Robert Ambrogi Blog
Thomson Reuters is opening early access this week to what it calls the next generation of CoCounsel Legal, the most substantial reworking of its flagship legal AI assistant since the company acquired the product as part of its 2023 purchase of Casetext — and, just as notably, a shift in how the company describes what the tool is meant to do.
During a LinkedIn Live event this morning, Ragunath Ramanathan, Thomson Reuters’ president of legal professionals, said the company has rebuilt the product from the ground up.
Thomson Reuters previewed the rollout in May, announcing that it had rebuilt the next-generation system, then in beta, on Anthropic’s Claude Agent SDK and that the system would reach general availability “this summer.” (I covered that announcement, along with a parallel MCP integration from the Free Law Project, here.) This week’s news puts the product in front of customers ahead of that broader launch.
Starting this week, every CoCounsel Legal customer in the United States will see a toggle in the product allowing them to switch into the new experience and back to the current version at will, the company says. Both versions remain available throughout the early-access period. Thomson Reuters says full general availability is planned for August 2026 in the U.S., followed by rollouts in Canada, the U.K., and Australia.
The company did not specify pricing.
From Skills to Agent
The first generation of CoCounsel Legal — descended from the product Casetext launched in 2023 as the first AI legal assistant of its kind — was organized around discrete “skills” and structured workflows. A user selected a skill, defined a workflow, or wrote a detailed prompt, and results came back task by task.
The next generation, according to co-heads of Thomson Reuters Legal Products Emily Colbert and Rawia Ashraf, is designed to work less like software and more like a colleague.
A user describes a matter in plain language; the system drafts a plan, works through the legal issues, pulls from the user’s own precedents as well as from Westlaw and Practical Law, drafts with citations, and adapts as new information surfaces.
The result, Thomson Reuters says, is a single, iterable work product rather than a series of piecemeal answers.
Analogizing it to a senior associate, Colbert and Ashraf said that beta testers stopped comparing CoCounsel Legal to other AI tools and began comparing it to a skilled junior lawyer whose work comes back “verifiable, ready for review, and open to iteration.”
They ‘F#@%ing Loved’ the Product
Launch materials provided by Thomson Reuters are unusually emphatic, even by the standards of product announcements. In a document written by Colbert and Ashraf, they say they had expected the typical beta cycle of feature requests, refinements, and months of additional work. Instead, they received unsolicited praise, including from testers who reported that they had begun starting nearly every project in the new experience rather than reserving it for specific tasks.
More than a few users told them that they “F#@%ing loved” the product, which they said was a direct quote.
In a series of attributed testimonials, Dan Block, a director at Sterne, Kessler, Goldstein & Fox, is quoted saying the new version is now “one of the first tools I turn to when I want to get work done.” Andrew Medeiros, managing director of innovation at Troutman Pepper Locke, points to adoption “from associates to partners across every practice area.” Amber Simon, an attorney at Polsinelli, says the tool flagged an anti-assignment issue she had not yet asked about and rates the experience a “10/10.”
Thomson Reuters also says the breadth of the product surprised testers, with transactional and specialist attorneys — including in areas such as employee benefits — reporting use cases they had assumed were out of reach for a tool historically strongest in litigation and research.
What Is Coming Next
Thomson Reuters says this early access version is a starting point and that three additional capabilities are still rolling out:
- Workspaces, a dedicated environment for each matter that carries a user’s documents, precedents, and prior positions across sessions and colleagues. The company says Workspaces is live today and will continue to develop.
- Brief Builder, an agentic drafting tool for briefs and motions grounded in Westlaw and Practical Law authority, with citation checking and issue spotting built in.
- Firm and organizational intelligence, described as a skill-authoring layer that lets lawyers encode their own expertise into the system so it is applied consistently across matters and across a team.
‘Fiduciary-Grade AI’
In both the article by Colbert and Ashraf and a companion article by Joel Hron, Thomson Reuters’ chief technology officer, significant emphasis is placed on the concept of “fiduciary-grade AI” — AI built for work subject to regulatory oversight and duties of care, where accuracy, confidentiality, and accountability are paramount.
Both the article by Colbert and Ashraf and a companion article by Joel Hron, Thomson Reuters’ chief technology officer, place significant emphasis on the concept of “fiduciary-grade AI” — AI built for work subject to regulatory oversight and duties of care, where accuracy, confidentiality and accountability are paramount.
The company says the standard means outputs are grounded in authoritative content from the first step of reasoning rather than checked against sources afterward, that every citation is traceable to a linked source, that the reasoning process is inspectable, and that confidential data is not used to train third-party models.
Hron’s article builds on that concept to describe a product strategy, positioning CoCounsel as an emerging “agentic operating system” for the professions Thomson Reuters serves — a system meant to be available not only as a destination but across the tools, models, and platforms where customers already work.
He says the company is engaging with Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, AWS, and Anthropic, among others, to make CoCounsel reachable through APIs, connectors, and the Model Context Protocol.
With regard to integrations, the company says CoCounsel Legal will connect to Microsoft 365, HighQ, iManage, NetDocuments, SharePoint, Icertis, DeepJudge, Supio, and Smokeball, and that its recently announced MCP integration with Anthropic lets lawyers working in Claude reach CoCounsel Legal without switching platforms.
“The future of professional AI will not be defined only by who can generate the fastest answer,” Hron wrote. “It will be defined by which systems professionals can verify, trust, and stand behind.”