CoCounsel Legal vs Harvey: how they compare in 2026

These two tie on the graded grid at twelve axes in the top two bands each, which is the highest score in the index and means the separation is not about quality. It is about what you are buying. CoCounsel Legal is an answer engine sitting on a corpus its parent owns, Westlaw and Practical Law, and it grades higher on who it serves and on proof that deployments worked: named customers with figures and a commissioned 2026 Forrester study whose method a reader can assess. Harvey is a workspace that reaches into the systems you already run, and it takes the only A on integration depth in this category, with the iManage connection documented at the level an administrator needs rather than announced. Both publish independently measured accuracy. Neither publishes what happens when the output is wrong.

CoCounsel Legal profileHarvey profile
Last verifiedAugust 30, 2026

At a glance

Category
General Legal Assistants
General Legal Assistants
Founded
2023
2022
Headquarters
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
San Francisco, California, United States
Last verified
Aug 29, 2026
Aug 29, 2026

All 15 axes, side by side

The same grid applied to every vendor in the index, graded from public sources. Hover a grade to see what the letter means on that axis.

AI Centrality

How much of the product is actually AI. Whether the machine learning is the mechanism the buyer is paying for or a feature layered onto conventional software, and whether the vendor is specific about which is which.

AA on AI CentralityThe artificial intelligence is the product. Remove the models and there is nothing left to sell.
AA on AI CentralityThe artificial intelligence is the product. Remove the models and there is nothing left to sell.
CoCounsel Legal

The artificial intelligence is the product. CoCounsel Legal exists only as a generative and agentic layer, rebuilt in 2026 on an agent framework so it plans, reasons and executes multi step legal work. Remove the models and there is no product, only the underlying Westlaw and Practical Law content, which the parent sells separately as its own products.

Harvey

The models are the product. Assistant, Vault, Knowledge and Workflow Agents are all generative systems, and there is no underlying document or workflow system that would stand without them. Vendor material describes every module in model terms.

Citation Accuracy and Hallucination Disclosure

Whether the vendor publishes measured accuracy on citations and assertions, grounds output to primary sources, and says plainly what its system does when it does not know. Legal has a documented public record of fabricated citations reaching filed briefs, so an untested claim of accuracy is not evidence.

AA on Citation Accuracy and Hallucination DisclosureMeasured accuracy is published with the test set described and the failure modes named. Output grounds to primary authority the reader can open, citation status is checked, and the system states when it found no support.
AA on Citation Accuracy and Hallucination DisclosureMeasured accuracy is published with the test set described and the failure modes named. Output grounds to primary authority the reader can open, citation status is checked, and the system states when it found no support.
CoCounsel Legal

CORRECTED 29 Aug 2026, second correction to this row. Previously graded B on the finding that no accuracy measurement was published, and carrying a remark that the largest company on the index published less measurement than far smaller vendors. That finding was wrong and the remark was the opposite of the truth. It came from searching only the vendor's own surfaces and not the independent evaluator's. Grounding was already strong and is unchanged: the retrieval method is described rather than asserted, with the research agent identifying key legal concepts, selecting Westlaw tools including KeyCite, the Key Number System and annotated statutes, running multiple search cycles and synthesising a structured result. Output grounds to primary authority the reader can open, with inline citations, a Sources tab carrying direct links and highlighted excerpts, and KeyCite validity flags shown with the authority. A citation level verification feature, Deep Research Verify, is published, prompting guardrails restrict output to human validated content rather than the open internet, and all of it sits under a named published framework. What is now added is measurement, and it is independent. CoCounsel participated in the February 2025 Vals Legal AI Report, a third party benchmark against a measured lawyer baseline, and scored between 73.2 and 89.6 percent across four tasks, each exceeding the lawyer baseline by more than 10 points, with a 79.5 percent average that was the highest of any participating vendor and a top score of 77.2 percent on document summarisation. Those figures sit on the evaluator's own site and the vendor also publishes them on its legal blog, so a buyer can reach them from either direction. The vendor separately publishes CoCounsel Bench, its own evaluation framework, under which experienced attorneys reviewed performance across 50 complex tasks each estimated at six lawyer hours, reporting that the product produced a stronger response than the expert written reference answer on nearly 40 percent of them. Two limits recorded rather than deducted for: the February 2025 study measured task accuracy such as document question answering and summarisation rather than citation validity or hallucination rate specifically, and this vendor did not participate in the later Vals study that measured citation authoritativeness.

Harvey

CORRECTED 29 Aug 2026, second correction to this row. Previously graded B on two stated grounds, both of which are now resolved. Ground one was that BigLaw Bench is the vendor's own framework rather than independent evidence. That remains true of BigLaw Bench, but independent evidence also exists and was missed: Harvey Assistant participated in the February 2025 Vals Legal AI Report, a third party benchmark against a measured lawyer baseline, and was evaluated across six tasks scoring between 65.0 and 94.8 percent, surpassing the lawyer baseline on five of the six, with 94.8 percent on document question answering at 24.7 points above baseline and 77.8 percent on scanned and messily formatted court transcripts at 24.1 points above baseline, all at sub minute response times. Those figures sit on the evaluator's own site and are checkable without reference to any vendor claim. Ground two was that the citator and refusal limbs failed. That was a double count and is withdrawn: both are separately measured by their own signal rows on this record, and applying them again to the capability grade penalised the same absence twice. It was also inconsistent, since three legal research vendors on this index hold an A on this axis with both of those signals recorded as not addressed. The vendor's own disclosure is unchanged and remains substantial: BigLaw Bench with task categories and grading rubrics on a public repository, measured hallucination rates and source scores by model, a hallucination defined as a factual claim disprovable against a source of truth with reasoning errors tracked separately, and output linking to the specific document passages supporting each assertion. Two limits recorded rather than deducted for: the February 2025 study measured task accuracy rather than citation validity or hallucination rate specifically, and this vendor did not participate in the later Vals study that measured citation authoritativeness. The full BigLaw Bench dataset also sits behind a direct request rather than open publication.

Autonomy and Oversight Model

What the system decides on its own, what a lawyer must approve, and whether the vendor documents where the review point sits. A tool that drafts under review and a tool that files without one are different products and different risks.

BB on Autonomy and Oversight ModelA written commitment that the models work alongside a supervising lawyer, with real review surfaces, short of the full control structure: commonly the threshold at which the system stops or what happens after it is wrong.
BB on Autonomy and Oversight ModelA written commitment that the models work alongside a supervising lawyer, with real review surfaces, short of the full control structure: commonly the threshold at which the system stops or what happens after it is wrong.
CoCounsel Legal

A real published commitment with documented review surfaces, short of the full control structure. The vendor states that its AI is built with human oversight at its core, publishes a Fiduciary-Grade AI framework built around transparency and accountability, and the product is described as showing its plan before executing: it interprets a request, builds a matter specific plan, and returns work product with traceable citations the reader can open and check. Not located as of 29 Aug 2026: the threshold at which an agent stops and returns to a lawyer, and what the vendor commits to when an agent is wrong. The August 2026 shift from structured skills to a fully agentic experience makes the missing threshold more material than it would have been a year ago.

Harvey

States in published material that the product is designed to assist lawyers rather than replace them and that it is built to make verification easy. Review surfaces are real and documented: inline links to source passages, role based permissions and conditionals in the workflow builder, and admin level workspace governance. Not located as of 29 Aug 2026: the threshold at which an agent stops and hands back to a lawyer, or what the vendor commits to when an agent is wrong.

Operational and Outcome Evidence

Named, dated evidence that the product works in production at real firms or legal departments. Case studies with figures and identified customers count. Unattributed testimonials and launch announcements do not.

AA on Operational and Outcome EvidenceNamed firms or legal departments, dated, with figures for what changed and a method a reader can assess.
BB on Operational and Outcome EvidenceReal deployment evidence with substance, short of full attribution or measurement: a named customer without figures, or figures without the named customer.
CoCounsel Legal

Named customers, dated, with figures and an assessable method. The vendor publishes individual case studies naming Justly Prudent, reporting five times return on investment and a doubling of litigation capacity, and Brinks on reducing outside counsel spend, alongside a commissioned Forrester Total Economic Impact study dated 2026, which is a published methodology an outside reader can assess and whose commissioned status is disclosed on the page. Also publishes aggregate figures with the population stated, including 2,700 corporate customers using the CoCounsel family and a 61 percent reduction in time to draft correspondence. Deeper than anything else on the index so far on this axis.

Harvey

Named customers appear in vendor material with attributed quotes, including Blank Rome on the iManage integration and a published Burges Salmon selection story. Vendor states 700 plus customers across 58 plus countries. Not located as of 29 Aug 2026: dated outcome figures with a stated method a reader could assess, which is what separates this from an A.

Privilege and Confidentiality Posture

How client confidences are handled: attorney client privilege and work product treatment, segregation of one client matter from another, whether client data trains any model, and what the vendor commits to in writing rather than in marketing.

BB on Privilege and Confidentiality PostureSubstantive published commitments on confidentiality and training use, short of the full picture: commonly silence on segregation between users or matters, or on what the underlying model provider may retain.
BB on Privilege and Confidentiality PostureSubstantive published commitments on confidentiality and training use, short of the full picture: commonly silence on segregation between users or matters, or on what the underlying model provider may retain.
CoCounsel Legal

Substantive published commitments, and unusually the answer is given directly in a published FAQ rather than implied. The vendor states plainly that customer content and prompts are not used to train or improve the product or the underlying models, that third party model partners including OpenAI and Google are contractually prohibited from training on customer data, and that systemic controls turn off those third parties' abuse monitoring so there is no human access to customer data. Also publishes a zero retention API architecture and data residency controls. Two gaps hold this off an A. Attorney client privilege and work product handling is not addressed directly in located material. Matter level segregation is not documented on the vendor's own pages, although the product is matter centric by design.

Harvey

Substantive published commitments: no training on customer data by default, a contractual prohibition on model providers training, zero data retention enforced on model providers, logical workspace separation, role based access, ethical wall sync with the firm's own walls provider, and processing in the EU, Switzerland or Australia. Two gaps keep this off an A. The security page defines customer data as uploaded documents and customer content as queries and responses as separate contractual terms, so the no training commitment reads plainly on one and not on both. Attorney client privilege and work product handling is not addressed directly in located public material as of 29 Aug 2026.

UPL and Professional Responsibility Posture

Whether the vendor is clear that it supplies a tool rather than legal advice, who its audience is, and how it addresses unauthorized practice of law, competence and supervision duties, and jurisdiction limits. ABA Formal Opinion 512 is the reference point.

CC on UPL and Professional Responsibility PostureA boilerplate disclaimer sits in the terms while the marketing describes the product in advice terms, or the intended audience is left ambiguous.
CC on UPL and Professional Responsibility PostureA boilerplate disclaimer sits in the terms while the marketing describes the product in advice terms, or the intended audience is left ambiguous.
CoCounsel Legal

The claim is made and the documentation is not published. The product is sold squarely to licensed professionals, is distributed to more than 200 law schools and 120,000 law students, and the vendor's framing is that the system works at the level of a senior associate under professional supervision. Searched the product page, the AI hub, the trust center and the legal blog on 29 Aug 2026 and located no published position on the advice line, no treatment of competence and supervision duties, and no statement of jurisdiction limits. The senior associate framing is a capability claim rather than a professional responsibility position, and for a product marketed to students it is the place a position would matter most.

Harvey

One sentence in a security blog post states the product is designed to assist lawyers rather than replace them. Checked the vendor site, security page, security addendum and help center on 29 Aug 2026 and did not locate a published position on the advice line, on competence and supervision duties, or on jurisdiction limits. The intended audience is unambiguously lawyers and legal departments, which is why this sits at C rather than lower.

AI Governance and Bias Disclosure

Published governance over model behaviour: who owns it inside the vendor, what is tested before release, and what is disclosed about disparate output across matter types, parties, or populations.

BB on AI Governance and Bias DisclosureA published governance framework with real substance, short of testing results or a named owner.
AA on AI Governance and Bias DisclosureGovernance is documented and owned: who inside the vendor is accountable, what is tested before release, and what has been found and disclosed about uneven output across matter types or populations.
CoCounsel Legal

A published governance framework with real substance, short of testing results or a named owner. The vendor publishes a named standard it calls Fiduciary-Grade AI with a buying framework attached, describes a dedicated research organisation of more than 1,000 specialists, states a figure for annual responsible AI investment, and answers a direct published question on bias: prompting guardrails restrict output to a clearly defined and limited set of human validated content rather than the open internet. That is a stated mechanism, not a principles page. Not located as of 29 Aug 2026: a named internal owner of model governance, published pre release testing results, or any disclosure of uneven output across matter types, parties or populations. The bias answer describes a content restriction rather than testing for disparate output.

Harvey

CORRECTED 29 Aug 2026, third correction to this record. Previously graded C on the finding that no AI specific governance regime was located and that the published testing was security testing rather than model behaviour testing. That was wrong, and it came from reading the vendor's marketing surfaces rather than opening its trust centre, where the governance material actually sits. What is published on the trust centre, publicly and without a request: ISO/IEC 42001:2023 certification, the international standard for AI management systems, accompanied by a published Statement of Applicability, which is the document identifying which controls apply and why and is therefore a published scope rather than a bare badge. Alongside it, AIUC-1 certification, an AI specific assurance standard, conducted by Schellman, which the vendor states is the first accredited AIUC-1 certification body, and which the vendor describes as validating adversarial testing and its AI security programme specifically. EU AI Act conformity is separately listed. The trust centre carries a dedicated AI section with AI Governance, AI Monitoring and AI Overview items, and an AI Acceptable Use Policy sits in the published policy set. ISO 27701 for privacy information management and an IRAP attestation are also held. Two independent AI specific certifications, one of them adversarially tested, with published statements of applicability and a named accredited certifier, is the strongest AI governance position on this index, ahead of the four other A grades on this axis, each of which rests on ISO 42001 alone or on a single certification plus a framework document. One gap remains and is recorded rather than waived: no disclosure was located about uneven output across matter types, parties or populations, so bias specifically is still unaddressed, and no named individual owner of model governance was located.

AI Safety and Data Stewardship

Retention, deletion, access control, and what happens to prompts and documents after they are processed. Whether the vendor states its subprocessors and its incident practice, or leaves the buyer to assume.

BB on AI Safety and Data StewardshipSubstantive published policy covering most of the ground, short of the full set: commonly no named subprocessor list or no stated incident practice.
BB on AI Safety and Data StewardshipSubstantive published policy covering most of the ground, short of the full set: commonly no named subprocessor list or no stated incident practice.
CoCounsel Legal

Substantive published policy covering most of the ground. SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 maintained, ISO 42001 certification referenced for the AI management system, a zero retention API architecture published, data residency controls, 24 hour security monitoring and threat detection, corporate identity management integration, and a corporate trust center carrying the information security framework. Not located as of 29 Aug 2026: a current named subprocessor list for this product, and a stated incident and breach notification practice. The two named model partners are disclosed in the AI FAQ rather than in a maintained subprocessor list, which is the remaining element of the A bar.

Harvey

Publishes retention under customer control with documented vault retention triggers and deletion timelines, role based access control, logical workspace separation, encryption in transit and at rest, and a current named subprocessor list with an update FAQ. Not located as of 29 Aug 2026: a published incident and breach notification practice, which is the remaining element of the A bar.

AI Liability and Recourse

What the vendor stands behind contractually when its output is wrong. Indemnities, caps, carve outs, insurance, and whether any of it is published or only reachable through a negotiated agreement.

DD on AI Liability and RecourseNothing published on who bears the loss when the system is wrong.
DD on AI Liability and RecourseNothing published on who bears the loss when the system is wrong.
CoCounsel Legal

Searched the product page, the AI hub, the trust center, the corporate terms of use and the segment plans pages on 29 Aug 2026. No published indemnity scope, liability cap, carve out, warranty on output or insurance position was located for this product. Commercial terms are reached through a negotiated subscription agreement. The Fiduciary-Grade AI framework speaks to accountability as a design principle rather than to who bears the loss when output is wrong, and a fiduciary framing without a published liability position is exactly the shape this axis exists to record.

Harvey

Checked the vendor site, its published legal pages including the security addendum and the subprocessor FAQ, and the trust center on 29 Aug 2026. No published indemnity scope, liability cap, carve out, warranty or insurance position located. Commercial terms appear to be reached through a negotiated enterprise agreement rather than published.

Practice Systems Integration Depth

How deeply the product reaches into the systems legal work already lives in: document management such as iManage and NetDocuments, Word and Outlook, contract lifecycle management, matter management, e-billing, and court filing systems.

BB on Practice Systems Integration DepthReal integrations exist and are documented, short of depth: named connections without a description of what they actually move.
AA on Practice Systems Integration DepthDocumented, verifiable integrations into the systems legal work already lives in, with the depth described: what syncs, in which direction, and what a firm must configure.
CoCounsel Legal

Real and documented integrations, short of implementer level depth. Named connections span document management with iManage, NetDocuments and SharePoint, Microsoft 365, the parent's own HighQ collaboration platform and Legal Tracker, contract lifecycle through Icertis, plus DeepJudge, Supio and Smokeball, and a Word add in carrying a personal clause library. An MCP integration lets a lawyer reach the product from a separate AI client without switching platforms, which is a genuinely forward integration surface. Not located as of 29 Aug 2026: documentation describing what each integration moves, in which direction, and what an administrator must configure.

Harvey

Documented native integrations with iManage, NetDocuments, SharePoint and OneDrive, Google Drive, Box, Microsoft Word, Outlook, EDGAR and PitchBook, plus an MCP connector library. Help center articles describe what each integration moves, in which direction, what an admin must configure, and what a given integration does not support. The iManage connection is a direct OAuth integration with an embedded web extension rather than third party middleware.

Deployment Model and Data Residency

Where the software runs and where the data sits. Multi tenant cloud, single tenant, private deployment, on premises, and whether region of residence is a published option or an enterprise conversation.

BB on Deployment Model and Data ResidencyDeployment model is stated clearly with partial residency detail, or residency is offered without the processing location being addressed.
BB on Deployment Model and Data ResidencyDeployment model is stated clearly with partial residency detail, or residency is offered without the processing location being addressed.
CoCounsel Legal

Deployment is stated clearly with partial residency detail. The vendor publishes data residency controls that keep information within required geographic boundaries, operates a rollout sequenced by country across the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia, and holds FedRAMP In Process status for the underlying Westlaw and Practical Law products with stated investment toward authorization for this one. Not located as of 29 Aug 2026: the list of available regions, the tenancy model, what changes between tiers, and where processing happens as distinct from where data is stored.

Harvey

States processing in the EU and Switzerland or Australia for customers with data localization requirements, and states that this applies to subprocessors as well. Tenancy is multi tenant with logical workspace separation and enforced role based access. Not located as of 29 Aug 2026: where data is stored as distinct from where it is processed, and what changes between tiers.

Security Certifications and Trust Center

Independent attestation a buyer can pull without a sales call: SOC 2, ISO 27001, penetration test summaries, a trust center with current reports and named scope rather than a badge image.

BB on Security Certifications and Trust CenterCertification is real and stated, short of accessible evidence: a named standard without scope, date, or a way to obtain the report.
AA on Security Certifications and Trust CenterCurrent independent attestation with named scope, reachable without a sales call: a trust center carrying reports, dates and the standards actually covered.
CoCounsel Legal

Certification is real and stated, short of accessible evidence. SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 are stated as maintained, ISO 42001 is referenced for the AI management system, FedRAMP In Process status is published for Westlaw and Practical Law with authorization stated as an investment goal for this product, and a corporate trust center publishes the information security management framework. What is missing is what a reader can actually pull: no attestation report, no coverage period, no audit scope, and no named auditor was located as of 29 Aug 2026, and no route to request the reports without a sales conversation was located either. Certifications are also stated at the parent company level rather than scoped to this product, which is the distinction a buyer's security team asks about.

Harvey

SOC 2 Type II attestation and ISO 27001 certification with the auditor named as Schellman, renewed annually, and the 2026 cycle announced publicly. Penetration testing and red teaming partners are named as NCC Group and Bishop Fox. Certified under the EU US Data Privacy Framework. A live trust portal at trust.harvey.ai carries the current reports. Reports sit behind a portal request rather than an open download, which is a request flow rather than a sales call.

Model Supply Chain Disclosure

Which models sit underneath, whose they are, where they run, and whether the vendor commits to telling customers when that changes. A legal buyer inherits every dependency it cannot see.

BB on Model Supply Chain DisclosureThe supply chain is partly disclosed: providers named without change notification, or architecture described without the providers.
BB on Model Supply Chain DisclosureThe supply chain is partly disclosed: providers named without change notification, or architecture described without the providers.
CoCounsel Legal

The supply chain is partly disclosed and the disclosure is unusually specific. The vendor names Anthropic's Claude Agent SDK as the architecture of the current release, names OpenAI and Google as third party AI partners in a published FAQ, and states the contractual position imposed on them. Not located as of 29 Aug 2026: which model serves which task, where the models run, a maintained subprocessor list for this product, and any commitment to notify customers before the model supply chain changes. That last gap is material here because the product was re architected onto a different vendor's agent framework within the past year.

Harvey

Publishes a subprocessor list naming model and infrastructure providers including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Cloud, AWS and Microsoft, alongside a subprocessor update FAQ and a security diagram showing model access through Bedrock and Vertex AI. States zero data retention and ephemeral processing at the model providers. Not located as of 29 Aug 2026: a published commitment to notify customers before the model supply chain changes, as distinct from an FAQ describing a change that has already happened.

Commercial Transparency

Whether a buyer can learn what this costs without entering a sales process: published rates, the unit being charged, what sits behind an enterprise tier, and what implementation adds.

CC on Commercial TransparencyPricing is gated behind a demo request while tier names and feature splits are published, so the shape is visible and the number is not.
DD on Commercial TransparencyNo pricing information published at any level, including the unit of charge.
CoCounsel Legal

The shape is visible and the number is not. Tier names and feature splits are published and reachable from the main navigation: CoCounsel Essentials, Westlaw Advantage with CoCounsel Essentials, Practical Law Dynamic Tool Set with CoCounsel Essentials, and CoCounsel Legal, each with its own plans and pricing page and segment specific variants for law firms, corporations and government. Third party analyses report that the pages run a configurator returning a figure for firms up to ten attorneys and route larger firms to a sales quote. The configurator could not be verified directly on 29 Aug 2026 because that subdomain blocks automated access, so no vendor published figure is recorded here and this grade rests on the tier structure being public while the number was not confirmed. The unit of charge is per user per month by third party report rather than vendor statement. Rebuttable in either direction with one screenshot of the configurator.

Harvey

Checked the vendor home page, the platform and product pages, the help center and the trust center on 29 Aug 2026. No pricing page, no published rate, no stated unit of charge and no published tier structure located. Access to pricing runs through a demo request, which is sales gated and earns no credit. Third party per seat estimates exist in trade coverage but are not vendor published and do not move this axis.

Firm and Practice Coverage

Who the product is actually built for. AmLaw, midlaw, small firm and solo, in house departments, government and courts, and which practice areas are supported rather than merely claimed.

AA on Firm and Practice CoverageWho the product serves is documented precisely: firm segments, in house and government use, and the practice areas actually supported, with the limits stated.
BB on Firm and Practice CoverageSegment and practice coverage is described with substance, short of the boundaries: what is supported is clear, what is not is left open.
CoCounsel Legal

Who the product serves is documented precisely, across more segments than any other record on this index. Published navigation splits law firms under ten attorneys from firms over ten attorneys, and separately addresses corporations, government including courts, prosecutors, public defenders, city attorneys and law enforcement, and academic use across more than 200 law schools. Practice area coverage is enumerated with its own pages spanning business and commercial, civil litigation, criminal defense, family, labor and employment, mergers and acquisitions and personal injury. The limits are stated structurally rather than in prose: the tier table shows exactly which content each plan reaches, so a buyer can see where coverage stops.

Harvey

Describes its segments with substance: large law firms first, expanding into corporate legal departments and professional services, with 700 plus customers across 58 plus countries and practice coverage spanning litigation, transactional diligence, regulatory and tax. Not located as of 29 Aug 2026: a statement of the boundaries, meaning which firm sizes or practice areas the product is not built for, which is what the A bar asks for.

The 12 legal signals, side by side

Recorded rather than graded. These are the questions a practitioner has to answer before a tool touches a client matter, and the answers are taken from public material only.

Client Data in Training

Can material a lawyer puts into this product be used to train a model?

CoCounsel Legal
Never, in policy only

A published FAQ answers the question directly and in the negative, stating that user content and prompts are not used to train or improve the product or the underlying models, and that third party AI partners including OpenAI and Google are contractually prohibited from using customer data to train their models. The vendor also states it has established controls to turn off those third parties' abuse monitoring so there is no human access to customer data. The commitment as located sits on a public FAQ and trust page. No matching term was located in a published customer agreement as of 29 Aug 2026, and the subscription agreement is not published.

Harvey
Never, in policy only

The vendor security page states that by default it never trains on customer data and that it contractually prohibits model providers from training on customer data. A subprocessor FAQ states customer data is never used to train models unless explicitly authorized by both the customer and the vendor. The same page defines customer data as uploaded documents and customer content as queries and responses as separate contractual terms. No matching term was located in a published agreement as of 29 Aug 2026.

Prompt and Output Retention

How long does the product keep what a lawyer typed, and can that be set to zero?

CoCounsel Legal
Customer controlled, no zero option

REGRADED 29 Aug 2026 after the value set was amended; previously recorded at disclosed without a period, following an earlier correction on the same row. The vendor publishes a direct answer in a product FAQ: retention of user content and prompts is customised to the customer, set at the organisation account level with the support of a client manager, and the vendor deletes in accordance with the customer's own retention policy. Users can additionally delete their content and prompts in the product at any time. That is real customer control over the window and it is now recorded as such. Two qualifications kept it below the top value and are worth a buyer's attention: no retention period is published, so the window is whatever the customer negotiates rather than something disclosed in advance, and setting it runs through a client manager rather than an administrator control the customer operates alone. The separately published zero retention statement covers the model provider API layer rather than the product's own storage.

Harvey
Customer controlled, no zero option

REGRADED 29 Aug 2026 after the value set was amended; previously recorded at disclosed without a period, which understated real customer control. The security page states that customers determine what data to upload, how long it is retained, and whether it can be shared internally, and help centre documentation covers configuring vault retention settings including triggers and deletion timelines. That is retention configured by the customer inside the product, which is the strongest form of the control this value describes. Recorded at customer controlled rather than the top value because no zero retention setting for the vendor's own storage was confirmed in public material as of 29 Aug 2026, and no default period is published, so a customer knows they can set the window without knowing what it is before they do. Zero data retention is stated separately as a requirement imposed on model providers, which is a different layer.

Ethical Walls and Matter Segregation

Does retrieval respect the firm’s ethical walls, or can the model read across them?

CoCounsel Legal
Not addressed

Searched the product page, the AI hub, the corporate trust center, the legal blog and the published integration announcements on 29 Aug 2026. Integrations with iManage, NetDocuments and SharePoint are named, and corporate identity management integration is stated, but no vendor material was located addressing whether retrieval enforces source system permissions at query time per user, or how ethical walls and matter level segregation are handled. A third party review refers to granular roles and ethical walls, which is not vendor material and was not treated as evidence.

Harvey
Inherits document system permissions

Help center documentation states the product follows existing NetDocuments permissions, that a user sees only the cabinets, matters, folders and files they can already access, and that the product does not expand or modify permissions. The iManage integration is documented as a direct OAuth connection that respects iManage permissions and ethical walls. Separate admin documentation covers connecting, syncing and monitoring the firm's own ethical walls provider.

Third Party Request and Subpoena Notice

If someone subpoenas the vendor for a firm’s data, does the firm hear about it first?

CoCounsel Legal
Not addressed

Searched the product page, the AI hub, the corporate trust center and the corporate terms of use on 29 Aug 2026. No clause addressing government or law enforcement requests for customer data was located for this product, and no transparency report was located. Noted for a future reader: a commitment to inform the customer of third party data access requests, audited under ISO 27701, was located on the trust center for a different Thomson Reuters product line, ONESOURCE Pagero. It was not treated as covering this product and does not support a value here.

Harvey
Not addressed

Checked the security page, the published security addendum and the subprocessor update FAQ on 29 Aug 2026. No located term or policy addresses government or law enforcement requests for customer data, and no transparency report was located.

Primary Law Corpus Provenance

Where does the law in this product come from, and does the vendor have the right to use it?

CoCounsel Legal
Sources named, basis unstated

The corpus is named consistently and prominently: output is grounded in Westlaw and Practical Law, both proprietary databases the vendor owns and sells separately, maintained by attorney editors, with the editorial population stated at more than 1,200 full time attorney editors. Vendor material is explicit that the system draws on this content rather than scraping the public internet. The rights basis is ownership rather than a stated licence, and no update cadence or lag for the underlying corpus was located as of 29 Aug 2026.

Harvey
Sources named, basis unstated

The published subprocessor material identifies RELX and LexisNexis as a source provider behind an Ask LexisNexis feature, alongside web search providers, and product material refers to premium legal databases and curated public sources. The identification appears in the subprocessor list rather than a coverage page. No licence or rights basis, jurisdiction list or update cadence for the primary law corpus was located as of 29 Aug 2026.

Good Law Verification

Does the product tell you when the authority it just cited has been overruled?

CoCounsel Legal
Licensed citator, surfaced inline

Treatment signals come from KeyCite, the vendor's own named commercial citation service, and appear with the authority. Vendor engineering material states that reports carry inline citations, KeyCite flags and excerpts, and that the research agent uses KeyCite warnings to flag questioned or overruled cases and adjusts its strategy accordingly. Separate vendor material describes the system recognising red and yellow validity flags and factoring them into its analysis rather than only displaying them. First value on this signal in the index that rests on a licensed commercial citator.

Harvey
Not addressed

Checked product pages for the research module, the help center and the subprocessor material on 29 Aug 2026. A LexisNexis sourced research feature is documented, but no public material was located addressing whether authority returned by the product carries a treatment signal or is checked for subsequent history.

Refusal and Uncertainty Behaviour

What does the product do when the answer is not in the corpus?

CoCounsel Legal
Not addressed

Searched the product page, the AI hub, the legal blog, the engineering blog and the trust center on 29 Aug 2026. Vendor material describes transparent research logs, step by step reasoning, an audit trail and prompting guardrails that restrict output to a defined set of validated content. None of that states what the product does when it cannot ground an answer. No explicit no answer or abstention path was located, and no confidence or grounding score exposed to the user was located either.

Harvey
Not addressed

The vendor publishes measured hallucination rates and describes how hallucinated claims are detected and scored. Checked that research material, the product pages and the help center on 29 Aug 2026 and did not locate published material describing an explicit no answer or abstention path when the product cannot ground an answer.

Fabricated Citation Record

Does a public court record exist involving output from this product?

CoCounsel Legal
Record addresses filer conduct

A court record exists in which a predecessor brand of this product is mentioned. In Fletcher v. Experian Information Solutions, No. 25-20086, the Fifth Circuit sanctioned appellate counsel $2,500 on 18 Feb 2026 after a reply brief was found to contain 16 fabricated quotations and 5 further misrepresentations of law or fact. The court's findings address counsel's conduct: failure to verify, and evasive and misleading responses to the show cause order, which the court treated as conduct unbecoming under FRAP 46(c). The products counsel identified as the possible source were named by the court as Casetext and vLex, described as generative AI products. Casetext is the brand Thomson Reuters acquired in 2023 and no longer sells under its own name; this record is filed here because CoCounsel is the surviving product. The court made no finding about either product's own output. Instrument also searched: the AI Hallucination Cases database maintained by Damien Charlotin.

Harvey
None located

No court order, opinion or disciplinary record naming this product has been located as of 29 Aug 2026. Instrument searched: the AI Hallucination Cases database maintained by Damien Charlotin, which tracks court decisions worldwide involving AI generated hallucinated content and records the AI tool implicated where it is known. Also checked published sanctions summaries from Norton Rose Fulbright covering 2026 and two vendor maintained trackers. The entries located name filers, and in some rows other products, rather than this one. This is a statement about the public record on the date shown and not a clearance, and it is bounded by what that database covers.

Bar Guidance Alignment

Has the vendor engaged in public with the ethics opinions its buyers are bound by?

CoCounsel Legal
Generic reference

Searched the product page, the AI hub, the legal insights hub, the legal blog and the published Fiduciary-Grade AI material on 29 Aug 2026. The vendor publishes a substantial named framework and a buying guide addressed to professional standards in general terms, and markets a responsible AI position to courts and government. No engagement with any named ethics opinion was located, including ABA Formal Opinion 512 and state bar guidance.

Harvey
Generic reference

Published material refers in general terms to aligning with the high standards expected of legal work and to designing the product so that verification is easy. Checked the blog, resource pages and help center on 29 Aug 2026 and did not locate engagement with any named ethics opinion, including ABA Formal Opinion 512 or state bar guidance.

Billing and Fee Posture

Does the vendor address what happens to the bill when the work takes an hour instead of six?

CoCounsel Legal
Savings claims only

Vendor material leads with time compression and quantifies it: a 61 percent reduction in time to draft correspondence, a customer story reporting a task that took an hour completed in five minutes or less, and a commissioned return on investment study. Searched the product page, the AI hub, the legal blog and the customer stories on 29 Aug 2026 and located no per matter record of AI assisted work intended for fee purposes, and no published guidance on billing, fee or client disclosure treatment. The savings figures are published without anything on the client's side of the equation.

Harvey
Savings claims only

Vendor material offers impact and return on investment resources framed around what the product does for a firm or business, and the help center documents usage analytics dashboards and reporting APIs. Checked those surfaces on 29 Aug 2026 and did not locate a per matter record of AI assisted work intended for fee purposes, or any published guidance on billing, fee or client disclosure treatment.

Outside Counsel Guideline Readiness

Can a firm get this vendor through a client’s AI clause without a bespoke negotiation?

CoCounsel Legal
Subprocessors listed

A published FAQ names the third party model providers that may process customer content, OpenAI and Google, and states the contractual prohibition imposed on them, which is the substance of a model provider disclosure and is available with no agreement in place. A corporate trust center publishes the information security framework. What was not located as of 29 Aug 2026 is a maintained subprocessor list for this product, and any client facing consent or notification pack a firm could forward to its own client. Recorded at the model provider disclosure level rather than the full pack.

Harvey
Subprocessors listed

UPDATED 29 Aug 2026 during the trust portal sweep; value unchanged, evidence enumerated. The trust centre was opened directly and its published inventory is the most complete outside counsel readiness pack on this index. Available without a request, as named items: a Data Processing Addendum, a Business Associate Addendum, a Data Subject Requests item, completed self assessment questionnaires in three standard formats being CAIQ v4.0.3, SIG Core and SIG Lite, a Data Flow Diagram, a Network Diagram, a HIPAA report, a report titled Security and Privacy of Customer Data, and a Security Welcome Packet. A Subprocessors section is published as a standing part of the trust centre. Sensitive documents sit behind a self serve access request with a bulk download option. Compliance items are listed individually and include statements of applicability for ISO 27001, 27701 and 42001, which tell a client's reviewer what each certification actually covers. A firm answering a client AI clause could assemble a complete response from this without a sales conversation. One limitation recorded honestly: the subprocessors list renders client side and its contents were not retrieved in this pass, so the section's existence is established rather than the identity of the subprocessors in it.

Court Disclosure Support

If a judge’s standing order requires an AI disclosure, can the product produce one?

CoCounsel Legal
Partial record

Several elements of a disclosure record are available and documented. Vendor material states that each research report includes transparent research logs with verifiable citations and step by step reasoning, that sources are hyperlinked with highlighted excerpts in a dedicated tab, and that KeyCite validity flags appear with the authority, which together evidence what was retrieved and its status. Two elements are missing: the model used is not identified per output, since the vendor states the system is model agnostic across multiple providers, and no per document export covering model, sources and human verification together was located as of 29 Aug 2026.

Harvey
Partial record

Published material documents audit logs as a default enterprise control, inline links from assertions to the specific source passages behind them, and usage analytics available through a dashboard and APIs. Checked those surfaces on 29 Aug 2026 and did not locate a per document export covering model used, sources retrieved and human verification together.

What neither one publishes

The questions both sides leave open

Derived from the records above rather than written, so it cannot favour either vendor. Take these into both conversations and ask each side the same question.

Axes where neither earns credit
  • AI Liability and Recourse
Signals neither addresses in public material
  • Third Party Request and Subpoena Notice
  • Refusal and Uncertainty Behaviour

Which one fits

Choose CoCounsel Legal if

  • Your research answers need to rest on licensed secondary content rather than on documents you supply, and you want the Practical Law and Westlaw corpus behind the answer instead of retrieval over your own files.
  • You need to show a committee that this worked somewhere. CoCounsel takes the higher grade on outcome evidence because the case studies name the customer, carry a figure and sit alongside a commissioned study with a published method.
  • Your buying group is not a large firm. This is the only record in the category that separately addresses firms under ten attorneys, corporations, government including prosecutors and public defenders, and academic use.

Choose Harvey if

  • The tool has to live inside iManage, NetDocuments or SharePoint on day one. Harvey holds the only A on integration depth here, with each connection documented down to what it moves, what an administrator configures and what it does not support.
  • You are a large firm running cross border matters and want the vendor that describes that segment first rather than as one branch of a wider professional services product.
  • You want an MCP connector library so the platform can be reached from tools your firm already uses, rather than a fixed set of published integrations.

In summary

CoCounsel Legal

CoCounsel Legal is Thomson Reuters' flagship legal AI product, grounded in Westlaw and Practical Law content and descended from Casetext, which Thomson Reuters acquired in 2023. The AI Legal Index grades it in the top two bands on twelve of fifteen capability axes, the joint highest in its category, with A grades on citation accuracy, operational evidence and coverage of who it serves. It publishes named customer results with figures alongside a commissioned 2026 Forrester study, and states plainly in a public FAQ that customer content and prompts are not used to train the product or the underlying models, with third party model partners contractually prohibited from training. Its weakest graded areas are liability and recourse, where nothing is published about what happens when output is wrong, and professional responsibility, where no position on the advice line was located.

Source: AI Legal Index, 2026

Harvey

Harvey is an enterprise legal AI platform for law firms, in house legal departments and professional services firms, shipping Assistant, Vault, Knowledge and Workflow Agents. The AI Legal Index grades it in the top two bands on twelve of fifteen capability axes, the joint highest in its category, and awards it the category's only A on practice systems integration depth: its iManage, NetDocuments, SharePoint and Microsoft integrations are documented at the level an administrator can act on rather than merely announced. It participated in the independent 2025 Vals Legal AI Report and publishes substantive confidentiality commitments including contractual prohibitions on model provider training and enforced zero data retention. It publishes no pricing of any kind, and nothing on liability when an output is wrong.

Source: AI Legal Index, 2026

Questions buyers ask

Is Harvey better than CoCounsel?

Neither leads the other on the graded grid. The AI Legal Index places both in the top two bands on twelve of fifteen axes, the joint highest score in the general legal assistants category. They separate on what kind of product they are. CoCounsel grades higher on proof that deployments worked and on how precisely it defines who it serves. Harvey grades higher on how deeply it connects into the document systems a firm already runs.

Which one has better integrations with iManage and NetDocuments?

Harvey. It holds the only A on practice systems integration depth in this category. Its help articles describe what each integration moves, in which direction, what an administrator must configure and what a given integration does not support, and the iManage connection is a direct OAuth integration with an embedded web extension. CoCounsel's integrations are real and named, spanning iManage, NetDocuments, SharePoint, Microsoft 365, HighQ and Icertis, but are documented less deeply.

Do Harvey or CoCounsel train their models on client data?

Both say no, and both address the model provider layer rather than only their own. Harvey states no training on customer data by default, a contractual prohibition on model providers training, and enforced zero data retention. CoCounsel states in a published FAQ that customer content and prompts are not used to train the product or the underlying models, and that third party model partners including OpenAI and Google are contractually prohibited from training on customer data.

Do either of them publish accuracy or hallucination rates?

Both carry an A on citation accuracy in the AI Legal Index, and in both cases independent evidence exists rather than only vendor benchmarks. Harvey publishes BigLaw Bench, which is its own framework, but also participated in the February 2025 Vals Legal AI Report run by an outside evaluator. CoCounsel likewise has independent evaluator results. An earlier version of this index graded both lower by searching vendor surfaces alone, and both records were corrected upward on 29 August 2026.

What does Harvey cost compared with CoCounsel?

Neither publishes a rate. CoCounsel grades higher because the shape is visible: tier names and feature splits are published and reachable from the main navigation, with separate plans for law firms, corporations and government. Harvey publishes no pricing page, no rate, no unit of charge and no tier structure, and every commercial path runs through a demo request. Third party per seat estimates circulate in trade coverage for both but are not vendor published.

What do CoCounsel and Harvey both leave unanswered?

Two things, and they matter. Neither publishes a position on liability or recourse when the product produces a wrong output, which is the axis where both score lowest. And neither publishes a position on the advice line, on competence and supervision duties, or on jurisdiction limits, despite both selling squarely to licensed lawyers. Ask both the same two questions and compare the answers you get in writing.

Disclosure

One caution specific to this pair. CoCounsel Legal is Thomson Reuters, which also owns Westlaw and Practical Law, so the content its answers rest on and the product selling those answers have the same owner. That is a strength for grounding and a concentration risk for a firm already buying research from the same publisher, and it is worth pricing as one relationship rather than two. Both records on this page were corrected on 29 August 2026 after an earlier pass graded citation accuracy from vendor surfaces alone and missed the independent evaluator. Both moved up. Neither vendor was told in advance and neither reviewed this page.

Neither vendor paid for inclusion, placement or a grade, and neither reviewed this page before it published. Everything above comes from public material on the dates shown. How the index grades.

Contact

Correct a record, or ask how something was graded

Every grade and every signal on this index is drawn from public sources and dated. If a record is wrong, out of date, or missing an artifact the index did not locate, send the source and it will be reviewed and the record redated. Vendors are welcome to submit documentation. Nothing on this index is for sale, including a listing, a placement, or a grade.

AI Legal Index

The AI Legal Index is an independent index that tracks changes to AI vendors in legal. It holds 61 vendors across 9 categories, each graded on the same 15 capability axes and recorded against 12 legal signals, from public sources. No vendor pays for inclusion, placement, or rating.

Index Status
Last index update
August 29, 2026
The AI Legal Index is an editorial reference. It is not a regulatory body, not a law firm, and nothing published here is legal advice or a recommendation to retain or avoid a vendor. Records are verified against published sources, bar guidance and public court records. Where a record reads not addressed, the material was not located in public sources on the date shown. See the Methodology page for evaluation standards and limitations.
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