Skill: Summarize

Category: Summarize

Features and benefits

The
Summarize
skill can easily be adapted to user preferences.
You can request a page-by-page summary (for 1 document at a time).
You can direct CoCounsel to summarize specific aspects or portions of the documents versus the whole document or set of documents.
You can also reformat your results.
This flexibility lets you extract key information from large documents or sets of documents, saving valuable time without missing critical information.

Practice tips

Specify the type of summary you need (for example, “I need a [standard/page-by-page] summary”).
Specify the length of the summary in your prompt (for example, “Generate a summary in 3 paragraphs”).
Provide details on how the summary should be formatted (for example, “Provide the summary in paragraph form” or “Format the summary in a bulleted list”).
Be concise with your user prompts. It is usually unnecessary to provide detailed context when requesting a summary of a document. In some cases, extraneous information may even cause CoCounsel to behave in unexpected ways.
You may receive your summaries in multiple parts, or “chunks” when uploading extremely long documents.
Select
Summarize
to simplify complex legal language. For instance, you can upload a lengthy statute and ask CoCounsel to summarize it in layperson's terms.

Limitations to keep in mind

While you can instruct CoCounsel to output a specific summary length, it helps to be realistic with the length as it relates to your document. For example, asking for a 2-sentence summary of a 100-plus-page document will likely result in a poor quality or undesirable outcome.
Asking CoCounsel for a page-by-page summary of more than 1 document at a time will likely result in a poor quality or undesirable outcome.
If humans struggle to understand the text of the underlying document, such as illogical structure or illegible handwriting, CoCounsel may struggle as well.