Robert Ambrogi Blog
Thomson Reuters today announced the launch of the “next gen” of its CoCounsel artificial intelligence platform, marking what the company describes as a fundamental shift from AI assistants that respond to prompts to intelligent agentic systems that can plan, reason and execute complex multi-step workflows within professional environments.
Today’s announcement centered on the immediate availability of CoCounsel for tax, audit and accounting professionals, while previewing similar agentic capabilities for legal professionals coming sometime this summer.
The legal industry rollout will include agentic workflows for a variety of tasks such as document drafting, employment policy generation, deposition analysis, and compliance risk assessments integrated across the Westlaw, Practical Law and CoCounsel platforms.
During a media preview last week at Thomson Reuters’ New York City headquarters, David Wong, chief product officer at Thomson Reuters, said the company’s agentic approach represents more than an incremental improvement over existing AI tools.
“Agentic AI isn’t a marketing buzzword. It’s a new blueprint for how complex work gets done,” Wong said. “We’re delivering systems that don’t just assist but operate inside the workflows professionals use every day.”
The distinction, he said, lies in the systems’ ability to break down complex tasks into individual steps, adapt based on user response and context, guide users proactively, and extend capabilities by using tools and other software in combination with AI reasoning.
Unlike traditional AI assistants that require specific prompts for each task, agentic systems can understand broader objectives and determine the necessary steps to achieve them.
“They do this with understanding of professional work and the objectives of professional work so they can seamlessly integrate into workflows that lawyers, accountants, tax professionals, and auditors expect and provide information, answers and solutions in real time,” Wong said.
Legal Implementation
For legal professionals, Thomson Reuters is integrating CoCounsel’s agentic capabilities directly into its existing workflow and knowledge tools rather than creating standalone applications.
At last week’s briefing, Emily Colbert, senior vice president of CoCounsel, demonstrated how the system will guide users through complex legal processes using what the company describes as “guided workflows.”
“With our agentic guided workflows, we go from just one single-shot task, answering one question, to actually getting to a work output,” she said. “And when we think about how we apply this new technology to CoCounsel, our ambition as to what we’re designing is to be the most comprehensive AI solution for legal professionals.”
(The video above was provided by Thomson Reuters.)
As an example, Colbert showed how lawyers will be able to initiate document creation processes — such as drafting demand letters or employment policies — through structured workflows that leverage Thomson Reuters’ legal content and expertise. The system will analyze uploaded documents, summarize key details, create chronologies of events, and produce initial drafts, all while maintaining transparency about the sources it is using and its reasoning process.
The legal agentic system will integrate across Thomson Reuters’ legal product suite, incorporating not just just Westlaw and Practical Law, but also tools such as Westlaw’s Claims Explorer functionality, which can suggest potential legal claims based on provided facts and documents.
Colbert demonstrated one workflow showing the system drafting a paid sick leave policy for New York, with the AI automatically researching relevant Practical Law resources and footnoting sources throughout the document. More complex workflows, such as complaint drafting, integrate multiple research steps and can tap into Westlaw’s generative AI capabilities for comprehensive legal research.
She said that CoCounsel will significantly reduce the time it takes to perform legal work, estimating that it will cut the time to review documents or to draft and review contracts by as much as 63%, while cutting the time of legal know-how tasks by 10%.
When the legal product is released sometime this summer, it will come with a number of these guided workflows, Colbert said, although she was not ready to specify what they will be. Although subject to change, among those listed in last week’s preview were:
- Draft demand letter.
- Determine deal viability.
- Review deposition testimony.
- Draft complaint.
- Draft policy.
- Review licensing agreement.
- Summarize expert reports.
Colbert said a number of these workflows will be released this summer, with more to be added on an ongoing basis, covering all aspects of litigation, transactional and advisory legal work.
Multimodal and Multi-Agent
TR says its development of this agentic platform has been ongoing for over a year and was accelerated by its acquisition last year of Materia, an AI startup specializing in agentic systems for tax and accounting.
Speaking at last week’s briefing, Ryan Walker, vice president of engineering at Thomson Reuters, and formerly the chief technology officer at Casetext, which originally developed CoCounsel before its acquisition by Thomson Reuters in 2023, said that the system is designed to be multimodal and multi-agent, capable of orchestrating across different models and agents rather than relying on a single tool for all tasks.
“No one tool is going to be the best tool for the job to be done,” Walker explained. He also emphasized that the platform maintains human-in-the-loop functionality at two levels: users collaborate with the system to produce work product, and human experts are integral to building and training the tools.
The system integrates across Thomson Reuters’ content, including more than 20 billion documents and 15 petabytes of data, while maintaining what the company describes as enterprise-grade security with ISO 42001 certification and zero-retention architecture for client data.
In developing this new version of CoCounsel, Thomson Reuters says, it has partnered with multiple AI providers, including OpenAI, whose models power some elements of CoCounsel.
Live for Tax and Accounting
While today’s announcement only teased the coming launch of agentic AI for legal, it included the live release of agentic AI for tax and accounting professionals, offering a preview of what legal professionals can expect. Kevin Merlini, vice president of product for CoCounsel Tax, Accounting and Audit and the former CEO of the aforementioned Materia, demonstrated how the system automates complex workflows while maintaining professional standards.
The tax system includes “Ready to Review,” an agentic tax preparation application that can extract information from client documents, apply reasoning about where data should be placed in tax forms, input information into Thomson Reuters’ GoSystem Tax engine, and respond to diagnostic messages from the tax software. When the system encounters issues it cannot resolve, it brings humans into the loop with context about the problem and potential solutions.
“This isn’t GenAI in a prettier wrapper,” Merlini said. “It’s a fully integrated, intelligent system built to do the work. Now CoCounsel doesn’t just assist — it acts with context, navigates complexity, and integrates directly into how professionals already operate. It’s purpose-built for high-stakes work — and it’s only the beginning.”
At the press briefing, Zachary Iannotta, assurance associate at HBK CPAs, shared his experience in leading testing of the new agentic capabilities at his firm. Using it for lease accounting, he said, he was able to reduce the time from one hour if done manually to 15 minutes using CoCounsel — a 75% time savings. For a client with 20 leases, that meant that what would have taken 20 hours manually could be completed in five hours using CoCounsel.
He reported similar time savings for creating financial statement footnotes, where analyzing line-of-credit agreements and drafting footnotes dropped from 30 minutes to five minutes — an 83% time savings. Ayanata reported saving approximately 12 hours per week overall and experiencing a 30% reduction in technical review notes.
Teaching AI to Use A Calculator
Wong and other speakers emphasized their belief that CoCounsel’s agentic AI is distinguished from other products on the market by its deep integration with the entire Thomson Reuters universe of products and infrastructure, rather than just a standalone AI applications, leveraging Thomson Reuters’ existing software and teaching the AI system to use tools that customers already employ rather than replacing those tools entirely.
“Instead of teaching the AI systems how to do math, we taught the AI system how to use a calculator,” Wong said, referencing how the tax system uses calculation engines developed by Thomson Reuters rather than relying on large language models for numerical computation.
As noted, CoCounsel for tax, audit and accounting professionals is available immediately. Legal agentic workflows are scheduled for release this summer. When I tried to pin him down on a date, he responded only, “Summer 2025.”
“What others are calling agentic, we’ve already had in the market,” Wong said in a press release issued today. “What we’re launching now sets a new bar: this is what AI looks like when it’s built with real content, trained with real experts, and trusted by the professionals who do real work.”