Jun 29, 2026 | Partnerships
Building a Legal AI Partner Ecosystem on Standards the Profession Demands
By Camillo Speroni, Head of Partnerships and Alliances, Thomson Reuters
The practice of law runs on connected intelligence. Firms win when research, documents, institutional knowledge, and specialized tools work together, rather than in silos. Yet for most legal professionals, that connected reality is still out of reach, with critical information and capabilities scattered across systems.
Through Thomson Reuters expanding partner ecosystem of legal technology companies and law firm partners, CoCounsel Legal is connected to the tools legal professionals already rely on, from transaction management and case intelligence platforms to enterprise search and specialized practice workflows. This works in both directions: bringing more capabilities into CoCounsel Legal, and embedding CoCounsel Legal capabilities into other solutions, so firms can move faster, work smarter, and deliver better results with connected workflows.
The outcome is a legal practice that runs the way the practice of law demands: greater speed, sharper insight, and the confidence to deliver.
A Partner Ecosystem Built on Shared High Standards
Law firms face an overwhelming market of solutions with few reliable ways to evaluate what is trustworthy, what is secure, and what actually belongs in a legal tech stack. Thomson Reuters has done that work. Every partner goes through a rigorous vetting process that evaluates their technology, security controls, commitment to data protection, and alignment with the standards legal professionals rely on.
The outcome is a shared partner ecosystem where legal professionals have seamless access to the intelligence, tools, and connected workflows they need, without the friction of switching between disconnected systems, and without compromising the standards their profession demands.
“The partnerships we’re building around CoCounsel Legal reflect how the practice of law actually works: interconnected, time‑sensitive, and outcome‑driven. By integrating intelligence directly into workflows, we help firms move faster and operate with greater precision.”
-Steve Assie, General Manager, Global & Large Law Firms, Thomson Reuters
The Partner Ecosystem in Action
DealCloser: Document Review Inside the Deal Workflow
Legal teams rely on transaction management platforms to coordinate the work that moves deals forward: collaboration, transparency, checklists, document organization and version control, deal status monitoring, signature page creation and collection, and generating final closing sets. When document review and analysis happen outside that workflow, teams must move files into separate tools and then bring the results back into the platform. This adds friction, delays, and the potential for lost context at the moments when speed and accuracy matter most, particularly in time-sensitive transactions.
DealCloser is a transaction management platform used by law firms and in-house legal teams across a broad range of transaction types, including mergers and acquisitions, banking and finance, real estate, venture capital, private equity, restructuring, and other complex transactions. Through its partnership with Thomson Reuters, CoCounsel Legal’s document review capabilities are now embedded directly within DealCloser, bringing AI-powered review to the full transaction lifecycle. Teams can analyze contracts, amendments, exhibits, and diligence materials without leaving the platform where the deal is being executed — no manual uploads, no version uncertainty, and no need to reconcile findings across tools.
DeepJudge: Bringing Firm Knowledge into CoCounsel Legal
Law firms store years of work product across document management systems, intranets, email archives, and other repositories. Their briefs, memos, negotiated agreements, and templates contain valuable institutional knowledge that differentiates them. Yet that information can be difficult to surface and apply quickly, particularly when content is spread across multiple systems.
DeepJudge helps firms realize the full value of that collective knowledge through enterprise search, AI agents and workflows, and governed access controls. Lawyers can rapidly find, analyze, and apply the most relevant information across millions of documents in iManage, NetDocuments, SharePoint, HighQ, network drives, and many other sources.
The partnership between DeepJudge and Thomson Reuters connects this institutional intelligence to CoCounsel Legal. Whether attorneys are working in Microsoft Word, CoCounsel, Westlaw, or Practical Law, they can use DeepJudge to rapidly retrieve and synthesize key language, facts, and precedent from internal documents and work product, making firm knowledge available in CoCounsel Legal for research, analysis, and drafting workflows. Firm precedents and external legal authority are accessible and actionable in the same workflow, with existing permissions and ethical walls carrying through.
Smokeball: Practice Management and Legal AI in One Ecosystem
Small and mid-sized law firms often have too many disconnected tools. When practice management, document storage, legal research, drafting, billing, and document analysis live in separate systems, lawyers spend time on administrative friction instead of legal work, and lean teams with tight margins feel that cost acutely.
Smokeball is a cloud-based practice management platform built for small to mid-sized firms, covering intake, matter management, automatic time capture, billing, and client communications. The combination of CoCounsel Legal and Smokeball unites deep legal content and advanced AI with comprehensive practice management, powered by technology that understands both the substance of legal work and the mechanics of running a firm.
Smokeball matter documents can now be brought directly into CoCounsel Legal in bulk, eliminating manual uploads and the version confusion that comes with moving files between disconnected systems.
The result is a more continuous workflow from matter management to substantive legal work. Attorneys can use CoCounsel Legal to rapidly analyze, draft, and research with their actual matter documents at hand, grounded in authoritative Westlaw and Practical Law content. This is just step one in a joint roadmap creating a unified ecosystem for small to mid-sized firms.
Sterne Kessler: A Law Firm as Co-Developer
The partnership with Sterne, Kessler, Goldstein & Fox, one of the leading intellectual property law firms in the United States, takes a different form. Rather than a product integration, this is a co-development relationship in which the firm’s practitioners worked directly alongside Thomson Reuters engineers and editorial teams to build a specialized workflow inside CoCounsel Legal.
The focus is Section 101 patent eligibility, a question central to most utility patent disputes, deeply precedent-dependent, and historically requiring significant associate time with no guarantee the research was complete.
The resulting Patent Claim Eligibility Analyzer inverts the traditional model of legal technology development: instead of practitioners receiving a finished product built by technologists, Sterne Kessler co-developed it from the start, translating the firm’s own Section 101 methodologies into a scalable workflow now available to patent practitioners across CoCounsel Legal.
Supio: Connecting Case Intelligence to Legal Strategy
Personal injury cases are won or lost on facts, and facts live in unstructured records that take too long to organize and are too easy to get wrong. Medical records, treatment timelines, damages calculations, liens, deposition summaries: plaintiff firms are managing all of it, under pressure, against better-resourced opponents.
Supio Agent changes the equation at every level. At the case level, it ingests every file, every system, every data source the firm runs on and executes the work: medical chronologies, damages summaries, causation analysis, and case-specific drafts grounded in verified facts. At the portfolio level, it surfaces what’s urgent, what’s behind, and what needs to move. At the firm level, it gives leadership real-time visibility into case quality, intake patterns, and institutional knowledge that previously lived only in attorneys’ heads.
Deep Research with Westlaw Advantage is available natively inside Supio Agent, invoked when legal research is needed, running in parallel, and surfacing findings directly in the workflow.
The result: Supio builds the record, compounds the knowledge, and works with Westlaw to verify the law, delivering defensible work product at a scale no case-level tool can touch.
A Growing Partner Ecosystem
Thanks to Thomson Reuters partner Anita, German legal research content is now part of the CoCounsel Legal experience, providing authoritative guidance for Germany-based and international teams. A recent document connector integration with practice management solution Litify creates a fast track from matter files to substantive legal work product.
Document storage integrations launched early this year with Box and Dropbox extend that reach further, making it easier for firms to work with their documents wherever they live. And with Outlook search now enabled within CoCounsel Legal, users can simultaneously surface and apply relevant information from their email, Westlaw, Practical Law, and other connected sources, all without leaving the platform.
The practice of law looks different depending on where you sit, from solo and small firm practitioners managing tight margins and lean teams, to large global firms and corporations navigating complex, high-stakes matters. The partner ecosystem is built to serve that full spectrum, meeting legal professionals where they work with the connected intelligence and seamless workflows their practice demands.
As the legal profession’s needs evolve, so will the partner ecosystem. For lawyers, that means more capability, more connectivity, and more of the intelligence they need, wherever their work happens.
Learn more about CoCounsel Legal here.
