CoCounsel AI

CoCounsel is an artificial intelligence platform developed by Thomson Reuters to help legal professionals, tax specialists, auditors, accountants, and other professional teams complete complex work more efficiently. It combines generative AI, professional research content, document analysis, drafting tools, and workflow automation in a connected environment. The platform is designed to help users research complicated questions, analyse large collections of documents, prepare written work, and complete recurring professional tasks with less manual effort.

Originally launched as an AI legal assistant in 2023, CoCounsel has expanded into a broader professional AI platform. Its capabilities are integrated with Thomson Reuters products, including Westlaw, Practical Law, and Checkpoint. Unlike a general-purpose chatbot, CoCounsel is built around specialised professional workflows and access to relevant research materials. Its goal is to help professionals produce more useful, consistent, and verifiable work while retaining control over important decisions.

Legal research is one of CoCounsel’s central capabilities. Lawyers can use the platform to investigate legal questions, identify relevant authorities, analyse legal issues, and prepare research-based work products. Through its connections with Westlaw and Practical Law, supported products provide access to legal research materials, legislation, case law, and practical guidance. Its Deep Research capability can plan and conduct multi-step research based on a natural-language request, organise relevant information, and prepare a structured response with supporting citations. This can help legal professionals investigate unfamiliar areas of law, compare arguments, prepare preliminary memoranda, and identify authorities for further examination. Users must still verify citations, confirm that legal authorities remain current, and determine whether the analysis applies to the relevant jurisdiction and circumstances.

CoCounsel also helps professionals review, summarise, compare, and analyse documents. Its tools can extract specified information, identify relevant clauses, highlight potential inconsistencies, and summarise lengthy files. These capabilities are useful for contracts, litigation materials, transaction documents, regulatory records, and other professional information. For matters involving large document collections, CoCounsel can help organise information and identify material that deserves closer examination. This can support due diligence, litigation preparation, contract portfolio analysis, and transaction workflows. Although automated analysis can reduce repetitive work, users should check important findings against the original documents to avoid relying on incomplete summaries or incorrect interpretations.

Document drafting is another important part of the platform. CoCounsel helps users create and revise professional documents through natural-language instructions and relevant source materials. Depending on the product, users can draft clauses, modify existing language, prepare legal memoranda, develop research summaries, and produce other written work. Contract Playbooks allow teams to define review standards and preferred positions for supported contract workflows. This helps organisations apply consistent criteria when assessing agreements and identifying provisions that require attention. CoCounsel can also support document comparison, contract term extraction, and checks for specified errors. These capabilities can improve drafting efficiency, but generated documents still require human review for legal accuracy, factual correctness, citations, and consistency with client instructions.

The platform has expanded beyond single-question assistance through agent-based AI workflows. These capabilities allow CoCounsel to plan and execute supported sequences of tasks rather than simply returning an immediate answer. A user can describe a desired outcome, and the system can organise the necessary steps, conduct research, analyse information, and prepare a result. Users can inspect the process, refine their instructions, and review the output. This approach is useful for tasks involving several stages, such as researching a legal issue, comparing authorities, reviewing related documents, and producing a cited summary. CoCounsel also provides a Library of expert-created prompts and workflows that helps users discover supported capabilities without having to develop every instruction from scratch. Agent-based automation can reduce manual coordination, although it does not guarantee that every step will be correct.

CoCounsel is also relevant to tax, audit, accounting, and corporate professionals. Thomson Reuters offers related capabilities through its professional product ecosystem, including Checkpoint and other specialised research resources. These tools can help users investigate technical questions, examine documents, research regulatory requirements, and prepare summaries or other work products. Tax and accounting teams may use the platform to support complex research involving multiple issues or jurisdictions, while corporate legal departments can use it for contract analysis, drafting, and legal research. The precise features and authoritative content available depend on the selected product and subscription.

Knowledge management and collaboration are important parts of CoCounsel’s professional environment. Through supported tools and integrations, teams can work with internal documents, research resources, and shared information. Connections to document management and productivity systems can reduce the need to move files manually between applications. This can help legal teams incorporate relevant organisational knowledge into their work while maintaining established processes for document access and collaboration. The platform’s usefulness depends on the quality of the information available, the configuration of the connected systems, and the permissions assigned to individual users.

CoCounsel integrates with Thomson Reuters products and selected workplace applications. Supported environments include Microsoft Word, Outlook, Teams, and SharePoint, alongside document management systems such as iManage and NetDocuments. Other integrations and connected workflows may be available through products including HighQ, Ironclad, and Microsoft 365. These connections can help professionals use AI assistance within familiar working environments. However, availability varies by product, subscription, and configuration, so organisations should confirm compatibility and access requirements before implementation.

Security and privacy are especially important because professional teams frequently handle confidential client information, privileged communications, personal data, and commercially sensitive documents. Thomson Reuters describes enterprise privacy and security safeguards, including encryption and controls intended to protect customer data. The company states that customer content and prompts are not used to train or improve CoCounsel and associated products or underlying large language models, and that third-party AI providers are contractually restricted from using customer data to train their models. Thomson Reuters also publishes information about its security certifications and data handling practices. Organisations should review the current security documentation, retention policies, data processing terms, and applicable hosting arrangements before using the platform for sensitive work.

CoCounsel is designed primarily for professional organisations rather than casual consumers. Its pricing is generally quotation-based, and implementation may involve procurement, staff training, configuration, and integration with existing systems. Access to particular capabilities can depend on subscriptions to Thomson Reuters research products, and available content varies by jurisdiction. AI-generated research, summaries, and drafts can contain mistakes or omit important context, so qualified professionals must review results and remain responsible for final decisions.

Overall, CoCounsel is a comprehensive professional AI platform that combines research, drafting, document analysis, and workflow automation. Its integration with Thomson Reuters’ specialised content makes it particularly relevant to law firms, corporate legal departments, tax professionals, auditors, and accounting teams. Organisations seeking to reduce repetitive work while maintaining professional oversight may find it useful, provided they evaluate its capabilities, pricing, security arrangements, and suitability for their particular workflows.