Oct 15, 2024 | AI

Today, nearly two years since ChatGPT debuted, GenAI continues to dominate our cultural and professional conversations. Even as its adoption for work steadily increases, the biggest concern for most professionals – 70% of them – is accuracy of output. 

However, not using GenAI for work at all is a non-option. 77% of professionals believe AI will have a high or transformational impact on their work over the next five years, and 78% call AI a “force for good” in their profession. In fact, 50% of law firms named AI among their top five strategic priorities for the next 18 months. If there were still doubt, there definitely isn’t anymore: GenAI is here to stay. 

So how can conscientious – and forward-thinking – professionals make the most of this generational technology while guarding against its drawbacks? How do you know if the GenAI solution you’re considering will live up to your professional obligation to work ethically and ensure your clients’ data is securely handled? Is any GenAI product trustworthy? Is it even possible for tools built on large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-4o from OpenAI and Google’s Gemini, all of which are known to hallucinate, to be safe enough to use professionally? 

Yes, it is possible. “Built on” is the key. When we launched our GenAI assistant, CoCounsel, our product and engineering teams delivered on the challenge of creating a product that could take advantage of LLMs’ tremendous raw power while eliminating as many of their serious limitations as possible – like hallucinations – that curb the professional utility of models when used on their own. What makes the current generation of LLMs truly extraordinary, then, is not what they alone can do, but what they enable.      

Using a model directly should be done with great caution and exposes users to risk if they use the output professionally. CoCounsel, on the other hand, harnesses that power and has engineered robust, well-tested accuracy, privacy, and security controls around it. In short: LLMs are the world’s most incredible engines. CoCounsel uses that engine to take you incredible places – places you couldn’t reach without these LLMs – safely. 

Why can professionals trust CoCounsel? 

We’ve applied our technical and domain expertise to leading LLMs in creating and continuing to optimize CoCounsel, a first-of-its-kind product that both does more than LLMs can and corrects the problems that make them unsuitable on their own. 

In short, CoCounsel is a professional-grade GenAI assistant. And no professional should use a GenAI solution that isn’t. 

What does it take for a GenAI assistant to be professional-grade? At a bare minimum – without which it should not be trusted for your work – it must be: 

1. Built for domain-specific use and grounded in reliable sources of data relevant to that use. A professional-grade solution, such as CoCounsel, harnesses the power of LLMs but limits the source of knowledge to known, reliable data sources – such as profession-specific domains or professionals’ or their clients’ databases – which rigorously limits the possibility of inaccuracies.
2. Built to make verifying its output easy. CoCounsel was not designed to replace the role of the professional, but rather to help them accomplish more and higher-quality work in less time. So just as lawyers review all work delegated to a junior associate or paralegal, they must validate CoCounsel’s output. We’ve made it easy to do so: all answers link to their origin in the source documents, so it’s simple to “trust, but verify.” 
3. Developed by technical teams with deep GenAI expertise.  Though GenAI has only been broadly talked about since 2022, it’s been around since 1961. Thomson Reuters AI engineers and research teams have worked with LLMs since their invention, were among the first to build with GPT-4, and have invented patented approaches to applying LLMs to professional use cases.  
4. Continually and consistently tested and authenticated by a dedicated team of domain experts.  Thomson Reuters AI engineers and Trust Team attorneys together filter, rank, and score CoCounsel’s responses to a daily battery of thousands of tests developed to simulate real-life legal use cases and ensure the assistant’s answers are consistent and accurate. To date we’ve run more than 1,000,000 such tests against CoCounsel.  
5. Secure and private, because it interacts with third-party LLMs the right way. Thomson Reuters GenAI solutions access third-party LLMs through dedicated, private servers, and through an “eyes off” API. No LLM partner employees can see customer queries or documents, and our LLM access is contractually “zero retention.” Our LLM partners cannot store customer data longer than it takes to process the request. Our product data is never used to train any third-party models. And all product data is encrypted in transit and at rest, and subject to Thomson Reuters rigorous security policies and practices.  

Why “makes minimal mistakes” isn’t enough 

As important as the above five characteristics are, they’ve become price-of-entry criteria for professional-grade GenAI. And given how rapidly the technology is evolving, what you expect from a professional-grade solution should, as well. Remember: GenAI has the power to do so much more than help you complete jobs. It can transform what it means to be a professional, freeing you for more strategic, creative, valuable work that a machine just cannot do – which can transform not only how you do business, but also how much business you do.  

To take full advantage of this potential, you need a GenAI assistant that fulfills two more key requirements: 

1. Professional-grade means intelligently and seamlessly handling workflows, not just completing a series of tasks. A true GenAI assistant goes beyond responding to your requests, instead guiding you through the steps required to finish long, complex, even open-ended projects. Only this kind of product, such as CoCounsel, can truly unlock the full potential of GenAI.

Through an expanding set of capabilities and deep connections with both your documents and the tools you use every day – e.g., Microsoft 365 – a professional-grade GenAI assistant can traffic an entire deliverable from task to task, program to program, in a continuous stream, prompting you forward through the next steps and simultaneously handling multiple pieces of the work itself.

CoCounsel is built for workflows. It’s accessible across multiple Thomson Reuters products, bringing together both fundamental capabilities such as summarization and document review with specialized functions such as legal research, for a smooth transition from one type of work to the next. And it’s integrated with both Microsoft 365 and document management systems, available for you literally wherever you’re working, from client communication to research to document drafting and beyond.

2. Professional-grade means providing partnership, not just product. Without in-depth, sustained support, you’re unlikely to get the most possible value from your investment. A professional-grade vendor offers a success and support team that will be there for you long after you’ve signed a subscription agreement. They work with you to deeply understand your most prevalent use cases and how their solution will help you tackle them, and of course are available when something’s not working the way it should. They keep you informed about product changes and improvements and continue creating content you can use to increase your knowledge, such as videos, webinars, and written materials. A truly professional-grade team has a vision for their GenAI assistant, ensuring it will increase in power and capability as the technology advances. And most important, they are as invested in you as you are in them.

Upon adopting CoCounsel, legal professional users are trained by the Thomson Reuters Customer Success team, made up of licensed attorneys, many still practicing, with dozens of years of combined experience in both litigation and transactional law. And many of these trainers are prompting engineer specialists, who in addition to being licensed attorneys have a background in computer science. After onboarding, we ensure everyone using CoCounsel has the opportunity to attend live trainings and watch recorded webinars, get individual help through live chat and email, and access dozens of video tutorials—a resource pool that will only keep growing.

This is a guest post from Jake Heller, head of CoCounsel, Thomson Reuters, and Erin Nelson, CoCounsel content strategist, Thomson Reuters.