May 06, 2026 | AI

AI is reshaping the legal industry. But across law firms of every size, the gap between deploying an AI solution and embedding it into daily practice remains wide. Access is the easy part. Habit is the hard part. Womble Bond Dickinson, one of the world’s leading international law firms, didn’t just close that gap. They built a model for how to do it right, beginning with all 7 of their staffed UK offices. 

Womble Bond Dickinson UK’s early adoption of CoCounsel Legal, Thomson Reuters advanced fiduciary-grade AI platform for legal professionals, has become a case study in what firmwide AI integration looks like. It required vision, discipline, creative leadership, and a partnership built on radical candor. 

Setting the Stage 

CoCounsel Legal integrates advanced AI with Westlaw and Practical Law content, as well as a firm’s own knowledge and tools, to support the full breadth of legal work—including research, document analysis, and drafting—in a single platform. When Womble Bond Dickinson committed to early adoption, the platform was still in development. Which was precisely the point. 

What began as an evaluation of the original CoCounsel product evolved into a sweeping, full-scale early adoption initiative, spanning 7 of Womble Bond Dickinson’s UK offices and all 650 timekeepers (including 457 qualified lawyers) working in them. The goal was not simply to make the tool available. It was to make it indispensable, transforming AI use from an occasional experiment into a daily professional habit. 

Sam Dixon, Chief Innovation Officer and Partner, led the charge. His vision was anchored in a clear strategic ambition the firm already had in place: a self-service innovation model in which every lawyer across the business has innovation as part of their role. CoCounsel Legal, with its intuitive interface and enterprise-wide applicability, was the right tool at the right moment to help make that vision real. 

A Partnership Built on Candor 

What set this initiative apart from a conventional technology rollout was the nature of the relationship between Womble Bond Dickinson and Thomson Reuters. It was a co-development partnership defined by openness, mutual accountability, and a shared commitment to getting it right. 

From the outset, both teams committed to saying the quiet parts out loud. When something wasn’t working, they said so. When feedback was uncomfortable, it was shared anyway. Womble Bond Dickinson stress-tested CoCounsel Legal’s capabilities, challenged its assumptions, and provided structured, direct feedback throughout the development process. Thomson Reuters listened, iterated, and acted. As a result, the firm’s input directly shaped the product before launch, a level of influence that reflects genuine partnership, not merely consultation. 

That bidirectional feedback loop ran throughout the project. The joint team, spanning Womble Bond Dickinson’s innovation and legal technology functions and Thomson Reuters sales, customer success, and product teams, built in multiple touchpoints for sharing insights, surfacing issues, and refining both the product and the rollout approach. Challenges became collaborative problem-solving moments rather than blockers. 

The pilot group itself was carefully constructed to reflect the full diversity of the firm: across practice areas, job roles, seniority levels, technology comfort levels, and demographic backgrounds. This wasn’t a pilot of the willing. It was a deliberate, representative sample designed to surface real-world adoption challenges before the firmwide launch. 

Bringing the Whole Firm Along 

Rather than relying on emails, slide decks, and vendor-led training sessions, Womble Bond Dickinson took a different approach. Sam Dixon travelled to each of the firm’s 7 staffed UK offices and personally led 35 introduction and training sessions for CoCounsel Legal, a campaign that became affectionately known as “Cocoa with CoCo.” In the middle of a British summer, he served hot chocolate, sat down with colleagues, and walked them through the platform himself.  

It’s the kind of visible, lead-by-example behavior that research shows makes a real difference. According to the 2025 Thomson Reuters Future of Professionals Report, professionals who agree that leaders in their organization consistently lead by example are 1.7x more likely to be experiencing benefits from AI than those who disagree. 

The sessions were part of a broader, multimodal training program that included use-case specific meetings, pre-recorded leadership conversations reinforcing responsible use, and one-to-one engagement on the floor. Sam didn’t wait for questions to come to him. He walked the offices, asked people directly whether they had used CoCounsel Legal, and if they hadn’t, asked why not. That kind of visible, personal commitment created a ripple effect across the firm. 

The training program also served as a real-time risk management mechanism. Face-to-face conversations surfaced misconceptions early, allowing the team to refine their messaging on the spot. One recurring insight was around Deep Research in Westlaw Advantage, a key capability of CoCounsel Legal that delivers comprehensive legal research in 10 to 15 minutes, the kind of work that might otherwise occupy a lawyer for an entire day. 

Results That Speak for Themselves 

The impact on the quality and efficiency of legal work at Womble Bond Dickinson has been significant. CoCounsel Legal is now used regularly across practice areas, supporting work that spans almost the full breadth of what lawyers do, from legal research to document analysis to drafting.  

The platform delivers up to 80% efficiency gains on specific tasks, enables junior lawyers to contribute more meaningfully at an earlier career stage, and accelerates client turnaround across the firm. 

A Model for the Industry 

This initiative has not gone unnoticed. Womble Bond Dickinson and Thomson Reuters were recently recognized with the ILTA Trailblazer Award for this work. 

As Sam Dixon reflected on the decision to commit to early adoption of a product still in development: “It was the vision for the product and where I thought it would go and what I thought its advantages were over competitors. If I didn’t believe in the Thomson Reuters vision for the product, I couldn’t have believed it fit into our vision for the firm’s AI adoption ambitions.” 

“Womble Bond Dickinson exemplifies what it means to lead in the AI era. Sam Dixon and his team didn’t just deploy fiduciary-grade AI, they embedded it into the culture of the firm, making it a natural part of how every lawyer works. That kind of leadership is what separates firms that experiment with AI from those that truly use it to transform how they work,” said Raghu Ramanathan, President of Legal Professionals, Thomson Reuters. 

The trust between Womble Bond Dickinson and Thomson Reuters, and trust in the product, has been earned through transparency, delivered through partnership, and validated through results. That is the real story here. Womble Bond Dickinson didn’t wait for AI to be perfect before committing. They helped make it better. And in doing so, they built something more valuable than a technology deployment: a firm-wide culture in which AI is not a novelty, but a natural part of how every lawyer works.