Product Walk Through: Thomson Reuters CoCounsel

Valerie McConnell, senior director of customer success at Thomson Reuters, gives Legal IT Insider a demonstration of the functionality currently available within generative AI research platform CoCounsel. McConnell talks us through some of the eight CoCounsel use cases or ‘skills’, including the AI Search Database, where you can search the likes of contractual precedents, brief banks, or docket records. One use case is to search the contracts to identify trends, such as ‘what is the typical period of a non-compete clause.’ McConnell says: “This is an example of the types of questions you can ask where other AI would struggle.” CoCounsel will leverage its training to undertake a higher-level analysis, and you can use it to evaluate potential risk and liability for clients.
CoCounsel can also evaluate witness statements, including searching by the likes of tone and demeanor. Is the witness frustrated or angry? “This is the kind of stuff litigators look for,” says McConnell. “Is the witness testifying beyond the scope of their knowledge?” AI can go through a 400-page transcript and provide you with information that might otherwise be difficult and very time consuming to search for. As shown in this demo, CoCounsel can review a contract in a different language within one search and return the response in English, with an explanation of the reasoning.
In conversation with Legal IT Insider’s editor Caroline Hill, McConnell talks through key questions around the importance of retrieval augmented generation and security, as well as how you protect against bias.