Sep 17, 2026 | AI and product innovation

The open ecosystem for professional AI is moving from strategy to reality. 

In June, I wrote about our strategy to make Fiduciary-Grade AI™ available wherever professional work begins, and today we’re taking another step with OpenAI.  

In partnership with OpenAI, Thomson Reuters is showing how both CoCounsel Legal and HighQ can connect with ChatGPT Enterprise. We are previewing a coming CoCounsel Legal experience, which demonstrates how legal professionals will access CoCounsel Legal capabilities directly from ChatGPT, and starting today HighQ is available through a Model Context Protocol (MCP) connection. 

This collaboration is a clear reinforcement of our strategy to build an extensible, open, and connected ecosystem that delivers Fiduciary-Grade AI™ wherever our customers work.  

“We believe the next generation of AI for law will be built around what makes each firm distinctive – its expertise, judgment, and way of working. By building alongside Thomson Reuters, we’re turning that expertise into AI lawyers can use every day, creating new ways for firms to serve their clients and shape the future of legal work,” said Jason Boehmig, GM Legal Industry at OpenAI .

From a Connection to an Architecture 

Together, the experiences we are developing with OpenAI point towards a future where legal professionals working in ChatGPT Enterprise could connect to the matter context they are authorized to access in HighQ and call on CoCounsel Legal for specialized legal capabilities. The systems remain distinct, but the experience becomes more connected regardless of the surface of interaction. 

That is the architecture we are working toward: frontier intelligence connected with the context and professional-grade capabilities needed to complete high-stakes work. 

MCP Is the Infrastructure, Not the Story 

Open standards like MCP are important because they create a more consistent way for AI systems to discover and invoke tools and context across platforms. But the protocol itself is not the end goal. What matters is what it allows professionals to do. 

Lawyers at global firms and in-house counsel should be able to begin work in the environment that is most natural for the task, bring in the context they are permitted to use, call on trusted professional capabilities, and move the work forward, all while maintaining the governance and security controls their organizations require. 

That experience must be built around security, permissions, governance, transparency, and accountability. Open cannot mean uncontrolled. Interoperability is valuable only when trust travels with the work. 

CoCounsel Legal remains the trusted professional AI system designed to ground, validate, and help complete high-stakes work. Our ecosystem strategy makes that system more accessible, while preserving the role it plays at the center of professional work. 

A Strategy Built for Choice 

Our customers will use different models and AI environments for different kinds of work. Our vision and strategy is to ensure Fiduciary-Grade AI™ travels with the work, regardless of which environment our customers choose. Environments will continue to evolve as frontier intelligence advances. What should persist is the ability to connect them with the trusted content, customer context, workflows, and professional capabilities our customers rely on. 

The future of legal AI will not be defined by one model, one interface, or one company working alone. It will be defined by how well an ecosystem of general-purpose and specialized systems can work together on behalf of the professional. 

The opportunity is to give customers the best of both: the freedom to work in the environments they choose and access to systems that offer accuracy and accountability when it matters most. 

What Comes Next 

The experiences we are showing with OpenAI are an important step, but they are not the destination. 

We will continue to work with our customers to provide them with a best-in-class destination for legal work – CoCounsel Legal, extending its capabilities across the models, platforms, and workflows our customers choose to use. 

Our plugin with ChatGPT Enterprise offers a glimpse of what that connected future can look like: matter context and trusted legal intelligence available from the same AI environment, with CoCounsel Legal at the center of how high-stakes work gets completed.