Highlights
- CoCounsel Legal reasons from Westlaw, Practical Law, and your organisation's knowledge throughout workflows.
- 86% of general counsel view legal as significant contributors, but only 17% of C-suite agree.
- AI built for professionals with duties of care, where nearly right still counts as wrong.
Sooner or later, someone asks how legal reached its view. It might be the chief financial officer, a board member, or a regulator. “The tool said so” is not an answer.
The next generation of Thomson Reuters® CoCounsel Legal became available in the UK on 14 October. Our launch post, The next generation of CoCounsel Legal, covers what’s new. Here we’ll explain what it means, and how in-house counsel can reply quickly and knowledgably to all your stakeholders about legal matters.
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More work, more scrutiny
CoCounsel Legal reasons from sources your team already trusts
You see the work, and you stay in control
More work, more scrutiny
In-house teams are under escalating pressure: from budgets, from global regulations, from business needs. Worse, in our State of the Corporate Law Department 2026 report, 86% of general counsel said legal is a significant contributor to the business, but only 17% of the C-suite agreed. Nearly half of general counsel named staffing constraints as the biggest barrier to delivering more value. Work volumes are rising and headcount isn’t.
Many teams are already turning to AI. A large majority of UK legal professionals have used generative AI at work, and growing numbers are using it on a daily basis. Wider adoption raises the standard. A fast first draft helps only if you can stand behind it, and that depends on what the AI reasons from and how much of its reasoning you can see.
CoCounsel Legal reasons from sources your team already trusts
CoCounsel Legal reasons from Westlaw, Practical Law, and your organisation’s own knowledge, throughout an entire workflow. That doesn’t mean you get a list of citations for follow-up research. Instead, you see how the AI reasons through your matter, step by defensible step, using procedures curated and validated by lawyer editors.
This is the difference from general-purpose AI, which gives you no way to know whether what it found is authoritative or current. We call the standard Fiduciary-Grade AI™. It is AI built for professionals with duties of care, where nearly right still counts as wrong.
See what a purpose-built solution looks like
CoCounsel Legal gives in-house teams a properly vetted, fiduciary-grade tool rather than leaving them to rely on unapproved workarounds.
See it in action ↗You see the work, and you stay in control
Describe the matter in plain language, whether that’s reviewing a contract, risk-spotting employment documentation, structuring a multi-jurisdictional deal, or building a litigation strategy. CoCounsel Legal builds a plan and works through it step by step. It explains its reasoning, surfaces its sources, and asks clarifying questions when it needs them. You can step in and redirect it at any point, and every citation links back to the source so you can read what the authority actually says.
No matter whether a document was created by a human or an AI, it needs to be defensible, trackable to authority, and aligned with your legal position. That’s why that visibility matters. For solicitors, the SRA’s position is that you remain personally responsible for the work you produce, whether or not AI was involved. CoCounsel Legal is designed for that reality. It is engineered to work at the level of a senior associate, and it doesn’t replace lawyers. Your role shifts from producing every first draft to reviewing and directing strong ones, then moving the business forward.
Built around your matters
Every matter has its own documents, prior positions, and templates. In CoCounsel Legal, you create a workspace for each matter and upload up to 200 documents (soon to be 10,000 documents). Your precedents inform the analysis, your templates shape the draft, and when you return to a matter next month, the context is already there.
This extends to drafting in Microsoft Word. Your first draft arrives jurisdiction-aware, drawing on Practical Law and current market standards, with your own precedents surfaced in context. CoCounsel Legal also integrates with Microsoft 365.
Two further capabilities are coming soon. Shared workspaces will let everyone on a matter work from the same foundation, and direct document management system integration will bring your DMS content in. We’ll announce both when they’re available.
Your data stays yours
Your data remains your data. It is private, and it is never used to train underlying models. CoCounsel Legal is multi-model by design, so we choose the model that suits each task, and it runs in an enterprise-grade, secure environment.
Your data protection and information security teams will want to assess it as they would any tool that handles personal data. ICO guidance indicates that AI systems processing personal data will almost always need a Data Protection Impact Assessment, so we’d encourage you to start that conversation early. The Thomson Reuters global Trust Centre has the product security information to support it.
See it on a real matter
The best test of any legal AI is your own work. Book a 30-minute demo and we’ll run CoCounsel Legal on a real matter your team is handling today, so you can inspect the reasoning and check the sources yourself.
Still weighing what to look for in an agentic AI tool?
Read our e-book 'Agentic AI 101: What UK legal professionals need to know'
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