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What is CoCounsel on Westlaw?

Published in Legal AI Assistant 3 mins read

CoCounsel on Westlaw is an advanced, AI-powered legal productivity tool integrated within Westlaw Precision, designed to revolutionize how legal professionals conduct research and manage their workflows. It serves as a generative AI assistant, enabling users to find relevant answers to their legal questions more quickly and with greater confidence.

An AI-Powered Legal Productivity Tool

CoCounsel leverages sophisticated artificial intelligence to transform traditional legal research. Available as part of Westlaw Precision, this innovative tool is built to streamline the demanding process of legal research. It aims to significantly cut down on the time legal professionals spend sifting through vast search results and manually summarizing information, ensuring that their research efforts are directed efficiently and accurately.

Key Capabilities and Benefits

CoCounsel is engineered to provide a suite of benefits that enhance legal practice efficiency and effectiveness:

  • Accelerated Research: It drastically reduces the time required to locate precise answers to complex legal questions, allowing professionals to focus on strategic analysis rather than exhaustive searching.
  • Enhanced Confidence: Users can proceed with their research and case preparation knowing they are working with highly relevant and accurate information, fostering greater certainty in their findings.
  • Streamlined Workflow: By automating the initial stages of information gathering and summarization, CoCounsel minimizes the laborious task of manually reviewing and extracting key details from extensive legal documents.
  • Targeted Direction: The AI helps guide legal research in the most productive direction, ensuring that the time spent is always contributing to a more comprehensive and accurate understanding of the legal landscape.
  • Generative AI Assistant: It acts as a smart assistant, capable of understanding legal queries and generating focused insights, moving beyond simple keyword matching.

Practical Insights

CoCounsel redefines the typical legal research session:

  • Instead of broad searches, users can pose specific legal questions and receive concise, synthesized answers.
  • It aids in quickly grasping the core arguments or relevant statutes within a large body of text, saving hours of detailed reading.
  • It empowers legal professionals to quickly confirm the direction of their research or pivot as new information is presented, all with the backing of Westlaw's extensive and authoritative content.

CoCounsel's Impact on Legal Practice

The introduction of CoCounsel marks a significant shift in legal technology, moving towards more intelligent and intuitive research tools. It allows legal teams to be more agile, productive, and precise in their work, ultimately contributing to better client outcomes.

Feature Area Traditional Research CoCounsel Integration
Information Sifting Manual review of numerous documents and search results Automated summarization and identification of key answers
Research Speed Time-consuming, often iterative Significantly faster answer retrieval and research direction
Confidence Dependent on user's manual validation and synthesis Enhanced by AI-driven relevance and accuracy
Workflow Linear, labor-intensive Streamlined, allowing focus on high-value tasks

This tool is particularly beneficial for litigators, transactional lawyers, and legal scholars who consistently deal with large volumes of legal information and require rapid, reliable answers.