Jun 22, 2026 | AI and product innovation
The Next Generation of CoCounsel Legal Is Here — and Early Access Starts Now
When we launched the beta for the next generation of CoCounsel Legal, we knew we built something special. But we still expected what most betas look like: feedback on missing features, requests for refinements, and months of work before we were ready to put it in front of everyone.
That is not what happened.
Instead, what we heard from lawyers using the beta stopped us in our tracks. We received emails from attorneys who had used CoCounsel Legal for specific tasks saying they were now starting nearly every project in the new experience. More than a few testers sent us emails sharing how much they “F#@%ing loved” the new CoCounsel (that’s a direct quote!). Transactional lawyers told us they were completing work in a single session that used to take multiple tools and context rebuilding. Litigators told us the underlying legal analysis made them rethink what was possible with AI in complex work. Our average rating on outputs was over 4 stars (out of 5)! Across every user, the reaction to the shift was the same, and it was unprompted: I can’t get enough of this. They started asking us to add additional users to the beta program and told us they were now rethinking rollouts planned with other AI tools.
We realized we built a product that lawyers needed access to now.
So, we are not waiting. Starting this week, CoCounsel Legal customers will get early access to the next generation of CoCounsel, ahead of the full launch planned for later this summer starting in the U.S, and followed by rollouts in Canada, UK and Australia. The product will keep getting better. But it is already good enough that keeping it from you any longer felt like the wrong call.
“The new version of CoCounsel Legal is now one of the first tools I turn to when I want to get work done. Where I once used CoCounsel Legal for specific tasks, I now start nearly everything with the new CoCounsel Legal.”
Dan Block, Director, Sterne Kessler Goldstein & Fox
Built to Work Like a Senior Associate
The first generation of CoCounsel Legal was built around skills and structured workflows. It reflected where AI was when we designed it. You chose a skill, defined a workflow, or wrote a detailed prompt, and the work came back task by task.
The next generation works the way an attorney works with a teammate. Describe your matter in plain language. CoCounsel Legal creates a plan, dives deep into legal authority, reasons through the legal issues, retrieves what it needs from your own precedents, and from Westlaw and Practical Law, and drafts with citations. When new information changes the picture, it adapts. Instead of getting piecemeal answers, you get a professional standard response that you can iterate on.
In the beta, attorneys stopped comparing CoCounsel Legal to other AI products and software. They started comparing it to a senior associate. The work came back with the detail and judgment they would expect from a skilled colleague — verifiable, ready for review, and open to iteration. Like a good teammate, CoCounsel Legal does not just deliver an answer. It stays in the conversation until the work is right.
“Lawyers don’t want to just operate software, and that’s not what great AI should do. CoCounsel keeps them in the analytical mindset they were trained for: going back and forth, challenging answers, and steering the work. With sourcing directly from Westlaw and Practical Law, they’re not wasting time second-guessing the results. We’re seeing adoption from associates to partners across every practice area. When it spreads that quickly, the experience just works.”
Andrew Medeiros, Managing Director of Innovation, Troutman Pepper Locke LLP
It Was Built for You Too
CoCounsel Legal has always been exceptional at litigation and legal research. What surprised beta customers was how much more it has to offer.
Transactional attorneys found it opening lines of work they had assumed were out of reach. A specialist in employee benefits told us the result was exactly what they had hoped AI could do for their practice, and that it could save them months of work. One beta user told us they asked CoCounsel Legal to redline and it did a better job than anything else on the market. The breadth is real, and it is one of the strongest signals to come out of the beta: the people most surprised by the product were often the ones who thought it was not built for them.
“I would argue I can’t do 20% of my job in a way that I feel is responsible for the company without the next-gen CoCounsel Legal.”
– Mike Schultz, Senior Securities and Corporate Counsel, FMC
There is More to Come
The early access experience is the beginning. We’ll continue rolling out more of the capabilities our beta customers told us they want:
- Workspaces give lawyers a dedicated environment for every matter, where their documents, precedents, and prior positions shape the analysis from the start. Context does not get lost between sessions, between colleagues, or between matters. The institutional knowledge that took years to build is available in the workflow right when the user needs it. Workspaces is live today and will get even better in the coming months.
- Brief Builder is an agentic drafting tool for complex briefs and motions, grounded in verified Westlaw and Practical Law authority, with citation checking and issue spotting built into the process and the attorney in control at every step.
- Firm and organizational intelligence, built in, is a skill-authoring layer that lets lawyers encode their expertise and knowledge directly into CoCounsel Legal. That expertise is then applied consistently across every matter and every lawyer on the team. Work that used to live in one person’s head becomes something the whole firm can draw on.
Each of these came directly from what legal professionals told us they needed. A platform that holds the work together, carries context forward, and meets professional standards throughout.
“CoCounsel Legal is a superior AI tool for litigators—not just for legal research and drafting, but can take a first pass at a legal analysis. It even proactively flagged an anti-assignment issue I hadn’t yet asked about—it anticipated exactly where I was going to prompt it next. It wasn’t making anything up, it was simply surfacing the right extra issue. I’d give the new CoCounsel Legal experience a 10/10.”
Amber Simon, Attorney, Polsinelli
The Standard Stays
The experience is new, but the standard has not changed.
Fiduciary-Grade AI™ means something specific at Thomson Reuters. It means every output is grounded in authoritative, verified content from the very first step of the reasoning, not retrieved afterward to check the answer, but native to how the system thinks. It means every citation is traceable, with linked sources users can click through and read themselves. It means the reasoning process is visible, so the attorney reviewing the work can inspect it rather than simply approve it. And it means confidential data is never used to train third-party models.
The next generation of CoCounsel Legal is the definition of Fiduciary-Grade AI ™.
Our commitment to being available where lawyers work has also not changed. CoCounsel Legal will connect to Microsoft 365, HighQ, iManage, NetDocuments, SharePoint, Icertis, DeepJudge, Supio, Smokeball and more. Documents move into the workflow without downloading and uploading. And through our new MCP integration with Anthropic, legal professionals working in Claude can now access CoCounsel Legal without switching platforms.
“CoCounsel Legal is vastly ahead of them [legal AI assistant alternatives]. If we’re talking about this new updated version of CoCounsel Legal, I don’t think there’s any other legal tool on the market that’s really close to it.”
– Jerry Johnson, Chief Privacy Officer and Vice President, Teladoc Health
Starting This Week
Every CoCounsel Legal customer in the US will see a toggle in the product this week. They can move to the next generation experience and return to the current version at any time. Both remain fully available throughout the early access period. No work is disrupted and no access is lost. Customers who purchase CoCounsel Legal after this week will have the same experience, with full general availability planned for August 2026.
Lawyers across law firms, government agencies, courts, and legal departments told us the new version of the product was ready. We believe them. We hope you enjoy it. To learn more about the next generation of CoCounsel Legal, visit our website.
