Legal professionals operate in high-pressure environments where accuracy, transparency, and trust are paramount. Legal work has always required attorneys and legal staff to develop high-level skills for in-depth research and analysis to find the best citations and most relevant statutes, while complying with ever-changing regulations. But while drafting, analyzing, and reviewing legal documents and contracts are vital tasks, they’re also tedious and time-consuming. In fact, legal professionals say they spend between 40 to 60% of their time on them.
To increase efficiency and streamline workflows, a growing number of legal professionals are turning to AI-powered solutions. But the quality and efficacy of AI legal solutions vary widely, and as law firms and legal departments consider these tools, they should pay particular attention to the quality of the solution’s source content.
When evaluating an AI solution, ask if its content sources are consistently updated to ensure correctness and relevance. Is human oversight incorporated into how an AI tool sources content? Is it easy to demonstrate this to a prospective customer?
Whether conducting research, drafting contracts, or building cases, legal professionals need more than just an AI-powered solution. They need to trust the partner providing that solution, including the content its answers are based on.
The pitfalls of public AI tools
In recent years, the legal industry has emerged as a frontrunner in the adoption of generative AI (GenAI) tools. According to a recent Generative AI in Professional Services Report, 28% of law firms and 23% of corporate legal departments have integrated GenAI into their workflows. This momentum continues to be driven by increasing pressure to deliver legal services more efficiently and cost-effectively, while maintaining or exceeding traditional standards of accuracy and quality.
To meet these demands, some legal professionals are turning to free public AI tools such as ChatGPT. But these tools, while easy to access, deliver unreliable results because they base their answers on a wide range of unverified internet sources and are prone to incorrect and even hallucinated results.
Some law firms have discovered the risks of relying on generic AI the hard way. In a recent lawsuit against Walmart, a judge threatened to sanction two attorneys for using fictitious case citations they admitted were made up by an AI tool. This incident and many more like it illustrate how most AI solutions simply aren’t built to meet the unique, domain-specific needs of legal professionals. While the legal market has recently seen a proliferation of AI tools claiming to be professional-grade and able to support legal work, most fall short in critical areas, including:
- Lack of authoritative content. Many AI assistants use large-language models (LLMs) that pull from content sources across the internet that aren’t necessarily verified or legally sound.
- Opaque sourcing. AI results are often presented without citations, which makes it impossible for attorneys to verify or trust the output.
- Reliance on non-legal training data. AI models that are trained on LLM internet data are prone to misunderstanding legal terms, misapplying rules, and returning irrelevant content.
- No compliance safeguards. Many AI tools don’t meet the data security and privacy standards and requirements that top-tier law firms and government agencies demand.
To build strong and sound legal strategies, legal professionals need a robust AI solution that accesses the most factual and up-to-date content available.
CoCounsel Legal and the Thomson Reuters advantage
Thomson Reuters CoCounsel Legal is the most trusted all-in-one AI solution for the legal industry. Backed by the full power of CoCounsel — the professional-grade AI assistant that accompanies users from task to task and connects every capability in CoCounsel Legal — judges, attorneys, and court staff can rely on its results. CoCounsel Legal provides insights generated by building legal-specific capabilities on a foundation of deep, accurate, and current Westlaw and Practical Law content, always supported by human expertise.
This human expertise as fundamental to a professional-grade AI solution is what sets CoCounsel Legal apart. More than 1,200 of our attorney-editors and legal specialists ensure that our customers always get answers based on the most current and jurisdictionally relevant content. Our team continually curates, updates, and refines information, so our customers can be confident in our sources’ accuracy and applicability. Over 1,000 data scientists, AI engineers, and machine-learning experts build and optimize CoCounsel Legal, each using their industry-leading expertise and insights to continually develop and maintain its capabilities.
With more than 225 years serving legal professionals, Thomson Reuters remains fully committed to ensuring the continued progress and development of professional-grade AI legal solutions. In 2025 alone, we are investing more than $200 million to develop and expand AI capabilities and partnering with highly regarded cloud providers such as Microsoft and leading DMS platforms. This investment ensures CoCounsel Legal remains both robust and compliant with evolving data privacy regulations and client confidentiality standards.
The unmatched expertise of CoCounsel Legal
CoCounsel Legal draws from the power of a variety of state-of-the-art LLMs, combining them with the unmatched, trusted source material of Westlaw and Practical Law.
More than 20,000 law firms and legal departments, along with courts across the U.S. federal court system, already use CoCounsel — underscoring its unmatched credibility and utility in real-world practice.
With CoCounsel Legal, legal professionals can easily and quickly:
- Find the most comprehensive and complete legal citations, sources, and information
- Conduct in-depth analyses of legal documents
- Transform complex legal documents into concise and easy-to-digest summaries
- Comb through litigation documents to discover hidden insights
- Discover potential counter arguments with supporting legal authority
Why legal professionals trust CoCounsel Legal results
CoCounsel Legal is reliable because its answers are all based on the industry’s most reliable content — Thomson Reuters Westlaw and Practical Law. The legal know-how it delivers is scenario-specific and authored by practicing attorneys. CoCounsel Legal can also understand and apply legal strategy and nuance, operating like a highly efficient research assistant and skilled drafting and compliance aide.
Unlike consumer-grade AI tools that draw on data sources from the open internet, CoCounsel Legal sources its results from an actively maintained legal knowledge foundation that includes:
- Continual and consistent fine-tuning done by practicing attorneys
- Answers and insights that include full citations, so legal professionals can instantly verify sources
- Output that aligns with professional ethics standards, maintains client confidentiality, and is legally accurate
Additionally, CoCounsel Legal harnesses the power of both GenAI and agentic AI to deliver more capabilities than any other AI legal solution. Agentic AI does more than just respond to prompts. It can understand and systematically work to achieve established goals by creating workflows that plan and carry out the best steps for a given project. Plus, CoCounsel Legal is always governed by human-in-the-loop oversight for safety, accuracy, and accountability.
Whether researching precedent, reviewing contracts, or drafting motions, CoCounsel Legal ensures that results are defensible, verifiable, and aligned with the highest professional standards and expectations.
CoCounsel Legal is the future of legal work
As AI continues to redefine how legal professionals work, law firms, corporate legal departments, and government agencies must decide which AI legal solution to trust. Based on the unprecedented level of institutional trust by the tens of thousands of legal professionals already using CoCounsel every day, the choice is clear.
Choosing CoCounsel Legal isn’t just about staying current with legal technology. It’s about staying ahead and confidently practicing law in a digital age where precision, expertise, and trust matter more than ever.
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