Thomson Reuters (TR) has formally announced the expansion of Casetext’s generative AI legal assistant, CoCounsel Core, into new markets of Canada and Australia. This announcement indicates the first steps in TR’s plans to extend the product to English-speaking countries beyond the U.S.
CoCounsel was first launched by Casetext on March 1, 2023, as a product developed in partnership with OpenAI; employing the capabilities of the GPT-4 large language model to assist lawyers with a variety of tasks.
Within barely four months of CoCounsel’s launch, due to the strength of the product, Thomson Reuters acquired Casetext for a sum of $650 million. Shortly afterwards, TR previewed its plans to integrate CoCounsel across its core products, such as Westlaw Precision, Practical Law, Document Intelligence, and HighQ, while also promising to continue offering CoCounsel as a standalone product under the name CoCounsel Core.
Before CoCounsel’s expansion to Canada and Australia, in the 11 months since CoCounsel’s launch, it had been rolled out to more than 45 large law firms in the United States. This included six of the Am Law 10 and involved over 50,000 lawyers. Thomson Reuters shared that over 9,000 of these lawyers had received extensive, hands-on instruction to prepare them to use the technology effectively and ethically, from a training staff of just four people. TR also indicated plans to quickly scale this “rollout playbook” for CoCounsel.
In both Canada and Australia, CoCounsel was already being used in a proof-of-concept phase in two firms, McCarthy Tétrault LLP in Canada and Maddocks in Australia. CoCounsel Core enables its users with eight core generative AI-powered legal skills: Prepare for a Deposition, Draft Correspondence, Search a Database, Review Documents, Summarize a Document, Extract Contract Data, Contract Policy Compliance and Timeline.
With the expansion of CoCounsel Core, TR has brought professional-grade AI access to markets that had previously been without this level of technological advantage. This is indeed a noteworthy accomplishment on the way to CoCounsel’s one-year anniversary, according to Jake Heller, the former co-founder of Casetext and current head of product, CoCounsel, at TR.
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