Key takeaways
- CoCounsel Legal plans, researches and drafts from a plain-language description of your matter, using Westlaw, Practical Law and your own documents.
- Australian courts expect lawyers to personally verify AI-assisted material, so CoCounsel Legal links every output to authoritative sources and shows its process for review.
- CoCounsel Legal is available to Australian customers from late October.
Legal professionals in Australia told us they want AI that fits how they work: a teammate that plans, researches, and drafts, with every answer traceable to authority they trust. With Australian courts now expecting lawyers to personally verify any AI-assisted material, this means that every lawyer is responsible for what their AI tool produces. This makes it essential that lawyers can verify the output from their AI tool back to reliable and authoritative primary sources. The next generation of CoCounsel Legal delivers that, backed by Westlaw, Practical Law, and our 120+ year history understanding how Australian legal practice works.
Unlike AI tools that simply return an answer to a prompt, the next generation of CoCounsel Legal can understand and apply legal nuance, built around how legal work happens. It can develop a legal approach, plan and carry out a series of steps for tasks such as legal research, analysis and drafting. It can work through a legal problem the way a lawyer would, pursuing the right inquiry, to help legal professionals evaluate issues and develop informed legal analysis. All while giving users visibility of the process, allowing the user to review, verify and adjust their approach in real time.
Built around how legal work gets done
Australian lawyers are being asked to prove their work. So is our AI. Earlier AI tools asked you to choose a skill, define a workflow, or write a detailed prompt, then returned work task by task. The next generation of CoCounsel Legal works the way you work, rather than requiring you to adapt to the way AI works.
Simply describe your matter in plain language. CoCounsel Legal interprets the request, develops a tailored approach, researches the authority in Westlaw and Practical Law, and draws on your own documents and playbooks. It drafts with citations. When new information changes the picture, it adapts. You get a response at a professional standard that you can review, question, and refine, with verification in-built.
What can you do with CoCounsel Legal in Australia?
Several new capabilities shape the experience. Each one is grounded in content you already trust.
- Market-Leading Research: Combines advanced AI with trusted Westlaw and Practical Law content to produce comprehensive legal research reports that surface key authorities, relevant precedents, and actionable insights.
- Workspaces: Create matter-specific workspaces that bring together firm documents, legal department materials, precedents, and institutional knowledge. Context is preserved across tasks and matters to support more informed analysis.
- Integrations with the tools lawyers use every day: CoCounsel Legal connects with document management systems and productivity tools including Microsoft 365, HighQ, Google Drive, iManage, DocuSign and Dropbox, helping professionals access relevant information where work already takes place.
“As we evaluate AI for legal work, confidence in the output is critical. What stood out about CoCounsel Legal was its combination of trusted legal content, transparency, and ease of use. Rather than spending time managing prompts, it allows our team to focus more on where we create real value: exercising judgment, navigating complexity, and helping the business make better-informed decisions. Being able to see how the work has been developed and verified gives us greater confidence in the output, so we can spend more time applying our insight and experience where they matter most,” said Chris Grier, Vice President, Legal and Corporate, Abt Global, Australia.
Built for legal work in Australia
As Fiduciary-Grade AI™, CoCounsel ensures every output is ready for professional review, and lawyers remain firmly in control of the final output. CoCounsel Legal has proven it can complete complex work across high-stakes legal workflows with results that professionals can trust. Drawing on an organisation’s in-house knowledge as well as Thomson Reuters’ trusted legal offerings Westlaw and Practical Law, it provides targeted and up-to-date advice and support for legal professionals, while ensuring process visibility and oversight so that professional judgement and accountability remain with the lawyer, and verification of AI use is efficient.
A higher standard of legal AI
The experience is new. The high standard is the one you expect from Thomson Reuters.
Fiduciary-Grade AI™ means every output is grounded in and linked to authoritative, domain-specific content that professionals can review and verify. The sources upon which responses are based are transparent, so you can inspect the work rather than simply approve it and, most importantly, your confidential information stays yours.
Get started in Australia
The next generation of CoCounsel Legal will be available to customers in Australia from late October.
To learn more, visit https://www.thomsonreuters.com.au/en-au/products/cocounsel-legal.html
