Trusted tools for confident, efficient legal analysis
Highlights
- GenAI is a popular but highly scrutinized tool for legal research; courts warn that free tools like ChatGPT are unreliable, creating a professional duty for lawyers to use and verify information from authoritative sources.
- CoCounsel Core's research tools, Westlaw AI-Assisted Research and Practical Law Search & Summarise, mitigate risks like hallucinations by sourcing data primarily from the trusted, authoritative content of Westlaw and Practical Law.
- While not a replacement for a lawyer's detailed examination, CoCounsel Core accelerates legal research by efficiently surfacing accurate summaries, relevant statutes, and case law, allowing for quicker and deeper understanding of legal issues.
Applying GenAI to legal research exercises is also one of the most scrutinised of all use cases. Therefore, it’s essential to use a GenAI legal research tool that draws on trusted sources and enables lawyers to thoroughly review the output and verify the relevance of sourced cases or legislation.
The High Court’s comments in R (Ayinde) v London Borough of Haringey [2025] EWHC 1383 (Admin) are vital reading on this topic. It stated that “freely available generative artificial intelligence tools, trained on large language models such as ChatGPT are not capable of conducting reliable legal research.”
Those who use AI to conduct legal research must refer to “authoritative sources”, which include legislation.gov.uk, the National Archives’ court judgment database, the official Law Reports, and the “databases of reputable legal publishers.” Checking the accuracy of AI-driven legal research is part of a lawyer’s professional duty.
The legal research tools embedded within CoCounsel Core, namely Westlaw AI-Assisted Research and Practical Law Search & Summarise, meet lawyers’ expectations in this respect. The data that each sources primarily originates from Westlaw and Practical Law, minimising the risk of hallucinations.
Though these research tools are accurate and reliable, lawyers still must carefully review legislative references, cases, guidance sources, and legal textbooks. These tools should also not be seen as doing research for lawyers. Rather, legal research in CoCounsel Core surfaces accurate and relevant information more swiftly.
To gain deeper understanding of a particular issue, lawyers don’t have to start at a website’s home page. Instead, a summary generated by GenAI can introduce and summarise the issue, providing links to relevant statutes and case law for further interrogation.
To recall what Chitty on Contracts says about unfair contract terms, lawyers can now ask CoCounsel directly. It will provide the relevant extracts from the textbook along with links to these extracts, eliminating the need to navigate to the contents page, index, or search bar.
Legal research will always require detailed and careful examination of relevant sources as well as browsing and searching. From there, our arguments can be carefully constructed. When it’s deployed with trusted and up to date resources, GenAI can assist in locating and delivering this information efficiently.
CoCounsel Core gives your legal team the ability to accelerate their legal research whilst still getting the benefit of the authoritative content of Westlaw and Practical Law. Learn how CoCounsel Core can amplify your practice today.
