Nov 13, 2023 | AI-Assisted Research

Thomson Reuters today announced a series of generative AI initiatives designed to transform the legal profession. Headlining these initiatives is AI-Assisted Research on Westlaw Precision.

Available now to customers in the United States, this skill helps legal professionals quickly get to answers for complex research questions. This generative AI skill leverages innovation in Casetext, created by taking a “best of” approach using the Thomson Reuters Generative AI Platform.

With AI-Assisted Research and CoCounsel Core, attorneys are empowered with eight generative AI-powered core skills, including AI-Assisted Research on Westlaw Precision, Prepare for a Deposition, Draft Correspondence, Search a Database, Review Documents, Summarize a Document, Extract Contract Data, and Contract Policy Compliance. The company also laid out high-level product roadmaps to develop numerous additional generative AI skills to address customer-specific needs. Each additional skill will be built on a common software framework within the Thomson Reuters Generative AI Platform.

AI-Assisted Research allows customers to ask complex legal research questions in natural language and quickly receive synthesized answers, with links to supporting authority from Westlaw content and links to further examine that authority. AI-Assisted Research streamlines the initial phase of legal research with sophisticated answers to questions and the authority those answers are based on, saving hours of work. These responses are founded on more than 150 years of Thomson Reuters classification, analysis, and editorial expertise contributed by subject matter experts and attorney editors.

AI-Assisted Research employs Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) to prevent the large language models (LLMs) from making up things like case names and citations by focusing the LLMs on the actual language of Westlaw content. Future plans include expanding generative AI throughout the research process in Westlaw and bringing these capabilities to versions of Westlaw outside the United States.

Also, the company announced that it will be building on the AI assistant experience Casetext created with CoCounsel, the world’s first AI legal assistant. Later in 2024, Thomson Reuters will launch an AI assistant that will be the interface across Thomson Reuters products with generative AI capabilities.

The AI assistant, called CoCounsel, will be fully integrated with multiple Thomson Reuters legal products, including Westlaw Precision, Practical Law Dynamic Tool Set, Document Intelligence, and HighQ, and will continue to be available on the CoCounsel application as a destination site.

In addition, Thomson Reuters will introduce generative AI within Practical Law Dynamic Tool Set in January 2024. Customers will benefit from generative AI within Practical Law through a new interface with an AI legal assistant, which will quickly provide answers using conversational language – all validated by trusted Practical Law content created and maintained by a team of more than 650 legal experts.

Read the press release for more on AI-Assisted Research on Westlaw Precision, the new generative AI assistant connecting all Thomson Reuters generative AI products, Thomson Reuters Generative AI Platform, generative AI capabilities in Practical Law, and CoCounsel Core. For more on how Thomson Reuters is ensuring that its AI products and skills are built responsibly, check out the company’s Data and AI Ethics Principles.