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Thomson Reuters launches generative AI-powered solutions to legal market
Thomson Reuters has recently launched a variety of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) initiatives set to transform the way legal professionals work, including a new research tool, a GenAI assistant and a generative AI platform.
Lauren Croft
The new GenAI initiatives are led by the launch of AI-Assisted Research on Westlaw Precision, a legal research platform. This platform provides faster answers to complex research questions and draws from “editorially enhanced” content. It leverages innovation in Casetext, and taking a “best of” approach was created using the Thomson Reuters Generative AI Platform.
CoCounsel is an AI assistant and 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. Customers will be able to choose the right skills to solve the problem at hand while taking advantage of generative AI capabilities, according to Thomson Reuters chief product officer David Wong.
“Thomson Reuters is redefining the way legal work is done by delivering a generative AI-based toolkit to enable attorneys to quickly gather deeper insights and deliver a better work product,” he said.
“AI-Assisted Research on Westlaw Precision and CoCounsel Core provide the most comprehensive set of generative AI skills that attorneys can use across their research and workflow.”
These tools will mean that solicitors are “empowered” by eight GenAI-powered core skills, including AI-Assisted Research on Westlaw Precision, Prepare for a Deposition, Draft Correspondence, Search a Database, Review Documents, Summarise a Document, Extract Contract Data, and Contract Policy Compliance. Thomson Reuters has also laid out high-level product roadmaps to develop numerous additional GenAI skills to address customer-specific needs.
AI-Assisted Research allows customers to ask complex legal research questions in natural language and quickly receive synthesised 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.
The 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.
The Westlaw research process is also due to be expanded on, as capabilities are only available in the US so far. Starting in 2024, target markets include the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.
“Thomson Reuters is well positioned to deliver high-quality AI results because it has the largest, most up-to-date, and trustworthy legal research system in the world,” Larson LLP counsel Andrew Bedigian said.
“The fact that AI-Assisted Research relies exclusively on Thomson Reuters vetted database should provide lawyers with confidence that the answer AI-Assisted Research is generating in response to attorney questions is going to be well supported. And the fact that AI-Assisted Research delivers all the sources it relied upon – right beneath the answer – provides additional confidence that the program is delivering on our research needs.”
Thomson Reuters head of Westlaw Product Management Mike Dahn added that overall, the tool will help legal professionals be more efficient moving forward.
“We leveraged our experts in Thomson Reuters Labs, our more than 1,600 attorneys, and our best-in-class content to build a Westlaw Precision tool that provides our customers with the trust, accuracy, and speed they need to serve their clients,” he said.
“Our human oversight, technology expertise, and industry-leading content are critical to producing trusted answers with generative AI. This tool won’t obviate the need for attorneys, but it will help them do their work better and faster.”
Lauren Croft
Lauren is a journalist at Lawyers Weekly and graduated with a Bachelor of Journalism from Macleay College. Prior to joining Lawyers Weekly, she worked as a trade journalist for media and travel industry publications and Travel Weekly. Originally born in England, Lauren enjoys trying new bars and restaurants, attending music festivals and travelling. She is also a keen snowboarder and pre-pandemic, spent a season living in a French ski resort.
