LinkSquares vs Thomson Reuters Document Intelligence: how they compare in 2026

LinkAI launched on 5 May 2026 as an agentic architecture that replaced the earlier approach. Independent review material describes it as a rebuild on a new architecture rather than a chat sidebar attached to the existing product. Extraction has been the core of the product from the start. Pulling payment deadlines, governing law, liability, renewal and commercial obligation terms out of signed agreements is a model task. The analytics layer the company is known for is built on that extracted output, so the models generate the data the rest of the product works with. The repository, workflow, approval routing and reporting still stand without the model layer. The agentic design is recent, dating from the May 2026 rebuild rather than from the product's origins.

Document Intelligence is a contract repository and analysis platform built around pretrained extraction models. The models identify thousands of provisions across a suite of domain specific models, from dates, obligations and payment details in commercial contracts to curtailment rights, production guarantees and take and pay clauses in wind and solar agreements. They return results as structured fields that HighQ's help pages call Thoughts, the extracted provisions and sub provisions. The same models drive retrieval by meaning, intent and context across thousands of documents, automatic labeling of document types on bulk upload, and the AI generated table of extracted contents in the Word add in. Around the models sit features that work without them. These include relational libraries in place of folders, shared bookmarks of saved results, notifications and calendar reminders, dashboards, playbooks with preferred and fallback language, and a low code and no code workflow builder. Thomson Reuters markets no generative drafting, chat or summarization feature for Document Intelligence.

LinkSquares publishes buyer guidance on evaluating AI contract management. It tells buyers to demand precision and recall benchmarks on their own documents and to keep review workflows for exceptions. LinkSquares publishes no precision or recall figure of its own, for any clause type, on any set of documents. Its comparison content claims extraction accuracy as a strength without a published measurement. It gives no error rate by clause type, no statement of behavior on nonstandard or ambiguous language, no confidence indicator on extracted values and no evaluation method. Extraction failures in this product are silent. A missed renewal date or auto renewal clause does not announce itself. It simply never appears in the report the legal team relies on.

Document Intelligence extracts provisions from the customer's own contracts, so its output points to text in documents the customer holds rather than to legal authority. Thomson Reuters publishes no precision, recall or error figure for its extraction models and describes no test set. The product page promises truly accurate results based on the context and intent of the text. The April 2023 launch release quotes Thomson Reuters' chief product officer for legal technology saying automated review improves accuracy, with no measurement behind either claim. The 50 percent figure Thomson Reuters cites measures faster retrieval and review against manual methods, not accuracy, and the features page says contextual retrieval ensures nothing important is overlooked. Editor users can edit and confirm extracted provisions under section 5.2.2 of the Legal Product Specific Terms, and fields shown in HighQ are limited to those defined in the Document Intelligence application. The Thomson Reuters General Terms of September 2026 call AI output probabilistic and say it may at times be incomplete, inaccurate, out of date or biased.

LinkSquares positions itself as agentic CLM and states that the platform handles the bulk of standard contracts automatically. Its own buyer guidance recommends maintaining review workflows for exceptions. For its own product, it does not publish which contract types or value thresholds can complete without human review, or what makes a contract standard enough to be handled automatically. It does not say whether an agent can send or approve a contract unattended, or what confidence threshold routes an exception to a person. Nor does it say what the audit record shows when an agent rather than a lawyer made the call.

Extraction runs on documents a user uploads or a HighQ site sends, and results flow into the library, dashboards, notifications and, for HighQ customers, AI Hub and iSheets. The Legal Product Specific Terms split users into Editor users, who upload and delete documents, create and modify tags and attributes, and edit and confirm provisions, and Viewer users, who have read only access. Section 3.3 of the General Terms of September 2026 says output must be reviewed by a licensed professional or someone with the right credentials before reliance, use or distribution. It makes the customer solely responsible for verifying the accuracy and legality of output. Thomson Reuters' AI Usage Policy of January 2026 bars using AI output for automated decision making, or as a substantial factor in decisions with legal or similarly significant effects, without that review. Playbooks in the Word add in carry escalation contacts for clauses outside approved positions. Thomson Reuters publishes no setting that holds extracted provisions for confirmation before they feed alerts or dashboards, and no point at which the system hands a document back to a person.

LinkSquares names DraftKings, TIME, ProPharma and Asurion as customers and states more than 1,200 customers in all. G2 has named it a Leader in contract lifecycle management for five years running, including the Winter 2026 Grid Report. On G2, 98 percent of users are reported as saying the product is moving in the right direction. A case study with Softonic, a named customer, reports outside counsel costs cut by 40 percent. The case study says NDAs used to take three to four business days, and that sales reps using templates now spend on average five times less time executing them. A LinkSquares comparison guide describes the same result as NDA processing time cut by nearly 400 percent. The vendor also states a 360 percent return on investment over three years, without a method, sample or baseline.

Tim Custer, a senior vice president at Apache, is quoted on the product page saying work that would have taken a team days, weeks or months now takes minutes and hours, with no figure and no date. A 2022 customer infographic carries anonymous quotes reporting a project cut from two years to two months and a consent to assign clause found in two minutes after a month of manual review. Others report work of 20 to 25 days done in a few days and a $4 million find. The corporate legal page quotes an unnamed M&A general counsel on saving hundreds of hours of manual review. Thomson Reuters says customers have cut information retrieval and review time by more than 50 percent against manual methods, a figure first published in the April 2023 launch release. It also says the models received more than 15,000 hours of training and maintenance in the second half of 2022. No figure is tied to a named customer or comes with a method, and the newest dated customer material is from 2023.

A dedicated security page publishes SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001 and GDPR compliance and encryption of all contracts and data. The vendor says customer data stays private within the platform. Independent review material, a practitioner view rather than vendor material, describes the residency and retention controls as mature enough that a public company legal operations lead need not negotiate addenda. Nothing published addresses legal professional privilege or attorney work product. Negotiation playbooks and clause libraries are the closest thing to work product in this product. The security material does not cover their confidentiality, though the vendor says elsewhere that they are isolated. Legal, sales, procurement, finance and HR work in the same instance, and nothing published describes the line between legal's own analysis and the wider business.

Section 5.4 of Thomson Reuters' Legal Product Specific Terms, version 1.0 of July 2026, lets Thomson Reuters use, store, copy, share, transfer and process customer data to provide Document Intelligence. Given the machine learning nature of the service, it may also use customer data to train, update, modify and adapt its products. The resulting Machine Learning Adaptions belong solely to Thomson Reuters, and the customer grants a royalty free, irrevocable and perpetual license to its data to secure those rights. Deidentified data Thomson Reuters collects or generates is its sole property, and the customer may have no access to it. The General Terms bar training of generative models and large language models on customer data, and the Legal AI Product Specific Terms bar training of generative or foundational models. Both rank below the Legal Product Specific Terms, and both address generative models, while Document Intelligence runs extraction models. The General Terms treat customer data as confidential information during the term and for five years after it ends. Privilege, work product and separation between clients or matters go unaddressed.

The product drafts, reviews and approves contracts and is sold for use by sales, procurement, HR, marketing and finance as well as legal. Staff who are not lawyers act on machine generated contract analysis by design, and the vendor presents that as a feature. LinkSquares publishes nothing on the line between the tool and legal advice. No statement says output is not legal advice, and no guidance says when a contract should reach a lawyer. Nothing covers in house counsel's supervision of business users who write contracts themselves, and nothing engages with bar guidance.

Section 14.3 of the Thomson Reuters General Terms, version 6.0 of September 2026, says Thomson Reuters provides its services for informational purposes and not as legal, financial, tax, accounting, compliance or other professional advice. Section 3.3 requires output to be reviewed by a licensed professional, or someone with the right credentials, before reliance, use or distribution. The AI Usage Policy of January 2026 bars using AI output to assist in giving legal advice unless such a professional reviews it first, and bars presenting output as solely human generated. Document Intelligence's marketing invites law firms and in house teams to advise with confidence. It also sells to buyers outside the legal function, including corporate asset management teams, contract managers and renewable energy developers, owner operators and investors, with no separate disclosure for them. Nothing in Document Intelligence material addresses competence or supervision duties, and jurisdiction limits are unstated.

The LinkSquares buyer guide recommends quarterly AI governance reviews to monitor bias, validate accuracy and enforce compliance. It lists model governance covering audit trails, PII handling and zero retention options as things to expect from a vendor. That guidance is written for customers. For LinkAI itself, the published material says only that it is designed with enterprise level data security and governance built in. The vendor publishes no AI policy, model card, bias or fairness testing, evaluation method or result, accuracy monitoring, drift statement or named governance body. The company holds ISO 27001 but has no ISO 42001 certification.

Thomson Reuters publishes data and AI ethics principles, including commitments to strive to keep human involvement in its AI products and to treat people fairly. Its Data and AI Governance and Security Program whitepaper of March 2025 places governance with a Responsible AI and Data Trust team. It requires AI models used for a business purpose to be registered in a central Responsible AI and Product Compliance Hub. It also runs data impact assessments and model risk assessments, with ethics controls covering human oversight, fairness and automated decisions. Section 3.2 of the General Terms commits Thomson Reuters to policies on bias, accuracy, explainability, transparency and human oversight in developing its AI. Practical Law attorney editors build, train and maintain the Document Intelligence models. Thomson Reuters' ISO/IEC 42001 certificate, valid from August 2026 to March 2028, covers Westlaw, CoCounsel Essentials, CoCounsel Tax, Audit and Accounting, CLEAR Investigate and Practical Law, and does not cover Document Intelligence. No testing result, bias finding or named owner is published for these models.

The vendor states that contract data is never shared with or used to train any third party LLM providers. It also says contract data and proprietary playbooks are completely isolated and never used to train public AI models, and that data stays completely private within the LinkSquares platform. Those statements cover the main risk for a contract lifecycle product, which is customer contract text reaching an outside model provider. Both are limited to third party and public models. Neither says LinkSquares does not use customer contract data to train or tune its own models inside its own platform. Data staying completely private within the platform is consistent with internal training rather than ruling it out. No retention position for AI processed content is published. The vendor's own buyer guide lists zero retention options as something to demand from a vendor, without saying whether this product offers one.

Thomson Reuters' Data Security Addendum, version 2.0 of November 2023, commits to notify the customer of a security breach without undue delay and within 72 hours of discovery, followed by a root cause analysis. Customer data is encrypted at AES 256 in transit and at rest, and user credentials are never stored in clear text. The Data Processing Addendum, version 3 effective February 2025, deletes customer personal data on request, except where law or Thomson Reuters' retention policies require it to be kept. Data kept on those grounds is isolated from further active processing. It points to subprocessor lists on Thomson Reuters' web pages, where product lists exist for Casetext, CoCounsel Core and Practical Law and none for Document Intelligence. The enterprise wide list of January 2022 names 20 providers, among them Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Pendo and Salesforce. Editor users can delete documents, and customer data may pass to Thomson Reuters' service providers and to partners the customer enables. No retention period for documents or extracted provisions is published.

LinkSquares publishes no terms page. Its enterprise agreements govern liability and are not public. Nothing published covers liability for AI output, warranties, service levels or remedies when an extraction is wrong, a clause is missed, or an agentic action moves forward a contract that should have been escalated. The vendor says the platform handles the bulk of standard contracts automatically. A missed auto renewal or liability cap in a signed agreement is a loss the customer finds later, and the vendor publishes no position on it.

The Thomson Reuters General Terms, version 6.0 of September 2026, cap each party's yearly liability at the amount payable for the affected service in the 12 months before the first event giving rise to the claim. In the first year the cap is 12 times the average monthly charge. Breaches of confidentiality, data protection or information security obligations carry a cap of twice that amount. Lost profits, revenue, goodwill and indirect, consequential and punitive damages are excluded. Section 3.2 says Thomson Reuters is not liable for the accuracy, legality or reliability of any output, or for decisions taken on it. Thomson Reuters defends the customer against third party intellectual property claims about the services, excluding combinations with customer data and unauthorized changes. It warrants that the services conform in all material respects to the documentation, with repair, modification or replacement as the remedy and termination if that fails. No indemnity or warranty covers extracted provisions, and no insurance is stated.

LinkSquares integrates with Microsoft Word, Google Docs, Microsoft 365, Salesforce, Slack, DocuSign and HubSpot. Drafting runs natively in Word and Google Docs. The vendor says clause libraries and playbooks are available inside the drafting environment, so users do not switch tabs or upload files. The CRM and electronic signature connections cover the path to signature end to end. Independent review material says there is no generally available API for developers, which limits moving contract data into systems the vendor has no connector for. No document management system such as iManage or NetDocuments is named.

Document Intelligence connects to HighQ through the HighQ AI Hub, set out step by step in HighQ's help pages. A HighQ system administrator enters a client ID, secret token and application URL generated under API clients in Document Intelligence, over the API at api.thoughttrace.com. Files sent from HighQ come back as Thoughts, the extracted provisions and sub provisions, and Facts, the metadata users assert, in AI Hub and iSheets. The customer must hold both products, each Document Intelligence workspace connects to one HighQ instance, HighQ's IP addresses must be allowed by Document Intelligence support, and HighQ fields are limited to those defined in Document Intelligence. A Microsoft Word add in compares drafts against a standard template, applies playbooks and alerts on redlines and comments. A low code and no code workflow builder, embedded from Workato under Thomson Reuters' third party terms, offers prebuilt connectors to common systems that are not named. No connection to iManage, NetDocuments, SharePoint or Salesforce is described.

Independent review material says LinkSquares' data residency and retention controls are mature enough that a public company legal operations lead does not have to negotiate addenda. That is a practitioner's account, not vendor material. No vendor page names a hosting provider, lists regions, states a residency commitment or describes single tenant or private deployment options.

Document Intelligence is delivered as software as a service from app.thoughttrace.com, the ThoughtTrace domain it kept after the 2022 acquisition. HighQ's help pages give app.thoughttrace.com/myworkspace as an example application address, one per Document Intelligence workspace, and api.thoughttrace.com as the API address. Thomson Reuters publishes no hosting provider, region, tenancy model or residency option for Document Intelligence. Its Data Processing Addendum covers international transfers of personal data across Thomson Reuters services under applicable data protection law, with separate terms for European personal data. Files a HighQ customer sends for processing leave HighQ for the Document Intelligence application, whatever region the HighQ instance runs in. No on premises or private cloud option is described, and where extraction runs, as distinct from where documents are stored, is unstated.

A dedicated security page, open without a login, states SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 alongside GDPR compliance and encryption of all contracts and data. Independent review material confirms both certifications and describes them as the two that clear most enterprise procurement checks. The page names no auditing firm for either. It gives no certificate date, examination period or expiry. LinkSquares publishes no trust center or route to request documentation, so there is no stated path to the reports themselves.

Thomson Reuters' trust center publishes security profiles for CoCounsel, HighQ, Practical Law and other legal products, and none for Document Intelligence. Its ISO/IEC 27001 certificate, CERT 001130 issued by MSECB and valid to October 2028, lists products in scope by site, including HighQ, CoCounsel and Contract Express, and does not list Document Intelligence or ThoughtTrace. The ISO/IEC 42001 certificate, CERT 002034, valid to March 2028, also leaves it out, and no SOC 2 report is stated for the product. Section 3.2 of the Data Security Addendum lets a customer review an executive summary of any independent assessment or certification Thomson Reuters makes available for a service, and section 3.1 allows one security questionnaire a year. Section 2.9 says Thomson Reuters or a third party it appoints may periodically run penetration tests, with a summary of the results available on written request. Systems are monitored for threats and vulnerabilities on an ongoing basis.

LinkSquares commits that contract data is never shared with third party LLM providers, which implies such providers are part of the architecture. It names none of them. It publishes no provider, model family or version and no subprocessor list. Nor does it say what runs on its own infrastructure and what runs on an external model. The product was rebuilt on an agentic architecture, and no published material identifies the models underneath it.

Document Intelligence runs on Thomson Reuters' own extraction models, described as a suite of domain specific models pretrained by Practical Law attorney editors and maintained by Thomson Reuters with no upkeep from the customer. Thomson Reuters says the editors spent more than 15,000 hours building and training them in six months, and that it continues to grow and scale its model training. No third party model provider, large language model or model version is named for Document Intelligence. Thomson Reuters' generative AI third party terms page lists Amazon Web Services, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft and OpenAI across its portfolio without tying any of them to this product. Where the models run is unstated. Section 5.4 of the Legal Product Specific Terms lets Thomson Reuters update, modify and adapt the models with customer data, and nothing commits it to tell customers when a model changes.

LinkSquares publishes no price, range, tier structure or unit of charge. Its own buyer guidance tells readers to compare user based, usage based and record based pricing models without saying which one LinkSquares uses. A third party estimate puts the median at around $31,000 a year, with a starter tier near $10,000 and enterprise above $75,000. Those figures are independent estimates, not vendor disclosure. If the estimate is accurate, the product is out of reach for small teams.

Thomson Reuters publishes no price for Document Intelligence. Buying runs through a free demo request, a contact form and a sales phone line, and a representative replies within one business day. The Legal Product Specific Terms say the scope and parameters of users are set in the ordering document and define two user types, Editor users and Viewer users, which sets the shape of the subscription without a figure. No tiers, modules or add on prices are named. The HighQ integration requires a Document Intelligence subscription alongside HighQ, and the Workato connectors run under Workato's embedded terms. SoftwareOne's software marketplace lists Document Intelligence with Thomson Reuters as vendor and no price. No implementation or training fee is stated, although Thomson Reuters runs product training and support for Document Intelligence customers.

LinkSquares describes its coverage by clause and lifecycle scope rather than by jurisdiction. The named terms are payment deadlines, governing law, liability clauses, renewal language and commercial obligations. Batch analysis runs across large legacy portfolios for M&A due diligence and repository audits. The lifecycle runs from before signature to after it in one platform. Users extend beyond legal to sales, procurement, finance, HR and marketing. The vendor states more than 1,200 customers in the in house market. It publishes no list of supported contract types or languages and no indication of extraction depth by agreement type. Governing law extraction is a named capability, but no jurisdictional scope is given for it. Independent review notes there is no primary law research capability, which is typical of the product category.

Document Intelligence names three buyer groups, law firms, in house counsel and legal operations, and corporates from energy to finance, including asset management teams and contract managers. Thomson Reuters runs a dedicated page for corporate legal departments and one for renewable energy. The renewable energy page lists power purchase agreements, interconnection agreements, operations and maintenance contracts, and site leases and option agreements. It counts more than 450 out of the box provisions for wind and solar agreements, from curtailment rights to forecasting requirements. M&A due diligence is the lead law firm use, the subject of the April 2023 launch release, alongside commercial contract review and drafting in Word. The demo forms take law firms by size, corporate legal departments, financial institutions, other businesses and government. Languages, jurisdictions and contract types outside commercial and energy agreements are not stated.