Today Thomson Reuters announced the launch of CoCounsel Legal which features both Deep Research and agentic workflows. I attended a recent press briefing where Raghu Ramanathan, president of Legal Professionals, Laura Clayton McDonnnell, President of Corporate Business Rawia Ashraf, Head of Product, CoCounsel Transactional and GCO, and Mike Dahn Head of Product Management Westlaw demonstrated a raft of new capabilities that resets the bar for AI enabled legal workflows.
CoCounsel Legal is designed to “help professionals move beyond prompting and start delegating.” The agentic guided workflows are built TR’s existing AI assistant and enhanced with advanced reasoning models, TR’s deep reservoir of Westlaw and Practical Law legal content and an army of domain experts at TR. “ CoCounsel Legal is a next-generation AI product that brings together legal research, essential workflow automation, intelligent document search and AI-powered legal assistance within one unified enterprise wide solution.”
At launch Co Counsel Legal offers workflows for transactional, litigation and regulatory analysis. The headliner here is that TR is building a single workflow that allows lawyers to transition seamlessly through an entire project without the interruption launching new applications and products. And the product responds like a an intelligent teammate that an attorney can interact with. The attorney gives assignments and the agent gives feedback, guidance and results.
What Does This Relaunch of CoCounsel Legal Mean for Subscribers?
Since CoCounsel has evolved several times of the past few years I ask TR to provide some background on the scope and market position of the product. Here is the response:
To keep pace with the rapid evolution of AI, we’re introducing a revised commercial model that ensures clients benefit from cutting-edge advancements as they emerge. CoCounsel Legal will be offered through multi-year subscriptions with modestly increased annual fees. These subscriptions include continual upgrade releases at no additional cost, delivering ongoing innovation and value. Here’s how the structure now works:
- CoCounsel Legal is the primary offering and includes:
- The functionality/capabilities from CoCounsel Core
- CoCounsel Drafting
- Deep Research
- Agentic workflows
- Integrations with Westlaw Advantage, Practical Law Dynamic Tool Set, Microsoft 365, and DMS systems
- CoCounsel Essentials is the new name for the foundational offering (formerly CoCounsel Core), and it is included as part of CoCounsel Legal or can be sold separately or with just Westlaw or Practical Law.
- In market at launch, CoCounsel Legal is the flagship solution.
Deep Research (or Westlaw Talks Back)
For several years I have been musing of a future in which research products will provide conversational suggestions not just prompts. Deep Research provides an actual research plan for the attorney. Today Deep Research is part of the latest and according to Dahn the last version of Westlaw and is branded as Westlaw Advantage.
According Dahn Deep Research “is the legal industry’s first professional-grade agentic AI research capability.” It is the first product that I know of where a lawyer can hand-off a research assignment and get not only an answer, but the reasoning behind and sources to support the answer. Results are grounded in Westlaw and Practical Law content which minimize the risk of hallucination. Dahn pointed out that even this powerful research tool includes a written caution for lawyers to always read sources and verify results.
Deep Research can:
• Generate multi-step research plans
• Trace its logic with transparent reasoning
• Deliver structured, Westlaw and Practical Law citation-backed reports
I will be writing a separate post to explore the many new features of Westlaw Advantage.
Guided Workflows
CoCounsel Legal now offers an expanding library of guided multi-step workflows which are driven by agentic AI and leverage the substantive and practical expertise in both Westlaw and Practical Law.
Several CoCounsel guided workflows were launched in July. Soon-to-be-launched workflows include:
• Draft a Privacy Policy
• Draft an Employee Policy
• Draft a complaint
• Draft discovery request
• Draft discovery response
• Deposition transcript review
Under the hood, “these workflows embed legal content, apply structured reasoning, and provide human oversight.” “This is where AI starts to feel less like a tool and more like a teammate,” said David Wong, Chief Product Officer at Thomson Reuters. “Guided workflows transform how professionals’ approach complex legal work, moving beyond simple prompting to sophisticated, multi-step task execution— and that’s a huge leap forward in what legal AI can deliver.”
Agentic AI vs Assistive AI
TR provided the following information on how they define and distinguish agentic and assistive AI. Here is the response:
- An AI assistant responds to prompts and performs single-step tasks, requiring user input at each stage.
- An AI agent can plan, reason, and act independently within a workflow. It does not just respond, it executes.
AI Agents: First They use advanced reasoning models, supported by an AI assistant that can help orchestrate work. Second, they have access to tools, and they can use these tools to complete tasks. Third, they can adapt and respond to new information, changing course as needed to achieve their outcomes. Fourth, as a result of these capabilities, agentic AI systems can complete complex, multi-step assignments.
Knowledge Search – Uncovering and exploiting law firm knowledge
On July 9, TR announced CoCounsel Knowledge Search which promises to revolutionize how organizations access internal knowledge. It can deliver a “unified search experience” by accessing content from across sources such as HighQ, iManage, NetDocuments, SharePoint and OneDrive. Having worked in law firms and seen firsthand the gnarly, unweeded garden of internal repositories – I assume there is some back-end prep required for this integration. If Knowledge Search is working as promised – it has Nirvanic possibilities. It is an important piece of TR’s agentic AI in CoCounsel Legal.
Embedded Training
One of the key unarticulated benefits of CoCounsel Legal and Deep Research is that these features provide embedded guidance to associates as they are drafting documents and conducting research. No matter how much energy library and professional development teams put into training – they can’t provide “on the spot training” for every assignment. As Agents grow more pervasive and more powerful a key training message will be to remind associates to “check the agent’s work and read every source!”
Here are some links to additional information: