Thomson Reuters used this week’s Legalweek in New York to unveil the next generation of CoCounsel, marking what the company describes as a foundational shift in how artificial intelligence supports legal work.
Rather than functioning as a collection of discrete AI tools, the redesigned platform is built around an “agentic” architecture capable of planning and executing multi-step legal workflows. The change reflects a broader evolution underway across the legal technology sector, as vendors move beyond experimental AI assistants toward systems designed to help complete entire pieces of legal work.
Earlier generations of legal AI tools typically required lawyers to choose from specific capabilities such as summarizing documents, drafting text, or conducting research. In the new model, lawyers can instead describe the outcome they want to achieve, and the system determines the steps required to complete the task.
According to Thomson Reuters, the new version of CoCounsel is designed to interpret user goals, retrieve relevant authorities, analyze documents, and generate outputs while showing its reasoning and sources. The company says the platform can dynamically plan legal workflows rather than relying on predefined prompts or skills.
The launch comes amid growing industry interest in so-called “agentic AI,” a model in which AI systems can autonomously coordinate multiple actions to complete complex tasks. Across enterprise software, vendors are increasingly experimenting with agents that move beyond answering questions to executing work.
For legal technology providers, however, reliability remains a central challenge. Thomson Reuters has emphasized that legal AI must be grounded in authoritative content rather than relying solely on general-purpose language models. The redesigned CoCounsel is tightly integrated with the company’s legal information services, including Westlaw and Practical Law, allowing the system to retrieve verified legal sources while completing tasks.
The company says the new architecture was built to support this approach, combining generative AI with legal research content, structured workflows, and user oversight.
The announcement also reflects a broader shift in how law firms and corporate legal departments are approaching artificial intelligence. Early experimentation with generative AI tools has increasingly given way to operational deployments, as organizations seek ways to integrate AI directly into everyday workflows.
Thomson Reuters says more than one million professionals now use CoCounsel across legal, tax, and corporate functions, suggesting the technology is moving beyond pilot projects toward wider adoption.
The company also reported that in internal evaluations of complex legal workflows, the redesigned platform was able to complete approximately 76 percent of tasks end-to-end. While human oversight remains essential, the goal is to reduce the number of steps lawyers must perform manually when conducting research, reviewing documents, or preparing analysis.
As legal AI competition intensifies, major incumbents and startups alike are racing to define the next generation of platforms. For Thomson Reuters, the latest evolution of CoCounsel represents a bet that the future of legal technology lies not simply in faster answers, but in AI systems capable of helping lawyers move from questions to outcomes.