Today Thomson Reuters is announcing a new Generative AI vision. Central to this vision is a new Generative AI Assistant branded as CoCounsel. There was no press conference and no demo to provide context or a Q&A around this announcement. Here is a link to the press release so you can read it for yourself.
The CoCounsel Vision in the press release says that “CoCounsel will unify the entire customer experience. CoCounsel will function like a team member handling complex tasks with natural language understanding and completing tasks at superhuman speeds.” Over time CoCounsel will link the entire suite of Thomson Reuters products and will bring together multiple skills and workflows from different products.
What is Happening Today?
Thomson Reuters is repositioning CoCounsel as the brand name for their new Generative AI vision and strategy. This is a spectacular “slight of hand” because this new Generative AI Assistant will not be leveraging the legacy CoCounsel Large Language Models (LLMs) which they acquired from Casetext. This CoCounsel assistant will be based on GPT4 LLMs which have been developed in-house at Thomson Reuters. The CoCounsel suite of workflow tools which were acquired from Casetext last year will now be designated at CoCounsel Core.
The CoCounsel Generative AI assistant is not launching in the US today.
The CoCounsel Generative AI assistant will be available as follows:
- Westlaw Edge UK with CoCounsel available today
- Checkpoint Edge with CoCounsel (expected to launch in the US in Summer 2024)
- CoCounsel integrations with Microsoft 60 five are expected to be available in beta to customers in the US and the UK in summer of 24.
- There will be additional rollouts of Co counsel skills during 2024 and beyond
- Thomson Reuters included a video which illustrates how Co counsel will be designed as ‘”a professional grade Gen. AI assistant which will transform work and unify the entire customer experience with applications across legal tax risk & fraud and media.” Here is a link to the video.
2024 Generative AI in Professional Services Report is being released and will be available at this link.
The Thomson Reuters Space Shot. The Thomson Reuters Generative AI Vision is certainly ambitious. TR owns a lot of data which is embedded in products with disparate functionalities. The press release indicates that the AI Assistant is not only for the legal suite of products – which alone would be a significant stretch — but this vision covers the whole universe of TR products across legal, risk, tax and news.
As far as I know Westlaw Precision with AI which launched last year, does not yet include all of the data and functionality in Westlaw Edge. With that in mind, one has to pause and wonder what the real timeline is for the fulfillment of a grander vision.
The bigger question is “Can the market be moved by a vision without a concrete deliverable?” One has to assume that TR is trying to expand the number of subscribers to their existing suite of AI products today ( Westlaw Precision with AI , Ask Practical Law, Precision, CoCounsel Core) , based on a promise of “workflow Nirvana” tomorrow.
Every legal information company is tackling the unified workflow challenge. vLex and Bloomberg Law both announced significant workflow enhancements this week.. LexisNexis announced the Lexis Create workflow solution in November. The stakes are high and it is anyone’s guess who will be able to simultaneously deliver an AI enabled and optimized workflow at a price that can dominate the market.
