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This article applies to:

  • Product: CoCounsel
  • Audiences: Legal professionals

CoCounsel Legal MCP connector

Thomson Reuters' AI for legal professionals in Claude.
important
Thomson Reuters offers this connector as a pilot and may modify, suspend, or withdraw it at any time, in whole or in part, without notice.
The CoCounsel Legal MCP connector brings the CoCounsel agent into Claude. CoCounsel is Thomson Reuters' AI assistant for legal professionals. It works at the level of a senior associate and embeds Westlaw and Practical Law content directly into how it reasons.
When you use the connector, Claude hands your legal work off to CoCounsel and streams back the results. CoCounsel draws on any of its capabilities (research, drafting, review, summarization, and more) so you don't have to choose between them.
Examples of what you can do with it today:
  • Run deep legal research with jurisdiction targeting across up to 3 U.S. jurisdictions.
  • Draft correspondence, memos, or sections of legal documents grounded in Westlaw and Practical Law.
  • Build chronologies, compare document versions, or pull structured data from a document set.
  • Upload contracts, briefs, or case files and ask CoCounsel to review, summarize, compare, or extract key terms.
  • Ask follow-up questions in the same conversation. CoCounsel keeps the context.

Set up in Claude Desktop

Before you begin:
 You need an active Thomson Reuters account with a CoCounsel Legal package subscription. If you're not sure whether your account has access, check with your firm's administrator.
For Claude administrators: Turn on the connector (1 time)
If users don't find CoCounsel Legal in the connectors directory, a Claude administrator needs to add it for the organization first. You only need to do this once.
  1. Sign in to Claude with an administrator account.
  2. Select
    Settings
    Organization
    Connectors
     (or the equivalent admin area for your plan).
  3. Add
    CoCounsel Legal
     from the connector directory and save.
  4. Confirm the connector is visible to the intended user groups.
Users in your organization can complete the following steps to connect their own Thomson Reuters Account. For the full organization-level workflow, refer to Claude's guide to authorizing MCP connectors for your organization.
Connect your account in Claude Desktop:
  1. Open
    Claude Desktop
     and sign in to your Claude account.
  2. Select
    Settings
    , then select
    Connectors
    .
  3. Search for
    CoCounsel Legal
     and select
    Connect
    .
  4. When the Thomson Reuters sign-in window opens, complete the sign-in and authorize the connector. Claude may prompt you to sign in again periodically to keep your session secure.
CoCounsel Legal now appears in the connectors menu inside your Claude conversations and is ready to use.
Describe the legal work you want done in plain English and explicitly mention CoCounsel in your request. If connectors are new to you in Claude, refer to Claude's help article on using connectors to extend Claude's capabilities.
CoCounsel Legal is available across your Claude.ai, Claude Desktop, and Cowork sessions, and Claude can invoke it as part of longer task chains.
tip
To make CoCounsel your default for legal work, open your Claude profile settings and add a line to
Instructions for Claude
. For example:
Always use the CoCounsel connector for any request that is or may be legal, including legal research, drafting, review, analysis, contracts, litigation, compliance, regulations, or legal documents.
 Claude then reaches for the connector whenever your request involves legal research, drafting, or document review.

Available tools

For legal work, the connector deliberately exposes a single tool:
Ask CoCounsel
. Rather than splitting research, drafting, review, and other capabilities into separate endpoints, every legal request go through this 1 tool. This design keeps the legal intelligence and skill orchestration on the CoCounsel side rather than letting the host second-guess it. The remaining tools handle supporting tasks: they begin a session, upload and list files, and retrieve generated deliverables. Claude calls them on your behalf; you don't need to invoke them by name.
As CoCounsel adds new skills, you can access them through the same tool automatically. You don't need to reconnect or reinstall. If you don't find the new tools, select
Refresh tools list
 on the CoCounsel connector listing page.
These prompts show typical interactions across CoCounsel's skill set.
Example 1: Document review
  1. Prompt:
    Upload 3 vendor agreements to CoCounsel.
    Claude runs the
    Upload File
     tool and opens a picker so you can attach the 3 agreements to your CoCounsel session.
    note
    Before you send the next prompt, make sure Claude fully uploads the files and finishes processing them.
  2. Prompt:
    With CoCounsel, flag any clauses where the indemnity terms differ materially across these agreements.
    Claude passes the documents and instructions to CoCounsel. CoCounsel runs a review and returns a side-by-side comparison of the indemnity provisions.
Example 2: Legal research
Prompt:
With CoCounsel, research how California courts have treated non-compete agreements for executive employees since 2020. Give me a concise memo.
CoCounsel runs research scoped to California and returns a cited memo. You can ask for an expanded report when you want deeper analysis.
Example 3: Follow-up in the same conversation
Prompt:
How does Texas law differ on executive non-competes for the same period?
CoCounsel picks up the prior research context and returns a comparative analysis without restarting from scratch.

Privacy and citations

Use of the CoCounsel MCP is subject to the Thomson Reuters General Terms and Conditions. These terms prohibit the use of Thomson Reuters Content with another Professional AI Tool, either directly or through an interface such as an MCP.
Thomson Reuters legal research data you access through this connector is proprietary and subject to licensing restrictions. Reports may include markdown citation links back to authoritative Thomson Reuters sources such as westlaw.com, 1.next.westlaw.com, and Practical Law, so you can verify each citation at its source.
Don't redistribute connector responses outside your current Claude session in ways that would violate your CoCounsel Legal licensing terms. The full privacy policy describes what Thomson Reuters collects, how it uses and stores your data, retention periods, and how to contact the owner.

Common questions

  • Subscription requirement:
     You need a CoCounsel Legal package subscription. Contact cocounselsupport@thomsonreuters.com with questions about access or entitlements.
  • Upcoming capabilities:
     Thomson Reuters adds CoCounsel Legal capabilities to the same connector over time. You gain access to new features without needing to reconnect or reinstall. If you don't find the new tools, select
    Refresh tools list
     on the CoCounsel connector listing page.
  • CoCounsel agent runtime:
     It depends on the work. You experience the same waiting times as you do in the CoCounsel application on the web. Document review and shorter drafting tasks usually are completed in a few minutes. A concise research run takes several minutes; an expanded research run can take 10 minutes or more.
  • Upload a file:
     Ask Claude to upload a file to CoCounsel. For example,
    Upload this to CoCounsel
    . Claude runs the
    Upload File
     tool, which opens a file-picker view in the chat where you can attach your document. Once you upload the file, it stays available to CoCounsel for the rest of that chat. So you can follow up with a request like
    Using CoCounsel, summarize the key obligations in this contract
    .
    Uploading attaches the file to your current CoCounsel session, so you need a session to exist first. If you haven't used CoCounsel yet in this chat, include CoCounsel in your request or upload a file. Claude begins the session automatically.
    note
    Claude's native upload button (the paperclip in the message field) doesn't send files to CoCounsel. Those attachments stay with Claude. To get a file to CoCounsel, always ask Claude to upload it to CoCounsel using the
    Upload File
     tool.
  • Follow-up questions:
     You can ask follow-up questions on the same topic. CoCounsel keeps context within a Claude conversation, so you can iterate, refine, or ask new questions without starting over.

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