Tech and Legal Industries React to the Thomson Reuters Expansion of CoCounsel
The Thomson Reuters expansion of CoCounsel “spreads the LLM love beyond legal,” said Richard Tromans on social media as part of Artificial Lawyer’s coverage of the announcement.
Journalists and bloggers shared their perspectives on the CoCounsel expansion, which includes the rollout of the generative AI assistant beyond the legal landscape as well as new skills for legal and tax professionals in the United States and UK. Here are some highlights of tech and legal influencers’ takes on the CoCounsel expansion.
“Thomson Reuters’ CoCounsel marks a pivotal moment in the evolution of legal AI, as established information services giants begin to flex their muscles in this burgeoning space,” Michael Nuñez said in VentureBeat’s coverage. “By combining cutting-edge generative AI with their extensive proprietary data and in-house expertise, Thomson Reuters has set a high bar for what legal professionals can expect from AI-powered tools.”
“Thomson Reuters delivered its plan to capture the hearts and minds of the industry, announcing a single GenAI assistant that will offer applications for TR’s range of professional services in Legal, Tax, Risk & Fraud, and Media,” Joe Patrice declared in Above the Law.
Bob Ambrogi explained in LawSites that the CoCounsel expansion is the latest in a series of generative AI initiatives from Thomson Reuters.
“Already, TR in November had announced the integration of generative AI within its flagship legal research platform Westlaw Precision and provided direct access to CoCounsel from within Precision,” Ambrogi said. “It also previewed its plans to integrate CoCounsel across multiple TR products, including Practical Law, Document Intelligence, and HighQ. In January, it rolled out Ask Practical Law AI, a generative AI feature within Practical Law.”
Stephanie Wilkins noted in Legaltech news that the CoCounsel expansion builds on – and completes – the Thomson Reuters integration of Casetext into the business.
“Since Thomson Reuters acquired legal research company Casetext last summer, it has gradually been incorporating the startup’s headline-grabbing AI legal assistant CoCounsel, the first legal tech tool to publicly confirm using OpenAI’s GPT-4 large language model (LLM), into its broader workflows,” Wilkins said. “On Wednesday, Thomson Reuters announced that it is now not only further expanding the legal capabilities of CoCounsel again, but also expanding the reach of the generative AI assistant beyond legal ‘to every professional it serves.’”
Nuñez noted the positive impact the CoCounsel expansion will have across the legal landscape in VentureBeat.
“The launch of CoCounsel is likely to spark a new wave of competition and innovation in the legal AI market,” he said. “As rivals scramble to match or surpass CoCounsel, we can anticipate a rapid acceleration in the development of sophisticated, domain-specific AI solutions tailored to the unique needs of legal professionals. This intensified competition bodes well for lawyers and their clients, as the increased pressure to innovate will drive the creation of ever more powerful and efficient AI tools.”
Insightful Accountant highlighted how expanding CoCounsel will support professionals beyond the legal market including in the tax, risk & fraud, and media segments: “Completing tasks at superhuman speeds, CoCounsel provides high-quality information at the right time, maintains multiple threads of work, as well as keeping context and memory across the different tasks and products customers use each day. By augmenting professional work with GenAI skills, CoCounsel delivers accelerated and streamlined workflows, enables professionals to produce higher-quality work more quickly, all while keeping customer data secure.”
CPA Practice Advisor also noted the broader impact of the CoCounsel expansion: “CoCounsel will unify the entire customer experience and give customers a new way to access Thomson Reuters product capabilities through a single GenAI assistant with applications across Legal, Tax, Risk & Fraud, and Media.”
For more on how Thomson Reuters is expanding CoCounsel, check out this video and read the press release.
