Mar 25, 2026 | Partnerships

The legal industry is transforming at a pace we’ve never seen before. Law firms are being asked to do more – more research, faster client communication, sophisticated drafting with expertise, quicker turnaround – while clients arrive better informed and with higher expectations than ever before. AI has changed what clients believe is possible: they expect prompt responses, transparent pricing and work product that reflects genuine expertise, not hours billed on routine tasks. For small law firms, meeting that bar with lean teams and tight margins is the central challenge. They need enterprise-grade solutions without enterprise-level complexity. That’s exactly what we’re building together with Smokeball.

Smokeball and Thomson Reuters announced a partnership to create a legal technology ecosystem that connects the business and the practice of law in a single, integrated experience. By bringing together Smokeball’s industry-leading practice management platform with CoCounsel Legal, our agentic AI solution for authoritative legal research, document analysis, and drafting, we’re giving legal professionals in small law firms something that simply hasn’t existed in the market until now.

Smokeball brings operational excellence to running a firm; Thomson Reuters brings two centuries of legal expertise – the driving force behind the power of CoCounsel Legal – purpose-built for the rigor the practice of law demands. Law firms finally have both in one place.

Why This Partnership Matters for Our Customers

For too long, legal professionals have had to stitch together disconnected systems. They rely on one tool to manage matters, another to do research, another to draft documents, and another to bill. Every handoff between systems is a place where time is lost, errors creep in, and client service suffers. This partnership changes that.

Smokeball’s platform already handles the full operational layer of running a legal practice: case management, document automation, billing, time tracking, calendaring, and client communications. Right away, our joint customers in the U.S. will be able to connect matter documents directly to CoCounsel Legal in bulk, saving significant time, reducing the risk of errors, and streamlining workflow like never before.

This is only the start of the journey, as additional exciting integration phases are in progress. The trajectory is to create a unified interface where legal professionals can effortlessly access Thomson Reuters legal content, AI, know-how tools, and current matter data – all in one seamless interface.

Built on a Foundation of Trust and Proven Scale

This partnership does more than just create an ecosystem, it connects a shared commitment to serve legal professionals at the highest level and with solutions they trust.

Thomson Reuters recently announced that one million professionals have chosen CoCounsel, the company’s professional-grade AI technology, across 107 countries and territories. That milestone is a testament to something important: AI is moving from experimentation to production. Rather than standalone solutions, firms are embedding AI directly into daily workflows where accuracy, sourcing, and data protection are essential.

Professionals are not deciding whether to use AI anymore. They are deciding which AI they trust when their reputation and their clients’ data are on the line. CoCounsel is built for exactly that moment.

The next generation of CoCounsel Legal, entering beta soon, is designed around conversational task execution, meaning the best is still ahead for our customers.

Leading the Industry Forward

With Smokeball and CoCounsel Legal, no other combination of technology in the small law firm market brings together this depth of legal content and AI capability with this breadth of practice management functionality. This is what legal tech leadership looks like – not just building great individual products, but creating ecosystems that meet lawyers where they are and give them the resources they need to serve their clients at the highest level.

The legal industry is moving fast. Thomson Reuters is committed to making sure our customers don’t just keep up, but that they lead. Our partnership with Smokeball is a continued step in delivering on that, and we’re just getting started.

Aaron Rademacher is the general manager of Small Law Firms at Thomson Reuters.