 lawyers, CoCounsel Legal becomes an indispensable tool.

• CoCounsel Legal’s enterprise-scale standardization makes for work product of uniform quality.
• With the add-on of HighQ for multistate coordination, coordination tasks see a 48% gain in efficiency.
• Use of CoCounsel Legal saves between $5 million and $8 million each year.

Value when it matters most: The CoCounsel Legal advantage

The People’s Lawyer could use some help.

Budgets are not getting any bigger, staff cannot handle any more than they have already taken on, and the work — which is, of course, of great importance — does not stop coming.

The value of CoCounsel Legal is never more apparent than it is in an attorney general’s office. Its efficiency and productivity gains help ease the workload, and its collaboration tools reduce duplication and give staff more time back. Additionally, its security features and intentional, purpose-built structure allay any concerns about AI before they can even arise.

With CoCounsel Legal, The People’s Lawyer can do more of what they do best — and can do it faster, smoother, and more efficiently.

To learn more about CoCounsel Legal, request a complimentary demonstration today.