C

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.