Case study
HARTMANN accelerates legal operations with Thomson Reuters CoCounsel
Driving digital transformation, HARTMANN’s legal team leverages Thomson Reuters CoCounsel to streamline workflows, boost efficiency, and achieve measurable cost and time savings across global operations
Introduction: A healthcare innovator scaling legal operations across 37 countries
HARTMANN is a leading European supplier of medical and care solutions designed to improve the lives and work of medical professionals and patients. Established in 1818 and headquartered in Germany, the company has grown to around 11,000 employees operating across 37 countries.
To support that scale, HARTMANN's legal department — around 100 people — has been on a multi-year digital transformation journey. The team has implemented several Thomson Reuters solutions to modernize day-to-day legal operations and create a stronger foundation for efficiency and control.
Most recently, HARTMANN adopted Thomson Reuters CoCounsel, an AI assistant developed specifically for lawyers, to accelerate critical processes and access newer AI-driven capabilities.
20–30%
reduction in overall legal spend
~20%
time savings
800
self service document requests per year
Challenge: Improving visibility and efficiency while supporting global work
As HARTMANN continued its broader transformation, the legal team needed to streamline how work entered the department, how matters were tracked, and how spend was managed. The priority wasn't only speed. It was also clarity: better visibility into legal work and costs, and more consistent oversight across engagements.
Because the business operates internationally, the legal team also had to support work across multiple languages and jurisdictions. That global reality makes it harder to find relevant past work quickly, respond to new issues fast, and reuse knowledge consistently.
With a strong foundation already in place, the next logical step was to embrace AI in a way that enhanced lawyers' capabilities within the tools they already used.
“The results of CoCounsel are well structured. I can upload multiple documents and can be very specific on the output I expect. It’s much easier for me to process and forward to colleagues to discuss. For me, it’s very important that the results are fast and usable”
Marcus Warmholz
Head of Commercial Law and Legal Operations
HARTMANN
Solution: Adding an AI "chat buddy" while connecting CoCounsel across other products
HARTMANN chose CoCounsel to extend its Thomson Reuters ecosystem and bring AI directly into legal workflows. A key appeal was the direction of travel: one trusted supplier, and a future in which CoCounsel could search and operate across environments like Legal Tracker, Practical Law, and HighQ, so lawyers could interact through a single assistant rather than switching between tools.
HARTMANN focused on practical, high-impact AI use cases. CoCounsel is used to extract data from documents and regulations, generate legal documents, and create redlined versions of agreements to speed review and standardization.
One concrete example is GDPR support. CoCounsel can extract relevant rights and duties for data processors under the EU's GDPR and turn them into GDPR-compliant data processing contracts. Those contracts can then be automatically redlined to align with existing policies and downloaded with the relevant lawyer's name. Given the company's global footprint, HARTMANN also uses AI for natural-language searches across multilingual documents within HighQ's intake and matter management environment. This strengthens knowledge management and helps reduce issue response time by making it easier to find the right information fast.
Security and fit with daily work were also central. HARTMANN emphasized confidence in a major provider's ability to meet security needs, and the importance of tools working smoothly inside Microsoft 365, including Outlook and Teams, so AI is available in the flow of work, like a colleague a lawyer can turn to quickly.
Outcomes: Lower legal spend and meaningful time savings freed through self-service automation
HARTMANN reports that its broader Thomson Reuters legal tech rollout has delivered measurable business value, starting with spend oversight. Legal Tracker improved transparency and benchmarking of legal spend, enabling more informed decision-making, tighter control of budgets, and more consistent rates. It also strengthened HARTMANN's negotiating position with external law firms — contributing to 20–30% overall cost savings on legal spend in recent years.
Beyond cost control, combining Legal Tracker with HighQ and Practical Law has delivered significant efficiency gains. HARTMANN estimates these solutions have produced around 20%-time savings, helping the legal department handle work more effectively.
A standout example is document self-service enabled by HighQ Document Automation. Business users make around 800 self-service document requests per year, which has saved up to 400 hours across the legal team. That time is effectively returned to the department to focus on higher-value work and serve the organization better.
Practical Law has also helped reduce external legal spend by enabling more work to be done in-house, with its value increasing as AI functionality expands. For a company committed to continuous improvement, HARTMANN positions this AI step as part of a longer innovation journey supported by a trusted, integrated solutions suite.
At a glance
Industry
Healthcare
HQ region
Heidenheim an der Brenz, Germany
Year founded
1818
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