Artificial intelligence (AI) never stands still. In the UK legal market, adoption has moved well beyond “wait and see”: many firms and in-house teams are already deploying AI in day-to-day workflows, moving from pilots to practical, governed use. And as capabilities continues to advance, those who embed AI effectively are seeing tangible gains in speed, consistency, and quality — while staying in control of risk and professional judgement.
Early legal AI focused on making research faster and more precise. Then generative AI (GenAI) expanded what was possible by helping lawyers create and refine content — from reviewing and summarizing voluminous document sets, producing timelines and creating first-draft advice notes to clients and internal memos. Now the market is entering another shift: agentic AI, which can do more than respond. It can plan, process, and execute multi-step workflows, empowering lawyers to handle complex tasks across their work.
It’s an exciting moment for the UK legal market. Guardrails are still necessary — especially around confidentiality, accuracy, and governance — but there is growing recognition that AI is poised to be truly transformative for the legal industry in the months and years ahead. Much like e-mail and internet search became indispensable in the late 1990s, AI is increasingly set to become a day-to-day tool for legal work.
In fact, more than two-thirds of respondents to our Future of Professionals 2025 report (68%) support AI for non-legal work, and more than half (55%) say the same for legal tasks. The reality is: it’s a question of when, not if, lawyers adopt it.
Innovation made easy – every day
Thomson Reuters is leading this next phase with the launch of CoCounsel Legal UK, the only platform that combines advanced AI capabilities with trusted Practical Law guidance and authoritative Westlaw UK content—bringing research, drafting, and document analysis together like never before.
CoCounsel Legal UK helps legal professionals work faster and deliver quality results, all while keeping their data private and secure. Powerful AI capabilities can help lawyers accelerate complex work so they can spend more time on highvalue strategy that drives better outcomes and business growth. Results can be easily verified and are grounded in trusted Thomson Reuters content and an organisation’s own knowledge.
CoCounsel Legal UK in practice
CoCounsel Legal UK has advanced AI capabilities that include:
1. Deep Research
Deep Research is an advanced agentic question‑answering capability that emulates the way experienced lawyers and professional support teams approach a problem: planning a multi-step research route, refining it as it goes, and drawing on trusted content to deliver clear, well-structured answers faster.
For legal professionals, that can mean practical support across common workflows, such as:
- Advisory and compliance work: quickly pulling together relevant UK legislation and amendments, checking it against regulator rules and guidance, and flagging where requirements may differ across England & Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland—or between UK and EU regimes where a business operates in both.
- Litigation preparation: surfacing relevant case law, comparing key authorities, and summarising implications for argument and strategy.
The result is research that is not only quicker, but also more systematic — helping teams move from “finding” to “deciding” with greater confidence.
2. Tabular analysis [Coming soon to CoCounsel Legal UK]
For legal professionals facing the time-consuming, error prone task of manually reviewing hundreds or thousands of documents, tabular analysis in CoCounsel transforms the process of high-volume document review so they can focus on higher-value, strategic work.
Tabular analysis rapidly reviews up to 10,000 documents with up to 100 questions in a flexible, filterable table format, where users can:
- Easily add or remove documents and questions while the review is processing
- Navigate results in a three-pane viewer
- Verify answers with clickable footnotes linked to the corresponding location of the document
- Run multiple tables simultaneously
3. A Library of resources
CoCounsel Legal UK includes a library of pre-built resources — prompts and skills — designed and tested by Thomson Reuters experts. This removes the guesswork that often slows adoption and helps teams use AI consistently across matters.
For example, tried-and-tested skills allow you to:
- Summarise long, complex documents
- Ask in-depth questions and receive substantive analysis with citations
- Assess similarities, differences, and favourability between documents
Why this matters now
AI can help legal professionals improve both quality and speed — without compromising judgement. It enables teams to spend less time on repetitive work and more time on what clients value most: clear advice, strategic thinking, negotiation, and relationship-building.
It also supports a more sustainable way of working. By reducing the grind of first-draft work, document triage, and repetitive analysis, teams can free up capacity — improving responsiveness while helping manage workload pressure.
CoCounsel Legal UK
Setting a new standard for AI-driven legal work, offering advanced AI, trusted content, and seamless integrations, all in one place.
Learn more ↗
