CoCounsel Legal vs Legora: how they compare in 2026
CoCounsel Legal and Legora both sell an AI workspace to law firms and in house teams. CoCounsel Legal's advantage is measurement and evidence. Its accuracy has been measured by an independent evaluator, scoring between 73.2 and 89.6 percent across four tasks in the February 2025 Vals Legal AI Report. It grounds output in Westlaw and Practical Law, with KeyCite validity flags shown alongside the authority and used by the research agent itself. Legora's advantage is documents. It publishes its general terms in EU and US versions, a data processing agreement and a security measures annex openly, with no gate. It holds ISO 42001 for its AI management system alongside ISO 27001 and SOC 2 Type II, and it states retention as instructed by the subscriber. CoCounsel Legal publishes no liability position at all.
At a glance
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.
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.
Everything Legora sells is generative. The Agent plans and executes legal work across the platform's tools, Tabular Review extracts answers from each document into a grid, research answers questions across jurisdictions, and drafting runs in Word, Outlook and the built in editor. An orchestration layer handles tool routing, memory, model selection and guardrails beneath them. Without the models there is no product left to sell.
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.
Grounding is described rather than asserted. The research agent identifies key legal concepts, selects Westlaw tools including KeyCite, the Key Number System and annotated statutes, runs multiple search cycles and synthesizes a structured result. Output grounds to primary authority the user can open, with inline citations, a Sources tab with direct links and highlighted excerpts, and KeyCite validity flags shown with the authority. A citation level verification feature, Deep Research Verify, is published, and prompting guardrails restrict output to content validated by people rather than the open internet. Measurement is independent. CoCounsel took part in the February 2025 Vals Legal AI Report, a third party benchmark against a measured lawyer baseline, scoring between 73.2 and 89.6 percent across four tasks with a 79.5 percent average, each task more than 10 points above the lawyer baseline. The vendor also publishes CoCounsel Bench, under which attorneys reviewed 50 complex tasks of about six lawyer hours each and judged the product's response stronger than the expert reference answer on nearly 40 percent. The 2025 study measured task accuracy rather than citation validity or hallucination rate, and the vendor did not take part in the later Vals study on citation authoritativeness.
Each cell in Tabular Review expands to its reasoning and the source documents behind it, and Portal answers carry links back to the exact source. Legal research works several sources in parallel, ranks them by authority and checks each finding against primary law before the answer returns. The rebuilt research layer announced on 14 September 2026 runs on an ontology of the law that maps how authorities rank and relate, including amendments and temporal validity. Its AI native citator follows a standard set and audited by former publisher attorney editors. Legora says it has cataloged more than 50 ways AI fails at legal research without publishing the list. The layer is in limited beta, and no accuracy figure, evaluation framework or hallucination rate is published.
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.
A real published commitment with documented review surfaces, without the full control structure. The vendor states that its AI is built with human oversight at its core and publishes a Fiduciary-Grade AI framework built around transparency and accountability. The product is described as showing its plan before executing: it interprets a request, builds a plan specific to the matter, and returns work product with traceable citations the user can open and check. Not located: 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.
The Agent proposes a plan before it acts, carries out the work across documents, data sources and tools, checks whether it met the goal, and delivers work product into the project workspace for the lawyer's review and approval. It can also act without being asked, watching email, documents and projects and starting work when something needs attention. Tabular Review adds Mark as Reviewed, Lock Cells and Review Mode for team review, and full audit trails record every tool call, file access and agent action. ISO 42001 covers the AI management system, with human oversight named as a principle. No threshold at which the Agent stops for a person, and no route after a wrong output, is described.
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.
Named customers, dated, with figures and a method that can be assessed. The vendor publishes case studies naming Justly Prudent, reporting five times return on investment and a doubling of litigation capacity, and Brinks, on reducing outside counsel spend. It also publishes a commissioned Forrester Total Economic Impact study dated 2026, whose method can be assessed and whose commissioned status is disclosed on the page. Aggregate figures are published with the population stated, including 2,700 corporate customers using the CoCounsel family and a 61 percent reduction in time to draft correspondence.
Legora counts more than 1,800 teams in over 50 markets and 100,000 lawyers on the platform. Named customers include White & Case, Crowell, Accor, Dentons Europe, Trowers & Hamlins and Grant Thornton UK, whose forensic investigations team has a published story. The customers page reports that users see a 25 percent improvement in work quality, that experienced users save 80 percent of non billable hours weekly, and that firms bill $6.4 million more per 100 lawyers a year. None of those figures carries a date, sample or method. An in house study with the analyst Ari Kaplan drew on conversations with 30 customers in nine countries.
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.
Substantive published commitments, with the answer 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. Third party model partners, including OpenAI and Google, are contractually prohibited from training on customer data, and systemic controls turn off those parties' abuse monitoring so there is no human access to customer data. The vendor also publishes a zero retention API architecture and data residency controls. Attorney client privilege and work product handling are not addressed directly in located material. Segregation by matter is not documented on the vendor's own pages, although the product is built around matters.
The general terms bar Legora from using a subscriber's confidential information to train or fine tune AI models and require the same of its subcontractors. The terms, the data processing agreement and the security measures annex are published in versions for the EU and the United States, and the annex covers least privilege access, personnel confidentiality, authorization controls and retention on customer instruction. Ethical walls and role based access are stated to keep confidential information from crossing matters or projects, on access control built on the Zanzibar authorization model, and engineers reach customer data only with the customer's written approval. Privilege and work product handling are not addressed.
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. Where the advice line is not the duty a product raises, the axis is read through the nearest professional duty it does raise: judicial conduct rules and the reviewing duty for products sold only to courts, and the duty to bill for time actually spent for products that draft time entries.
The claim is made and the documentation is not published. The product is sold to licensed professionals and distributed to more than 200 law schools and 120,000 law students. The vendor's framing is that the system works at the level of a senior associate under professional supervision. The product page, the AI hub, the trust center and the legal blog were searched. No published position on the advice line, no treatment of competence and supervision duties, and no statement of jurisdiction limits is published. The senior associate framing is a capability claim rather than a professional responsibility position, and for a product marketed to students it is where a position would matter most.
Lawyers, firms and in house teams are the buyers, and the product is described as working with lawyers rather than replacing them, with the Agent's output delivered for a lawyer's review and approval. No position on the advice line, no treatment of competence and supervision duties and no jurisdiction limit appears in the acceptable use policy, the general terms or the product pages.
AI Governance and Bias Disclosure
Published governance over model behavior: who owns it inside the vendor, what is tested before release, and what is disclosed about disparate output across matter types, parties, or populations.
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 organization 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: 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.
Legora holds ISO 42001 for its AI management system, independently audited with ongoing surveillance, and publishes what the certification covers: how AI is designed, deployed, supervised and monitored, with human oversight and structured governance as the operating principles. No internal owner of AI governance is named, no results of testing on model behavior before release are published, and nothing covers uneven output across matter types, parties or populations.
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.
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: 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.
The security measures annex sets least privilege and role based access, and centrally stored logs traceable to unique usernames, with security logs kept at least 12 months. It adds data integrity signing, background checks and confidentiality agreements for staff, and retention as the customer instructs. Subscriber environments are logically separated and full production backups run every four hours. The data processing agreement has Legora report a personal data breach within 36 hours and delete or return personal data at the subscriber's choice when it ends. The subprocessor list, last updated 6 July 2026, names each provider with its purpose, data and residency, and a new subprocessor comes with 30 days to object. Penetration tests cover the full platform twice a year.
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.
No published indemnity scope, liability cap, exclusion, warranty on output or insurance position is published for this product. Commercial terms are reached through a negotiated subscription agreement. The Fiduciary-Grade AI framework treats accountability as a design principle rather than saying who bears the loss when output is wrong. A fiduciary framing sits here without a published liability position.
General terms and conditions are published openly in an EU version and a version for the United States. They carry numbered liability clauses, aggregate caps that apply across the subscriber and its affiliates, a separate cap of €100,000 on beta features, and a carve out the terms call an Enhanced Claim. No indemnity for third party claims arising from output, warranty on output or insurance position is stated.
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.
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: documentation describing what each integration moves, in which direction, and what an administrator must configure.
Document management systems are integrated rather than replaced. An iManage technology partnership works through iManage APIs, and SharePoint, Box, virtual data rooms and contract lifecycle systems feed documents in. Add ins bring the Agent and playbooks into Word and Outlook, EDGAR sits among the research sources, and MCP connectors and third party legal services feed the Agent's context. A plugin released on 17 September 2026 brings Legora's grounded answers into ChatGPT Enterprise. What each connection moves, in which direction and what an administrator configures is not documented.
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.
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: the list of available regions, the tenancy model, what changes between tiers, and where processing happens as distinct from where data is stored.
Legora runs separate arrangements for the EU, the United States and Asia Pacific. Its subprocessor list sets out hosting and AI model providers by region, Microsoft, AWS and Google among them, with EU customers' data held in the EU and EEA. Storage is tiered to data sensitivity, technical teams in the EU and the United States support local clients, and subscriber environments are logically separated. No customer selection of region inside a tier is described, and where processing happens is not separated from where data is stored.
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.
Certification is real and stated, without accessible evidence. SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 are stated as maintained, and 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. No attestation report, coverage period, audit scope or named auditor is published, and no route to request the reports without a sales conversation is published either. Certifications are stated at the parent company level rather than scoped to this product, which is the distinction a buyer's security team asks about.
ISO 27001:2022 with a yearly audit, SOC 2 Type II and ISO 42001 for the AI management system are all current. The trust center at security.legora.com carries a resources section and a data flow diagram, and the security whitepapers and security measures annex are published without a gate. Penetration tests run twice a year under an assume breach method. The certifying auditor is not named.
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.
The supply chain is partly disclosed, and specifically. 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: 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 matters here because the product was rebuilt on a different vendor's agent framework within the past year.
The subprocessor list names Microsoft, AWS and Google for hosting, infrastructure and AI models and OpenAI for AI models, with DeepL for optional translation and Linkup Labs for web results, each with its residency. New subprocessors are announced by updating the list, with 30 days for the subscriber to object. An orchestration layer handles model selection across tasks. No model or model version is named, and nothing states which provider serves which feature.
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.
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 has its own plans and pricing page, with variants for law firms, corporations and government. Third party analyses report that the pages run a configurator returning a figure for firms of up to ten attorneys and route larger firms to a sales quote. The configurator could not be checked directly because that subdomain blocks automated access, so no vendor published figure is recorded here; it may say more. The unit of charge is per user per month by third party report rather than vendor statement.
No pricing page, rate, unit of charge or tier structure is published, and the commercial route is a demo request. The general terms are published openly, so contract terms can be read before a sales conversation even though price cannot.
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.
Who the product serves is documented precisely across many segments. Published navigation separates law firms under ten attorneys from firms over ten, 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 areas are listed with their 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 published table of plans shows exactly which content each plan reaches, so a buyer can see where coverage stops.
Large law firms, small and mid sized firms, in house legal departments, the public sector and professional services are all served, with solution pages for M&A, litigation, banking, insurance, private equity and tax. Multi jurisdiction and cross border work are stated strengths, with research sources across Europe and federal and state law in the United States. No firm size or practice area is named as outside its scope.
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?
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.
Under the heading Feedback, Usage Data and no training, Legora's general terms bar it from using a subscriber's confidential information to train or fine tune AI models and bar its subcontractors from doing so. Legora may use usage data to develop and improve the services, and shares it outside the company only when aggregated and anonymized. The home page and security page repeat the commitment as zero AI training on customer data.
Prompt and Output Retention
How long does the product keep what a lawyer typed, and can that be set to zero?
The vendor publishes a direct answer in a product FAQ. Retention of user content and prompts is customized to the customer, set at the organization account level with the support of a client manager, and the vendor deletes in line with the customer's own retention policy. Users can also delete their content and prompts in the product at any time. That is real customer control over the window. No retention period is published, so the window is whatever the customer negotiates, 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.
Section 17 of the security measures annex, dated 31 January 2025, keeps personal data under whatever retention the subscriber instructs during the data processing agreement, and clause 11 of that agreement governs return or deletion after it ends. No default retention period or zero retention setting is published. Backups of the full production environment run every four hours, and each subscriber's environment stays logically separate.
Ethical Walls and Matter Segregation
Does retrieval respect the firm’s ethical walls, or can the model read across them?
Named document system integrations come without a stated rule on whether their permissions or ethical walls apply at query time. 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.
Ethical walls and role based access control keep confidential information from crossing matters or projects, and full audit trails record every tool call, file access and agent action. Access control is built on the Zanzibar authorization model. How a wall is set up, and whether retrieval applies document management permissions per user at query time, is not described.
Third Party Request and Subpoena Notice
If someone subpoenas the vendor for a firm’s data, does the firm hear about it first?
Government and law enforcement requests for customer data have no product specific handling or transparency report. 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.
Either party may disclose confidential information under the general terms when law or an order of an authority, regulator or court compels it. The compelled party gives the other notice of the proceeding where the law allows and cooperates in seeking confidential treatment. The data processing agreement adds notice of any communication with a data protection authority about Legora's processing. No transparency report is published.
Primary Law Corpus Provenance
Where does the law in this product come from, and does the vendor have the right to use it?
The source collection is named consistently and prominently. Output is grounded in Westlaw and Practical Law, proprietary databases the vendor owns and sells separately, maintained by 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 license, and no update cadence or lag for the underlying content was located as of 29 Aug 2026.
Legora names the sources behind its research. Federal law and all 50 states in the United States are hosted on Legora, beside SEC EDGAR. European sources include France's Cour de cassation, Germany's federal statutes, Sweden's court portal, Lovdata, Retsinformation, Finland's legal database and Portugal's official gazette, and content partnerships bring in publishers. The Qura acquisition adds a Swedish database of case law, legislation and regulation. No license basis or update lag is stated for any source.
Good Law Verification
Does the product tell you when the authority it just cited has been overruled?
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 recognizing red and yellow validity flags and factoring them into its analysis rather than only displaying them.
Legora is building its own AI native citator on an ontology of the law, announced on 14 September 2026. The ontology captures the hierarchy of authority, how sources relate and temporal validity, so an amended rule or an overruled case is recognized as such, and former publisher attorney editors set and audit the standard. The technology comes from the Qura and Wexler acquisitions. The citator is in limited beta, with general availability planned for the fourth quarter of 2026, and no coverage figure or error rate is published.
Refusal and Uncertainty Behavior
What does the product do when the answer is not in the corpus?
Research logs, reasoning steps and guardrails are all described, but not what happens when an answer cannot be grounded. 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.
The Agent checks whether it met the goal and loops back to adjust, and research ranks sources by authority before answering. No explicit no answer path, abstention behavior or confidence value shown to the user is described.
Fabricated Citation Record
Does a public court record exist addressing fabricated or hallucinated legal citations in output from this product?
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, and CoCounsel is the surviving product. The court made no finding about either product's own output. The AI Hallucination Cases database maintained by Damien Charlotin was also searched.
The AI Hallucination Cases database maintained by Damien Charlotin, which records court decisions worldwide that address hallucinated AI content and the tool involved where known, has no entry naming Legora or Leya. Legora's research checks findings against primary law, and its Tabular Review links every answer to the document it came from.
Bar Guidance Alignment
Has the vendor engaged in public with the ethics opinions its buyers are bound by?
A named framework and a buying guide address professional standards in general terms, but no specific ethics opinion is engaged. 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.
Material Legora publishes on its own AI governance and ISO 42001 certification engages none of ABA Formal Opinion 512, a state bar opinion or national bar guidance on lawyers' use of AI.
Billing and Fee Posture
Does the vendor address what happens to the bill when the work takes an hour instead of six?
Vendor material leads with time compression and quantifies it: a 61 percent reduction in time to draft correspondence, a customer story reporting an hour's task completed in five minutes or less, and a commissioned return on investment study. The product page, the AI hub, the legal blog and the customer stories were searched on 29 Aug 2026. No per matter record of AI assisted work intended for fee purposes was located, and no published guidance on billing, fee or client disclosure treatment. The savings figures are published without anything on the client's side.
Law firms and in house teams buy the product, and the customers page reports 80 percent of non billable hours saved weekly by experienced users and $6.4 million in additional billing per 100 lawyers a year. The small and mid sized firm page pitches more matters handled without more headcount. No record of AI assisted work by matter for fee purposes, and no billing or client disclosure guidance, is offered.
Outside Counsel Guideline Readiness
Can a firm get this vendor through a client’s AI clause without a bespoke negotiation?
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, with no agreement needed to read it. A corporate trust center publishes the information security framework. Not located as of 29 Aug 2026: a maintained subprocessor list for this product, and any consent or notification pack a firm could forward to its own client.
Legora publishes its subprocessor list by region, last updated 6 July 2026, naming Microsoft, AWS, Google and OpenAI as AI model and hosting providers with their purpose, data categories and residency, and offers email updates. Its general terms, data processing agreement, security measures annex and acceptable use policy are published without a gate. No client facing consent or notice pack is offered, and trust center documents come through a request.
Court Disclosure Support
If a judge’s standing order requires an AI disclosure, can the product produce one?
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. Sources are hyperlinked with highlighted excerpts in a dedicated tab, and KeyCite validity flags appear with the authority, which together show what was retrieved and its status. Two elements are missing. The model used is not identified per output, since the vendor says the system works across multiple providers, and no export per document covering model, sources and human verification together was located as of 29 Aug 2026.
Full audit trails record every tool call, file access and agent action, Tabular Review cells link to their source documents, and Portal answers cite the exact source. No export for each document records the model used and the human verification, and no court disclosure template is offered.
The questions both sides leave open
Derived from the records above rather than written, so it cannot favor either vendor. Take these into both conversations and ask each side the same question.
- Refusal and Uncertainty Behavior
Which one fits
Choose CoCounsel Legal if
- You want accuracy measured by someone other than the vendor. CoCounsel Legal took part in the February 2025 Vals Legal AI Report, an independent benchmark against a measured lawyer baseline. It scored between 73.2 and 89.6 percent across four tasks, for a 79.5 percent average. It also publishes its own CoCounsel Bench evaluation across 50 complex tasks reviewed by experienced attorneys.
- Your research has to carry validity signals, not just links. Output is grounded in Westlaw and Practical Law rather than the open internet. Citations appear inline, with a sources tab carrying direct links and highlighted excerpts. KeyCite flags are shown with the authority and used by the research agent to flag questioned or overruled cases and adjust its approach.
- You want to know the product fits your kind of practice. CoCounsel publishes separate positioning for firms under and over ten attorneys, for corporations, and for government, including courts, prosecutors, public defenders and city attorneys. Its practice area pages cover litigation, criminal defense, family, employment, mergers and acquisitions, and personal injury. Named case studies include Justly Prudent, which reports five times return on investment.
Choose Legora if
- You want the agreement in hand before talking to sales. Legora publishes its general terms and conditions in EU and US versions, a data processing agreement, a security measures annex and an acceptable use policy openly, with no gate. That is material a firm can forward to a client today rather than request under an agreement.
- Your governance review wants the AI itself certified. Legora holds ISO 42001 for its AI management system, independently audited with ongoing surveillance and covering how AI is designed, deployed, supervised and monitored. It also holds ISO 27001:2022, audited yearly, and SOC 2 Type II. A public trust center carries a data flow diagram and security whitepapers.
- You want the allocation of loss and the retention window in writing. Legora's published terms carry numbered liability clauses, with aggregate caps applying across the subscriber and its affiliates and a separate cap on beta features. Section 17 of the security measures annex states that personal data is retained according to the requirements the subscriber instructs.
In summary
CoCounsel Legal
CoCounsel Legal is Thomson Reuters' flagship legal AI product, grounded in Westlaw and Practical Law. It was rebuilt in August 2026 as an agentic experience: a lawyer describes a matter in plain language, and the system plans, researches, reasons and drafts with citations. According to the AI Legal Index, its accuracy has been measured independently, scoring between 73.2 and 89.6 percent across four tasks in the February 2025 Vals Legal AI Report. KeyCite validity flags appear with cited authority and are used by the research agent. It publishes no liability position, no statement on the line between its output and legal advice, and no confirmed rate.
Legora
Legora is a collaborative AI workspace for law firms and in house legal teams. The matter team and the AI work on one shared surface, spanning Tabular Review, a Microsoft Word add in for drafting and redlining, agentic workflows and legal research. The AI Legal Index records that it holds ISO 27001:2022 audited yearly, SOC 2 Type II and ISO 42001 for its AI management system. Legora publishes its general terms in EU and US versions, a data processing agreement and a security measures annex openly, with no gate. Retention is stated as set by subscriber instruction. No accuracy measurement or price is published, and model providers appear only in its subprocessor list. A rebuilt research layer with its own citator, which Legora described in September 2026, is in limited beta.
Questions buyers ask
CoCounsel Legal vs Legora: which is better for a law firm?
CoCounsel Legal's strength is measurement and evidence: an independent accuracy benchmark, named customers with figures, and a licensed citator feeding its research. Legora's strength is documents: openly published terms, a data processing agreement and a security annex, plus ISO 42001 certification of its AI management system. One publishes results, the other publishes paperwork. From the AI Legal Index, based on each vendor's own published materials as of October 13, 2026. No vendor pays for placement.
Has either had its accuracy independently measured?
CoCounsel Legal has. It participated in the February 2025 Vals Legal AI Report, a third party benchmark measured against a lawyer baseline. It scored between 73.2 and 89.6 percent across four tasks, with a 79.5 percent average, and the figures sit on the evaluator's own site as well as the vendor's blog. Legora publishes no accuracy measurement, evaluation framework or hallucination rate. It states that review cells link to their source. In September 2026 it described a rebuilt research layer with its own AI native citator, in limited beta with general availability planned for the fourth quarter. From the AI Legal Index, based on each vendor's own published materials as of October 13, 2026. No vendor pays for placement.
What terms can a buyer read in advance?
On Legora, a great deal: general terms in EU and US versions, a data processing agreement, a security measures annex and an acceptable use policy, all published openly. CoCounsel Legal publishes no subscription agreement for the product, so the indemnity, cap, warranty and insurance position are reached only through a negotiated agreement. Its tier names and feature splits are published. Third parties report a pricing configurator on a separate subdomain. From the AI Legal Index, based on each vendor's own published materials as of October 13, 2026. No vendor pays for placement.
Do either use client data to train models?
Both say no. A CoCounsel FAQ states that user content and prompts are not used to train or improve the product or the underlying models. It adds that third party AI partners, including OpenAI and Google, are contractually prohibited from training on customer data, and that controls turn off those partners' abuse monitoring so there is no human access. Legora's general terms prohibit training on customer data. Only Legora's commitment sits in a published customer agreement. From the AI Legal Index, based on each vendor's own published materials as of October 13, 2026. No vendor pays for placement.
What do CoCounsel Legal and Legora both leave unpublished?
Neither documents what the product does when it cannot ground an answer, so neither describes an abstention path or a confidence signal. Neither documents how ethical walls or matter level segregation are enforced, which for firm facing products is the confidentiality question that bites hardest. Neither names an ethics opinion, including ABA Formal Opinion 512. And neither publishes a rate a buyer can rely on, although CoCounsel publishes its tier structure. From the AI Legal Index, based on each vendor's own published materials as of October 13, 2026. No vendor pays for placement.
Neither vendor paid for inclusion, placement or a grade, and neither reviewed this page before it published. Everything on it comes from public material on the dates shown. How the index grades.
Two gaps sit with CoCounsel Legal. CoCounsel Legal publishes a named responsible AI framework and no allocation of loss: no indemnity, liability cap, warranty on output or insurance position is published for the product. Its certifications are stated at parent company level rather than scoped to the product, the distinction a security team asks about. Legora puts its commitment against training on customer data in its general terms. Neither vendor names the models underneath in full. Neither vendor reviewed this page.