Skill: Review documents
Category: Review
The
Review Documents
skill is a versatile and powerful feature of CoCounsel, designed to streamline the time-consuming process of legal document analysis in legal practice. It can be used with a wide range of document types, including deposition transcripts, medical records, contracts, and discovery materials.This skill goes beyond simple document review, as you can ask CoCounsel to conduct more in-depth analyses and answer questions that require drawing inferences, uncovering nuanced insights and connections that might otherwise be overlooked.
For instance, in traditional document review, an attorney might look for a simple yes-or-no answer: does a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) contain a “return or destroy” provision? By contrast, using the
Review Documents
skill, an attorney can pose more sophisticated questions with user prompts, such as whether the NDA contemplates the return of confidential information when the agreement ends, and if so, whether the NDA proves adequate enforcement mechanisms.Likewise, in traditional document review, an attorney might require hours to review hundreds of pages of a deposition transcript to get sufficient information to assess whether the witness seems credible or evasive. By contrast, using the
Review Documents
skill, an attorney can ask CoCounsel to review and analyze the witness responses, demeanor, and consistency throughout the testimony to make a credibility determination in a fraction of the time.Features and benefits
- Whether you're looking for specific information, identifying patterns, or seeking a comprehensive understanding of complex documents, theReview Documentsskill lets you extract valuable information with speed and accuracy.
- You can use this skill to review: contracts (for example, for due diligence); legislation and regulatory materials; transcripts; or discovery materials.
- This not only saves time but also enhances the quality and depth of document analysis, letting you focus on strategic decision-making.
Practice tips
- Avoid documents that may be difficult for humans to read (for example, heavily redacted, illegible handwriting, containing structured data in an unstructured format), as they may also be hard for CoCounsel to read, too.
- Ask clear, concise questions to help generate the most relevant responses.
- Be as precise as possible, as the skill excels at following instructions. The more detailed your user prompt (telling CoCounsel exactly what you want) the better the result.
- Use plain, straightforward language (avoid slang) to ensure CoCounsel doesn’t misinterpret your requests.
- Avoid extraneous or immaterial information in your user prompt. Otherwise, CoCounsel may focus less on the key issues in its response.
- Provide additional context when using a term or acronym with multiple meanings to avoid ambiguity, for example, when referring to aone-way non-disclosure agreement, define the termone-way.
- When reviewing large sets of documents (for example, a due diligence review), upload files together for a comprehensive analysis. Include the most relevant documents to minimize processing time and ensure focused results.
- CoCounsel's response is best captured in a table format, which will either automatically be applied to high-volume reviews or when you specifically request a table. In addition, tables are customizable; for instance, tell CoCounsel to format its response in a table with specified column headers.
- Download the output in Excel (versus Word) to help with the organization of citations such as footnotes.
- If you receive a response that is too broad or doesn't align with your needs, ask CoCounsel follow-up questions to achieve the result you want.
- If CoCounsel's output is in a format other than what you expect, consider revising your prompt to include specific formatting instructions to achieve the result you want (for example, “Provide these results in a table.”).
- CoCounsel may include aSummary, and sometimes also aConclusionsection at the end of the output. For outputs containing extensive information, these sections can provide you with a quick and concise answer, even if they may be slightly repetitive of the main answer.
Limitations to keep in mind
- This skill permits uploads of 200 files at 1 time: TXT, HTM, HTML, and RTF file sizes up to 20MB; and PDF, DOC, DOCX, EML, MSG, and WPD file sizes up to 500MB.
- Review Documentscurrently can't identify Bates and line numbers, so requests for this type of information may not produce the results you want. However, the hyperlinked footnotes in responses provide page citations and identify relevant text with corresponding Bates or line numbers when selected in the document viewer.
- Results are AI-generated and should be verified for accuracy.
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