Thomson Reuters Launches Next-Gen CoCounsel Legal
Thomson Reuters (Nasdaq/TSX: TRI), a global content and technology company, has announced the general availability of the next generation of CoCounsel Legal, a fully agentic AI experience designed to help legal professionals move from research and issue analysis to trusted work product within a single workflow.
Purpose-built for legal work and grounded in the trusted authority of Westlaw and Practical Law, CoCounsel Legal is engineered to reason, plan and execute at the level of a senior associate. The enhanced experience brings together legal research, drafting, legal intelligence, verification and matter-centric workflows in one connected environment, helping law firms and legal departments move from question to strategy to execution.
As legal organisations shift from AI experimentation to enterprise-wide adoption, they are increasingly evaluating technology not on whether it can generate answers, but on whether they can trust it to support legal work. CoCounsel Legal addresses that need by combining transparent reasoning, citation-backed results and trusted legal content with agentic capabilities that can orchestrate complex, multi-step tasks.
‘The legal industry is moving beyond AI that simply generates answers’, said Raghu Ramanathan, President, Legal Professionals, Thomson Reuters. ‘Whether you’re at an Am Law 100 firm, a mid-size or small practice or a corporate legal department, the challenge is the same: turning insight into action. The next generation of CoCounsel Legal helps professionals complete legal work with confidence by combining trusted legal content, agentic intelligence and workflow execution in a single experience. That’s a fundamentally different approach to legal AI and a major step forward for the profession.’
Built on Anthropic’s Claude Agent SDK, CoCounsel Legal can plan, reason and execute across complex legal workflows rather than respond to isolated prompts. Every output remains grounded in verified, traceable legal authority and adheres to Thomson Reuters Fiduciary-Grade AI™ principles, providing the transparency, accountability and confidence professionals demand.
‘What sets the new CoCounsel Legal apart is that it doesn’t just answer questions; it builds toward real work product’, said Jennifer Eng, Shareholder, Commercial Litigation, Polsinelli. ‘Its grounding in Westlaw gives me confidence that the research is authoritative, while the agentic workflow carries that analysis through reasoning, drafting and verification. As a litigator, I need speed without sacrificing precision, and this is the first tool that gets me from a complex legal question to a defensible draft, faster and with real confidence, which is not a small shift.’
New Capabilities for Legal Work
Westlaw Brief Builder
The newest addition to CoCounsel Legal, Westlaw Brief Builder helps litigators move from research and issue analysis to first-draft brief creation while validating authority along the way. Powered by Westlaw Deep Research, KeyCite and Practical Law, it proposes relevant facts, arguments and supporting authority while keeping lawyers firmly in control of strategy, legal theory and final decisions.
Workspaces
Workspaces provide a dedicated environment for every matter, combining firm and legal department documents, precedents and institutional knowledge to inform analysis from the outset. Context is preserved across matters and teams, helping legal professionals build on prior work instead of starting from scratch.
Drafting
The Drafting Agent in CoCounsel for Word enables legal professionals to draft, edit and review agreements using natural language instructions directly within Microsoft Word, leveraging Practical Law content alongside an organisation’s own documents and playbooks.
Tabular Analysis
Designed for high-volume document review, Tabular Analysis allows attorneys to review up to 10,000 documents and ask up to 100 questions, with results returned in a dynamic, filterable table. Powered by Thomson, Thomson Reuters’ proprietary legal-focused large language model, it is optimised for complex legal analysis where domain-specific AI can outperform general-purpose models.
Deep Research Verify
Deep Research Verify checks whether cited Westlaw and Practical Law authority supports specific legal assertions, helping legal professionals strengthen confidence in AI-assisted work product.
‘A brief is only as strong as the thinking behind it’, said Emily Colbert, SVP, CoCounsel Litigation at Thomson Reuters. ‘Westlaw Brief Builder was built to support that thinking, not replace it, by transforming how litigators research, test and refine their arguments at every stage, from spotting the right issues to backing them with authoritative law. The goal is not to generate a document faster; it’s to help lawyers build a stronger, more defensible case they’re confident standing behind in court.’
Thomson Reuters
Thomson Reuters (Nasdaq/TSX: TRI) informs the way forward by bringing together the trusted content and technology that people and organisations need to make the right decisions. The company serves professionals across legal, tax, audit, accounting, compliance, government and media.