Thomson Reuters has announced the integration of generative AI into its flagship legal research platform, Westlaw. The new feature, titled AI Assisted Research, is now available to U.S. Precision customers at no additional cost. Notably, this feature promises to transform the way legal research is conducted by delivering direct answers to user queries in narrative form. It essentially eliminates the need to sift through a long list of cases, statutes, and other resources to find relevant legal information. This narrative comes complete with footnotes, which are linked to the cases or other materials that form the basis of the AI’s answer.
The AI in Westlaw uses retrieval augmented generation (RAG), which employs traditional research methods to extract relevant resources from Westlaw for the large language model (LLM) to analyze and generate responses. While these AI-generated responses can occasionally include inaccuracies, users have been impressed with how efficient the process is, as fetching an answer generally only takes between 90 seconds to three minutes. This development has been heralded as “the biggest transformational change in legal research since the move from books to online legal research”, according to Mike Dahn, the SVP and head of Westlaw product management.
On top of the game-changing AI integrated research, Thomson Reuters is set to integrate Casetext‘s CoCounsel, the first AI legal assistant developed in collaboration with OpenAI, across a variety of its products, including Westlaw Precision, Practical Law, Document Intelligence, and HighQ. This move further enhances the value proposition that Thomson Reuters offers its clients by providing them with an AI-based toolset that not only assists with legal research but also supports a wide array of legal tasks.
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