To drive better results, use a legal AI assistant integrated where you work

Legal  AI assistants promise to help legal professionals do their jobs more quickly and accurately. AI can streamline workflows, enhance decision-making, and handle time-consuming, low-skill tasks. These tools best accomplish this when integrated with the tools professionals already use — from legal research tools like Westlaw, to know-how tools like Practical Law, to the standard Microsoft 365 suite.

An AI assistant is an artificial intelligence system helping legal professionals reliably delegate simple and complex tasks. CoCounsel is the virtual assistant from Thomson Reuters. It handles a variety of legal tasks in a single, user-friendly interface. With CoCounsel as your virtual legal assistant, you can quickly and accurately complete tasks like:

• Finding relevant documents within a large database.
• Condensing long, complex documents into succinct summaries.
• Identifying and extracting critical information from a large set of documents.
• Generating drafts of legal documents.
• Tracking changes in laws or regulations.
• Preparing for a deposition.
• Searching a database.
• Reviewing documents.
• Extracting contract data.
• Monitoring contract policy compliance.
• Drafting correspondence.
• Assembling timelines.

According to Darth Vaughn, Managing Director of Legal Operations and Litigation Counsel for Ford Motor Company, “This technology has the potential to revolutionize the way lawyers practice. The value of CoCounsel is quickly becoming evident across a range of our practice groups."

Integrated with tools you already use

Thomson Reuters CoCounsel is the only generative AI (GenAI) legal assistant at your side everywhere you work, from DMS, to Microsoft 365, to legal research. CoCounsel consolidates tasks across platforms into efficient, end-to-end workflows, then applies the power of its industry-leading GenAI legal skills to complete them more quickly, thoroughly, and accurately. Trained on Westlaw and Practical Law — the largest and most trusted collection of primary and secondary sources — CoCounsel reliably amplifies your expertise, freeing you for higher-value work so you can transform your practice and deliver superior service. CoCounsel increases efficiency by keeping your work connected, minimizes errors by automatically shepherding documents across steps, and reveals crucial connections by tracking and "remembering" key information from across your entire workstream.

At the Microsoft Build conference in 2024, the Thomson Reuters team demonstrated how a legal department and its outside law firm used CoCounsel and Copilot to respond to new regulations aimed at addressing forced labor in supply chains. In the scenario, CoCounsel used a Copilot extension in Microsoft 365 to significantly expedite regulatory compliance tasks.

A legal professional who wants to track changes to laws and regulations could take the following steps:

• Identify relevant changes. Set up alerts for specific topics, jurisdictions or industries in Westlaw Precision. Use Copilot to set up folders in Outlook to manage the alerts and use Teams to summarize the alerts you receive.
• Analyze the impact of the changes. Use CoCounsel Drafting to prepare impact assessments and store your updates in HighQ, where they can be linked to specific departments or projects. Employ Excel to track impacts across departments
• Update internal policies and documentation. Incorporate changes into internal policies and compliance manuals with CoCounsel Drafting. Utilize HighQ and Teams to manage discussion and revisions.  
• Communicate changes to the organization. Distribute policies with HighQ’s automated workflows. Copilot can also be used in Outlook to communicate changes, helping you draft clear messages explaining the policies. Use Copilot in PowerPoint to visually summarize the changes for leaders or colleagues.
• Monitor compliance and follow-up. Manage outside legal costs, generate dashboards, and automate workflows with Legal Tracker and HighQ, enabling you to track implementation of regulatory changes. Set up regular check-ins, reminders, and meeting agendas with Copilot in Teams.
• Review and audit updates. Use Westlaw Precision to ensure all identified regulatory changes have been addressed properly and HighQ to ensure all compliance tasks are complete. Then create end-to-end presentations in PowerPoint with Copilot to demonstrate completion and celebrate milestones with executives and colleagues. 

Data and insights move seamlessly between applications, so you can move forward in a project rather than make the same updates in multiple places. Working through these tasks quickly will change the way legal professionals think about time allocation and the way they add value. Managing these tasks in a few hours rather than a few days can reframe your contribution in terms of impact delivered rather than hours spent.

Copilot and CoCounsel: Better together

Given how easy it is to access Copilot within Microsoft applications, it’s tempting to think it can serve as your one and only AI assistant. While Copilot is a powerful general-use AI system, it lacks the specialized legal knowledge of CoCounsel. Together, though, the two systems create incredible efficiency and time savings. 

As one legal professional told us, “CoCounsel seems to offer significant advantages due to its integration with all our Microsoft 365 systems. This connection allows for more efficient workflows within familiar applications. Additionally, CoCounsel provides access to complex legal information and specialized legal content, making it valuable for our firm's needs. I believe there is a strong case for utilizing both tools.”

The partnership between CoCounsel and Copilot was announced last year, with an initial release and several updates. In 2025, Thomson Reuters will deliver tighter and stronger integrations between the two GenAI tools.

All development is built on a platform committed to security and reliability. CoCounsel is trusted by more than 1,400 corporate law departments, law firms, and government organizations. The system prioritizes security with NIST Cybersecurity & ISO 27001 standards, SOC 2 compliance, private servers, and zero data retention. In effect, the system is locked down, and it doesn’t store your data or use it to train itself.

Why use a legal AI assistant?

A legal AI assistant provides immediate time savings to legal professionals who are responsible for labor- intensive and detail-heavy work product. They can realize efficiency and time-savings while maintaining or even improving accuracy and context. They can enjoy greater productivity in a user-friendly and reliable workspace.

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. An AI tool like CoCounsel can review those same 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!”

People who use CoCounsel with Copilot especially appreciate the convenience of conducting legal research without switching to a different platform. They can access Westlaw and Practical Law in Teams or Word, instead of jumping out of those platforms and then back in once they have their answers.

Accuracy and context

One of the challenges with widely available AI tools is that they are prone to making up an answer that isn’t based in fact. If you choose a virtual legal assistant from a trusted source, you can have confidence the output is more accurate and secure.

We’ve found AI can do some tasks even more accurately than a human can, and in less time. For instance, extracting key obligations for 2,000 contracts takes more than 80 hours and is prone to a human error rate of 10-20%, 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. The AI assistant ensures high accuracy in identifying relevant sections and issues.

Enhanced productivity

Legal professionals at all levels — from paralegals to partners in AmLaw 100 firms and Fortune 500 in-house teams — use CoCounsel to produce top-quality work with greater speed and accuracy. Because the virtual assistant reduces hands-on time significantly, legal professionals can focus on the rewarding work machines can’t do.

Many lawyers use their virtual legal assistant to create concise summaries of legal issues and data sets for their clients and stakeholders. This allows lawyers to answer client questions and advance strategy rather than sweat over the documents and summaries themselves. 

User-friendly and reliable

A reported 81% of professionals believe AI can be applied to their work. Within legal specifically, 58% of in-house counsel expect their outside law firms to use AI. This technology is transforming the way work gets done. Using a comprehensive virtual assistant like CoCounsel is a better experience for users than trying to learn different systems and move between them as the task demands.

Feedback from early adopters of CoCounsel tells us that they find it reliable and effective. They appreciate that CoCounsel provides a single access point. It retrieves products and documents as needed. Users find that getting work done takes the form of an ongoing “conversation” with their AI legal assistant.

Law departments adding value, assisted by AI

As more clients adopt AI, your use of modern tools becomes even more important. AI is reshaping business expectations, with nearly 60% of in-house counsel anticipating its use and pushing their law firms to adopt it as well.

To guide the way AI is adopted, legal teams should explore it now. As technology evolves, its role in the legal field will expand, making this an ideal time to integrate tools like CoCounsel into your day-to-day work. The transformation of legal practice in your organization can start with the greater efficiency, improved productivity, and accuracy offered by an AI legal assistant.

After implementation, watch as review times are cut from days to hours. Complex documents are summarized in a snap. Variations in contract terms and risks are spotted instantly. Your team delivers increased efficiency, improved accuracy, and faster turnaround times while dedicating more time to providing strategic counsel.

You and your leadership team will have the data to show you are efficient and deliver positive business outcomes. Additionally, you have the capacity to get ahead of potential risks and help keep the business out of legal trouble in the first place.

An AI legal assistant like CoCounsel can’t do the lawyering for you and your team, but it does set you up with the facts, trends, and insights needed to get to the actual lawyering faster. CoCounsel does this within the legal and productivity tools you already use, helping create a more efficient, agile, and competitive legal department.

The power of an AI assistant is just a few clicks away. Find out more about artificial intelligence from Thomson Reuters and request a demo today.