Improving access to the law

Last year, a New York City–based law firm, after having pored over thousands of documents in a complex employment discrimination case, turned to Casetext—a San Francisco–based tech startup now part of Thomson Reuters—and its remarkable AI-powered legal assistant technology, CoCounsel, to review the copious pages of text.



As CoCounsel electronically sifted through the mountain of files, it discov–ered and flagged multiple uses of a two-word expression: Club Fed. As a term that mocks the relative comforts of a minimum-security prison, its use clearly indicated that the defendants knew their activity was criminal. It was the break the attorneys needed.







CoCounsel, released in 2023, does more than flag consequential words and passages. It can read, analyze, and even summarize legal material at a postgraduate level and can perform about 60% of the time-consuming tasks required of paralegals or attorneys.



“An attorney can delegate substantive legal work to their AI assistant,” says Casetext cofounder-CEO and Thomson Reuters’s head of product for CoCounsel Jake Heller, “and expect that work to get done at superhuman speeds, with superhuman accuracy and reliability.” This breakthrough technology has earned Casetext a spot on Fast Company ’s list of the Most Innovative Companies for 2024.



A SHARED DEDICATION TO JUSTICE



If you can go online and find a specialty restaurant in a matter of seconds, why is it so hard for attorneys to locate specific legal research? It was this simple question that inspired the founding of Casetext in 2013. Casetext’s first attempt at meeting this challenge was the creation of a crowdsourced legal library it called a “Wikipedia for the law.”



In 2022, the company gained early access to GPT-4—the powerful large-language model created by OpenAI—and immediately realized how this technology could transform the area of legal research. GPT-4 understands the nuances of language, continually learns and improves, can generate original responses, and is capable of conversing with users. It serves as the foundation for CoCounsel.



The team that developed CoCounsel was motivated by two sobering statistics: that 80% of Americans can’t afford a lawyer, and that more than 90% of the legal needs of low-income Americans go unmet. “To a person, everyone in the business deeply believes the cause of justice is important,” Heller says.



One demonstration of this commitment is Casetext’s partnership with the Innocence Project of California, which provides legal assistance to people who may have been wrongly convicted of a crime. The organization is understandably flooded with requests from those seeking assistance—and a single application may contain thousands of pages of supporting evidence. As of early last year, the wait time for reviewing applications had grown to four years. Using CoCounsel to review witness statements, police reports, trial transcripts, and other information has cut that time in half.



AI FOR ALL PROFESSIONS



As CoCounsel’s capabilities for the legal profession continue to broaden, Thomson Reuters has also announced that CoCounsel will be the generative AI assistant available across their portfolio. These products serve professionals in tax and accounting, trade and supply, risk and fraud, and news and media. “This technology has immense applicability,” Heller says. “Applying its power to the work of professionals in multiple fields is an incredible opportunity—and will transform the way millions of people work.”