Robert Ambrogi Blog
Still less than a year since it launched, CoCounsel, the generative AI legal assistant originally developed by Casetext, has had quite a year. Now, as it expands into new markets, we get details on its adoption to date.
It was March 1, 2023, that Casetext launched CoCounsel, a product developed in partnership with OpenAI that uses the GPT-4 large language model to assist lawyers with a variety of tasks.
Barely four months later, on the strength of the CoCounsel product, Thomson Reuters gobbled up Casetext for a whopping $650 million, and then, after just another four months, TR previewed plans to integrate CoCounsel across its core products, including Westlaw Precision, Practical Law, Document Intelligence, and HighQ.
It said at the time it would also continue to offer CoCounsel as a standalone product under the name CoCounsel Core.
Now, TR is formally announcing the expansion of CoCounsel Core to Canada and Australia, the first of TR’s planned expansion of the product to English-speaking countries beyond the U.S.
“Bringing CoCounsel Core to markets that until now haven’t had access to professional-grade AI is a tremendous accomplishment as we approach the one-year anniversary of CoCounsel’s debut, and just three months after launching CoCounsel Core in the U.S. with Thomson Reuters,” said Jake Heller, the former cofounder of Casetext and now head of product, CoCounsel, at TR.
Even as it expands CoCounsel to other markets, TR is providing new details on the product’s adoption in the U.S.
In the 11 months since CoCounsel’s launch, it has been rolled out at more than 45 large law firms in the United States — including six of the Am Law 10 — which employ in total more than 50,000 lawyers, TR said.
More than 9,000 of those lawyers have received comprehensive, hands-on instruction to prepare them to use the technology effectively and ethically, from a training staff of just four people. TR says it plans to rapidly scale this “rollout playbook” for CoCounsel.
In Canada and Australia, CoCounsel was already in use in a proof-of-concept phase in two firms, McCarthy Tétrault LLP in Canada and Maddocks in Australia.
CoCounsel Core provides customers with eight core generative AI-powered legal skills: Prepare for a Deposition, Draft Correspondence, Search a Database, Review Documents, Summarize a Document, Extract Contract Data, Contract Policy Compliance and Timeline.