Today Thomson Reuters is announcing a new Generative AI vision. Central to this vision is a new Generative AI Assistant branded as CoCounsel. There was no press conference and no demo to provide context or a Q&A around this announcement. Here is a link to the press release so you can read it for yourself.

The CoCounsel Vision in the press release says that “CoCounsel will unify the entire customer experience. CoCounsel will function like a team member handling complex tasks with natural language understanding and completing tasks at superhuman speeds.” Over time CoCounsel will link the entire suite of Thomson Reuters products and will bring together multiple skills and workflows from different products.

What is Happening Today?

Thomson Reuters is repositioning CoCounsel as the brand name for their new Generative AI vision and strategy. This is a spectacular “slight of hand” because this new Generative AI Assistant will not be leveraging the legacy CoCounsel Large Language Models (LLMs) which they acquired from Casetext. This CoCounsel assistant will be based on GPT4 LLMs which have been developed in-house at Thomson Reuters. The CoCounsel suite of workflow tools which were acquired from Casetext last year will now be designated at CoCounsel Core.

The CoCounsel Generative AI assistant is not launching a legal product in the US today, but they are launching a US tax product will be available in Summer 2024.

The CoCounsel Generative AI assistant will be available as follows:

  • Westlaw Edge UK with CoCounsel available today
  • Checkpoint Edge with CoCounsel (expected to launch in the US in Summer 2024)
  • CoCounsel integrations with Microsoft 360 five are expected to be available in beta to customers in the US and the UK in summer of 24.
  • There will be additional rollouts of Co counsel skills during 2024 and beyond
  • Thomson Reuters included a video which illustrates how Co counsel will be designed as ‘”a professional grade Gen. AI assistant which will transform work and unify the entire customer experience with applications across legal tax risk & fraud and media.” Here is a link to the video.

2024 Generative AI in Professional Services Report is being released and will be available at this link.

The Thomson Reuters Space Shot. The Thomson Reuters Generative AI Vision is certainly ambitious. TR owns a lot of data  which is embedded in products with disparate functionalities. The press release indicates that the AI Assistant is not only for the legal suite of products – which alone would be a significant stretch — but this vision covers the whole universe of TR products across legal, risk, tax and news.

As far as I know Westlaw Precision with AI which launched last year, does not yet include all of the data and functionality in Westlaw Edge. With that in mind, one has to  pause and wonder  what the real timeline is for the fulfillment of a grander vision.

The bigger question is “Can the market be moved by a vision without a concrete deliverable?” One has to assume that TR is trying to expand the number of subscribers to their existing suite of AI products today ( Westlaw Precision with AI , Ask Practical Law, Precision, CoCounsel Core) , based on a promise of “workflow Nirvana” tomorrow.

Every legal information company is tackling the unified workflow challenge. vLex and Bloomberg Law both announced significant workflow enhancements this week.. LexisNexis announced the Lexis Create workflow solution in November. The stakes are high and it is anyone’s guess who will be able to simultaneously deliver an AI enabled and optimized workflow at a price that can dominate the market.

Today vLex  is announcing the launch of a powerful suite of generative AI-backed document analysis tools for litigators and transactional attorneys  Vincent AI platform.  vLex occupies a unique space in the legal research and workflow space since it is the only truly multi-national research platform which has now expanded into an AI enabled

Vincent AI Document Analyze The new product called Vincent AI Document Analyze is a workflow tool designed to streamline and enhance  the drafting of contracts, motions, pleadings, and other legal documents. vLex is the only legal research and drafting platform offering  AI tools with multi-national capabilities “built on top of the world’s most comprehensive global library of legal information, with more than 1 billion documents from around the world. “

vLex Labs  vLex is also announcing the availability of  vLex Labs. This will be offered to select Vincent customers and will enable them to team up with a vLex implementation team and in order to create proprietary AI-powered workflows.

Beyond Legal Research The most important sentence in the press release indicates that this is  a milestone marking  vLex’s commitment to drive innovation into their products and take the lead in developing legal research solutions “that go beyond information retrieval to revolutionize the way that legal professionals work.”

“With Vincent AI, you no longer have to choose between innovative technology and comprehensive content,” said vLex CEO Luís Faus. “Our platform offers a seamless integration of both, setting a new standard in efficiency, customization, and effectiveness across all legal practices.”

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Vincent AI Document Analyze

Vincent AI Document Analyze offers customizable GenAI-backed workflows that enable legal professionals to interrogate complex legal documents and use Vincent’s legal reasoning and analysis abilities to begin drafting strategic responses, harnessing the power of structured data. Users achieve benefits such as:

Continue Reading  vLex Expands Vincent GenAI Toolset, and Launches AI-Focused Co-Development Lab 

Bloomberg Industry Group has announced that the acquisition of Dashboard Legal, a project management and collaboration solution designed for law firms and in-house counsel. Like the majority of legal tech startups, Dashboard Legal by developed by a former ALM 100 attorney Mat Rotenberg, in a “there’s got to be a better way” moment.

I had a chance to talk with Rotenberg and Joe Breda, president Bloomberg Law.  I was particularly fascinated to hear that Rotenberg had participated in  large law “technology committees” which means not only felt the frustrations of of fragmented workflows as a practitioner, but understands the mechanics of legal tech decision making. Dashboard Legal was built to enable collaboration and to simplify and clarify workflows as well as maximize efficiency.

Dashboard Legal is positioned in the legal project management space. It provides team level, real-time visibility into the projects and tasks attorneys are responsible for executing. The acquisition expands Bloomberg Law’s presence within the legal workflow market, which it entered last year with the introduction of Bloomberg Law Contract Solutions, its AI-powered solution for storing, searching, drafting, and negotiating contracts. Although the founder was a transactional attorney the tools can be using across of wide spectrum of use cases including litigation projects.

Only two prior acquisitions. Bloomberg Law has done most of their development in-house. They have previously acquired only two other companies. The Bureau of National Affairs (BNA) in 2011  and . Exemplify in 2016, the technology that underpins Bloomberg Law’s Draft Analyzer.

The BNA acquisition aligns well with the Dashboard Legal workflow tools. BNA brought Bloomberg a deep mine of secondary material including treatises, newsletters and practical guidance materials. I like to remind people that BNA was the first company in the U.S. to

Continue Reading Bloomberg Industry Group Dives into Workflow and Collaboration Market with the Acquisition of Dashboard Legal

The ILTACON 2024 Exhibit Hall will once again host the ILTACON Startup Stage and Startup Hub. The Startup Hub will offer more than 25 opportunities for new startups to exhibit at ILTACON for a reduced rate and promote their organizations on the Startup Stage.

Applications for the Startup hub will open on March 25 and will close on May 1. 

This is a perfect opportunity for visionaries, industry disruptors, and those who challenge the status quo to participate in the premier Legal Technology Conference, ILTACON. 

Approved applicants will receive a 10 x 10 booth kiosk with 2 stools, carpet, and electrical, 2 – full-access conference badges, and the opportunity to present on the ILTACON Startup Stage. 

Apply early to secure your spot!

Today Lex Machina, a LexisNexis company, is releasing a new tool for competitive insights called “Litigation Footprint.”  Lex Machina now includes litigation analytics from over 27 million cases filed in 94 federal district courts and over 1,300 state courts in 34 states and the District of Columbia.  The Litigation Footprint enhancement was developed in response to customer demand for deeper party level analysis tools.

Since its launch in 2010 as a platform for analyzing IP litigation, Lex Machina has continuously raised the bar for the legal analytics market. The Lex Machina platform combines natural language processing, machine learning, human curation, data normalization and extensive tagging of data elements to improve precision and granularity of research results and reporting.

.Litigation Footprint focuses on the litigation histories of corporate entities in order to enable lawyers to quickly get a high level overview of a  party’s litigation footprint across the United States.

Continue Reading Lex Machina Launches  “Litigation Footprint” With Deep Insights into Company and Industry Litigation Trends

Law library budgets can easily grow wild like sprawling and untamed gardens. In the past, law librarians could be managing literally thousands of print titles spread across dozens of locations. The pandemic accelerated the full embrace of digital alternatives to print. Today many law firm libraries have small print collections but a large and complex network of digital licenses. Law firm mergers, the opening of new offices and the continuous churn of lateral partners can play havoc with budgets and orderly management of both digital and print collections.

We have all been confronted with an invoice which prompts us to pause and wonder “Why are we paying for that?”

The legal tech market is bursting with innovative new Generative AI products. Sometimes the only way to pay for a new resource, is to purge the collection of lesser used, duplicative or legacy products which have been automatically renewed without any analysis.

Over the course of my career I have grappled with the unruly forces of full “mergers of equals,”  partial mergers, office openings, office closing, spin-offs, practice group migrations…. Practices expand or shrink over time. Partners come and go and often leave behind a legacy of resources that no longer have a devoted champion.

The best way to control costs is to develop processes and protocols for each of the 3 major product lifecycle benchmarks:  acquisition, renewal and cancellation.

The full article is posted on Legal Tech Hub

Continue Reading Why Are we Paying for That?  10 Tips and Techniques for Taming a Library Budget and Optimizing ROI


CHICAGO – March 5, 2024 — The American Association of Law Libraries (AALL)— the
only national organization representing law librarians and legal information
professionals—is thrilled to announce registration for its 117th Annual Meeting &
Conference in Chicago, Illinois, is now open. Register at this link

The 2024 AALL Annual Meeting & Conference—Lead.Innovate.Transform—will be held at the Hyatt Regency Chicago, July 20-23.

Continue Reading Registration Open For AALL Annual Meeting in Chicago

LegalOn Technologies, has launched LegalOn Assistant, which can answer contract questions, draft clauses, summarize contract terms, and more. According to US CEO Daniel Lewis,  “LegalOn Assistant is an extension of your legal team. It saves you time, handles mundane tasks, and is easy to use in day-to-day work.”

LegalOn includes a suite  tools for streamlining contract review and drafting. Functionalities include redlining, practice notes, contract templates, and easy customization for companies with their own playbooks and templates. 

The new LegalOn Assistant will be available to all existing subscribers at no additional cost.

LegalOn Assistant is specially trained and tested for commercial contracting work. “Dozens of engineers and lawyers worked for months to take the power of GPT-4 and upgrade it with legal training and testing,” said Gabor Melli, VP of Artificial Intelligence at LegalOn. “We add to that

advanced security and privacy protections, including SOC II Type 2 compliance, so that companies can trust Assistant with their sensitive documents and questions.”

Continue Reading LegalOn Launches Gen AI Assistant for Contract Questions, Summarization, and Drafting

The American Association of Law Libraries is seeking nominations for the 2024 Product of the year award. Both members and vendors can submit nominations.

This award honors new commercial information products that enhance or improve existing law library services or procedures or innovative products which improve access to legal information, the legal research process, or procedures for technical processing of library materials.

A “new” product is defined as one which has been in the library-related marketplace for two years or less. New products may include, but are not limited to, computer hardware and/or software, educational or bibliographic material, or other products or devices that aid or improve library workflow, research, or intellectual access. Products that have been reintroduced in a new format or with substantial changes are eligible.

The world before and after Generative AI If you are scratching your head and trying to

Continue Reading Nominate Your Favorite Products for AALL’s Product of the Year Award

Today LexisNexis Legal & Professional, released results from a survey of senior leadership at top U.S. law firms and legal professionals at Fortune 1000 companies. The survey   2024 Investing in Legal Innovation Survey: The Rise of GenAI at Top Firms & Corporations  explores  the business impact of generative AI technology on the legal industry.

I can’t recall any prior technology that has simultaneously trigged both of breathless enthusiasm and panicked resistance . While the technology shows game changing promise, there are significant ethical, client relations, security and intellectual property concerns which still need to be addressed. The C-Suite survey charts the issues of concern where are impeding adoption of GenAI.

Rapid Uptake and Generative AI investments

Continue Reading LexisNexis Report: What Every C Suite Leader Needs to Know about Legal AI