CoCounsel Review 2026: Thomson Reuters' Legal Research Platform (formerly Casetext)

Legal research grounded in Westlaw and Practical Law

CoCounsel answers research questions against Thomson Reuters' proprietary content rather than the open internet. The practical difference is that outputs arrive with citations you can check, which is the difference between a starting point and a liability. For firms already paying for Westlaw Edge, this is additive rather than a separate research spend.

Business outcome: research that reaches a defensible first draft in a fraction of the time, with a verifiable source trail.

AI contract review and drafting at volume

CoCounsel's document review skills extract clauses, flag deviations from playbook positions and summarise terms across large document sets. This is the workload where AI legal tools deliver the clearest measurable return, because contract review is high-volume, repetitive and expensive at attorney rates. Firms evaluating this category more broadly should compare against the wider field of AI contract review tools before committing.

Business outcome: contract review capacity that scales without proportional headcount, freeing senior attorneys for higher-value work.

Drafting and summarising on top of your own documents

The drafting and summarisation skills work against documents you supply as well as Thomson Reuters content — memos, briefs, client summaries and internal notes. Because the underlying LLM interactions run on zero-retention API calls with no training on customer content, this is one of the few drafting workflows that a risk-averse firm can approve without a bespoke data-processing negotiation.

Business outcome: first drafts and document summaries produced in minutes, with confidentiality controls that satisfy firm risk review.

Timeline building and tabular analysis across document sets

CoCounsel can assemble chronologies and extract structured data from large document populations into tables — the kind of work that consumes paralegal and junior associate hours in discovery and due diligence. The output is a structured starting point rather than a finished work product, but it removes the most mechanical layer of the task.

Business outcome: large document populations converted into usable structure without burning junior time on manual extraction.

Works inside Microsoft 365 and your document management system

CoCounsel connects to Microsoft 365 and document management system partners, so it operates inside the tools attorneys already use rather than as a separate destination application. Integration is consistently the difference between a tool that gets adopted and one that gets abandoned after the pilot, because it removes the behaviour change that kills most legal tech rollouts.

Business outcome: higher adoption across the firm because the AI lives where the work already happens.

Enterprise-grade privacy and security safeguards

Customer content and prompts are not used to train CoCounsel or underlying LLMs. Third-party AI partners OpenAI and Google are contractually prohibited from training on customer data, all LLM interactions use zero-retention API calls, data is encrypted via TLS 1.2 in transit and AES-256 at rest, and retention is configurable at the organisation level. Users can delete content and prompts at any time.

Business outcome: client confidentiality objections answered with documented controls rather than assurances.

• Answers arrive with a verifiable source trailOutputs are grounded in Thomson Reuters' proprietary content and surface their sources, which is what makes the work defensible rather than merely fast.
• Privacy controls that survive firm risk reviewNo training on customer content, contractual prohibitions on OpenAI and Google, zero-retention API calls, and configurable retention at the organisation level.
• Integration into the tools attorneys already useMicrosoft 365 and document management system connections mean the AI sits inside existing workflows rather than adding a new destination.
• Scale that is already proven in the fieldThomson Reuters reports 1 million users across 107 countries as of February 2026, which is meaningful evidence for buyers wary of pilot-stage legal AI.

• No published pricing and no free trialBuyers cannot evaluate cost or capability without a sales conversation, which slows procurement and makes budget planning harder.
• Effectively tied to the Thomson Reuters ecosystemThe value proposition leans heavily on Westlaw, Practical Law and Checkpoint content — firms outside that ecosystem get substantially less from it.
• Some users report inconsistent response timesAnecdotal reports from legal practitioners describe slow response times and an underlying model that felt less capable than expected, so performance should be validated against your own workloads during any pilot.
• Professional RealityCoCounsel is not a general-purpose AI subscription you can buy self-serve — there is no public price list and no free trial, so if you are not prepared to go through a sales conversation and likely a Westlaw relationship, this is not the tool for you.

Litigation teams compressing research and document review cycles

Cole, Scott & Kissane's General Counsel Steven Hicks-Safra reports that tasks which previously took eight or nine hours now take one and a half to two hours. For litigation teams, that compression applies directly to research memos, chronology building and first-pass document review — the work that determines how quickly a matter can be positioned.

Firms measuring AI value in recovered attorney hours

Daniel Olson, Shareholder at Bassford Remele, reports saving six to eight hours of attorney time on any given day. That is the metric that matters commercially: not how clever the output is, but how much senior capacity is released back into billable or business-development work.

In-house teams handling high contract volume

For teams reviewing contracts at volume, CoCounsel's extraction and summarisation skills reduce the mechanical layer of review substantially. This is the workload where an AI contract review tool pays for itself fastest, because the alternative is either outside counsel spend or internal attorney hours on repetitive clause comparison.

CFOs and legal-adjacent leaders managing routine legal work internally

Gregory Kantor, CFO at OMNIUX, describes CoCounsel as 'not a replacement for outside counsel when the stakes are high, but for 90% of what I do day-to-day, it's the perfect solution.' That is the honest framing for non-lawyer executives handling routine legal and compliance work: it covers the routine layer, and you still escalate the high-stakes matters.

Confirm whether your organisation already holds a Westlaw or Checkpoint subscription — CoCounsel pricing is typically tied to it, and existing customers get a materially shorter procurement path.

Contact Thomson Reuters sales directly rather than looking for a self-serve signup; there is no public price list and no free trial, so the first real step is a scoping conversation.

During scoping, ask specifically about retention configuration at the organisation account level — retention is customisable to your own policy, and this is the setting your risk team will want documented.

Run a pilot against a real, closed matter rather than a demo dataset, and measure attorney hours recovered against a comparable historical matter rather than against vendor benchmarks.