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HighQ
HighQ is Thomson Reuters' collaboration and legal work management platform for law firms, corporate legal departments and government legal teams. It runs client portals, virtual data rooms, file sharing, iSheets, legal project management, workflow and document automation and dashboards, and for in house teams it covers contract management, legal intake and matter management. The HighQ AI engine in its AI Hub classifies documents by type and language and extracts dates, parties and clauses in English and German, at no per document cost for low volumes.
With CoCounsel licenses, HighQ adds generative features. Document Insights runs CoCounsel's review and summarize skills on HighQ files, Self service Q&A answers clients and staff from documents an administrator chooses, and CoCounsel Drafting opens HighQ documents in Word. A read only MCP server connects HighQ to assistants such as Claude and ChatGPT Enterprise for Premium customers. Thomson Reuters' ISO 27001 certificate names HighQ in scope, and its AI terms bar training generative models on customer prompts, content or outputs.
Bird & Bird, Geldards and Best Best & Krieger are named customers, Thomson Reuters counts more than one million users, and a UK government marketplace listing prices HighQ at £199 per user a month.
HighQ, head to head
Side by side on the same 15 capability axes and 12 legal signals: where the two part company, and what neither one publishes.
Capability grades
All 15 axes, graded from public sources on the date shown. 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.
HighQ is a collaboration and work management platform with AI layered on. The HighQ AI engine in the AI Hub classifies documents by type or language and extracts fields such as parties, dates, consideration and renewal terms. It also pulls clauses on governing law, jurisdiction, assignment, change of control, force majeure, indemnification and limitation of liability, with no per document cost for low volumes. Generative features arrived with CoCounsel in October 2025, through Document Insights, a prompt library and Self service Q&A, followed by CoCounsel Drafting, each needing CoCounsel licenses or a paid add on.
Document Insights is limited to the Premium tier. The AI Hub also connects Kira and Thomson Reuters Document Intelligence for customers with their own accounts. Portals, data rooms, file sharing, iSheets, workflow, document automation, project management and dashboards all run without AI.
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.
Answers trace to the customer's own files. Document Insights writes answers into iSheet columns and stores the detailed text CoCounsel returns behind each answer, with references to the passage in the file. Yes or no extraction fields record whether a field exists in the document, and clause fields point the user to the original text. Self service Q&A draws only on the documents in the top level folder an administrator selects.
No accuracy figure, error rate or evaluation accompanies HighQ AI or CoCounsel inside HighQ, and HighQ AI supports English and German only. The Thomson Reuters General Terms say the services are not warranted free of inaccuracies or errors.
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.
HighQ AI runs automatically when files land in folders set up for it, or a content administrator sends a file or assigns a template to an engine. Classifiers are trained from the customer's own folder mapping, with at least 50 new files recommended, can be rolled back to earlier versions, and the system administrator is told to review the list of models. Document Insights runs only when a user selects files and prompts, up to ten prompts at a time, and stores the text behind each answer, with no approval step before output is used.
Self service Q&A gives clients and other external users AI answers through a proxy user, limited to an administrator's database and to the single CoCounsel skill that answers from it. Questions unrelated to the database get a no relevant information found reply. The Thomson Reuters AI Usage Policy bars legal advice or decisions from AI output unless a licensed professional or someone with the right credentials reviews them. The General Terms make the customer solely responsible for review.
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.
Best Best & Krieger's case study, dated May 2026, reports sites created in a day instead of three to six months. Decisions on requests for proposals take two to three hours instead of three days. The Pascua Yaqui Tribe's January 2026 case study describes an attorney general's office serving 20,000 tribal members that automates about 100 contract types a year in HighQ. Geldards' January 2026 case study carries no figures.
Bird & Bird, Dillon Eustace and HelloFresh appear in testimonials without figures. Thomson Reuters said in October 2025 that HighQ has more than one million users, and at its 2019 acquisition HighQ served more than 400 customers, including more than half of the Global 100. None of the figures is tied to an AI feature, and no method is given.
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.
Section 3 of the HighQ Product Specific Terms, version 1.6 of July 2026, says the customer exclusively owns its content. Thomson Reuters shall not use that content for any purpose other than performing its obligations. The Legal AI Product Specific Terms of January 2026 bar Thomson Reuters from developing, training or fine tuning generative or foundational models with user prompts, user content or outputs unless agreed separately in writing.
The General Terms, lower in the order of precedence, license Thomson Reuters to use input to perform and improve its services. Customers who subscribe to bring your own key hold encryption keys Thomson Reuters cannot access. Inside HighQ, access runs through site groups and folder permissions. CoCounsel databases created from HighQ files are not permissioned the same way and keep copies until the customer deletes them. The terms give privilege, work product and ethical walls no separate treatment.
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.
Section 7 of the Thomson Reuters General Terms states that Thomson Reuters is not providing legal advice. It makes the customer solely responsible for the preparation, content, accuracy and review of its work and for decisions made in reliance on the services. The AI Usage Policy of January 2026 bars using AI output for legal advice or decisions unless a licensed professional or someone with the right credentials reviews it.
It also bars presenting output as solely human generated. The HighQ terms limit external users to collaborating on services the customer provides to its clients. Self service Q&A puts AI answers in front of clients, and its help pages say nothing about verification or about who answers for those responses. Jurisdiction limits are unstated.
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.
Thomson Reuters' eight data and AI ethics principles include fair treatment of people and human involvement in AI use. Its AI security governance whitepaper, last reviewed December 2025, names a Responsible AI and Data Trust team, an Ethics Advisory Committee and a Model Ethics Committee. It requires business AI models to be registered in a central compliance hub and describes a model risk assessment process. An ISO/IEC 42001 certificate issued by MSECB, valid from August 2026 to March 2028, covers CoCounsel Essentials, including the Core and Drafting skills HighQ calls. It does not name HighQ or the HighQ AI engine. There is no bias test method, testing result or named individual owner.
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.
Thomson Reuters' Data Security Addendum commits to notify a breach without undue delay and within 72 hours. It also commits to destroy data securely on termination and confirm it on request, apart from backup and archival copies kept in the normal course of business. The HighQ terms give 30 days after termination to remove content. The HighQ hosting and security whitepaper of February 2021 keeps database backups on a rolling 30 day basis, with data in backups for a further 30 days after a contract ends.
All user and administrator actions are logged, and audit logs are kept at least 12 months. The HighQ subprocessor list, dated June 2020, names only data center operators and predates the move to Azure. Files sent to CoCounsel stay in CoCounsel databases until the customer deletes them.
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.
The Thomson Reuters General Terms, version 5.0 of November 2023, which the HighQ terms incorporate, cap liability at the amount payable for the service in the prior 12 months. In the first year the cap is 12 times the average monthly charge. They exclude indirect, incidental, punitive, special and consequential damages and loss of data or profits. Fraud, willful misconduct, intellectual property infringement, the indemnities and payment sit outside the cap.
Thomson Reuters defends the customer against third party intellectual property claims about its services, excluding third party portions and combinations. It warrants that properly licensed services materially conform to the documentation, with repair or replacement as the remedy, and otherwise provides them as is. No indemnity covers AI output, the HighQ terms give no warranty on the API, and no insurance is described. Updated General Terms are dated September and October 2026.
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.
HighQ connects to SharePoint, eDoc, iManage and NetDocuments for document management, to SeeUnity, and to Kira, Leverton and Eigen for AI extraction. It also connects to Microsoft 365 through an Office add in, Outlook, Google Workspace, DocuSign, Adobe Sign, Workshare, Seclore, Active Directory, SAML single sign on and a SQL database connector. A HighQ app for Microsoft Teams uploads and shares files and sites from Teams, and HighQ Drive syncs files to desktops and mobile devices.
CoCounsel Drafting opens HighQ documents in Word and syncs changes back with version control and an audit trail. Premium customers get a read only MCP server for assistants such as Claude, ChatGPT Enterprise, Cursor and Copilot Studio, and the APIs include system level audit logs. The connectors page does not describe what each document management integration moves or in which direction.
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.
HighQ is moving to a single tenant setup on Microsoft Azure, in migrations that began in 2024 and are due to finish by the fourth quarter of 2026, with no added hosting charge. The Azure regions are not named. The February 2021 hosting whitepaper offered hosting in the United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirates, Jersey and Guernsey, Canada, the United States, Germany and Australia. Data stayed inside the chosen jurisdiction for backup and disaster recovery.
For CoCounsel features, users pick the CoCounsel account in the same region as their HighQ system. The CoCounsel Essentials page says model calls to OpenAI GPT and Google Gemini are processed in the United States, with regional hosting in the United Kingdom, Australia and Canada. The MCP server works only on instances already moved to Azure, and Azure uploads are capped at 4GB per request.
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.
Thomson Reuters' ISO/IEC 27001 certificate, issued by MSECB and valid from March 2026 to October 2028, lists HighQ in scope at its London and Sydney sites. HighQ's listing on the UK government G-Cloud marketplace adds a CSA STAR Level 1 self assessment. The Thomson Reuters trust center offers SOC reports and bridge letters through product profiles, and downloading them requires an account. The Azure migration FAQ points to a cloud hosting and security whitepaper on Whistic that also requires a login. The February 2021 hosting whitepaper says a CREST accredited firm runs penetration tests at every major release.
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.
Document Insights' review skill has run on GPT 4.1 since the third quarter of 2026, replacing GPT 4o, according to HighQ's release notes. The CoCounsel Essentials page says CoCounsel's calls to OpenAI GPT and Google Gemini run in the United States through zero retention API calls, and HighQ's generative features run CoCounsel skills. The Legal AI Product Specific Terms say services may be powered by third party AI models.
The HighQ AI engine is described only as an engine developed for classification, and Kira and Thomson Reuters Document Intelligence connect through the customer's own accounts. Model changes surface in release notes, with no commitment to notify customers before a model or provider changes.
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.
Thomson Reuters' own product pages carry no HighQ price. Its HighQ listing on the UK government's G-Cloud 14 marketplace, with documents dated April 2024, prices HighQ at £199 per user a month, and a second listing for HighQ document automation carries the same price. HighQ AI has no per document cost for low volumes. Self service Q&A is a paid add on, and Document Insights needs the Premium tier plus CoCounsel Core licenses, which can also come through Westlaw or Practical Law subscriptions.
CoCounsel Drafting needs a CoCounsel license. Azure Maps, Power BI and Meeting Planner panels became Premium add ons in the third quarter of 2026. The terms set user numbers by type in the order form, across core internal, basic internal and external users, and no implementation fee is stated.
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.
HighQ's product page lists law firms first, corporate legal departments second and government third. The UK site has a page for corporate legal departments covering contract management, intake and self service, document, matter, vendor and knowledge management, and team collaboration. Case studies come from law firms and a tribal government legal department. The interface runs in 11 languages, from English, German and French to Japanese, Simplified Chinese and Brazilian Portuguese, while HighQ AI supports English and German only.
External users are limited by contract to collaboration on services the customer provides to its clients. Publisher, HighQ's publishing product, was retired in July 2025. Team size and practice area limits are unstated.
11 public documents
The public pages on file for HighQ, with the recorded signals each one supports and the date it was last read. Open any of them and check the reading against the record.
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Billing and Fee Posture
Read Oct 9, 2026
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Primary Law Corpus Provenance
Read Oct 9, 2026
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Fabricated Citation Record
Read Oct 9, 2026
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Bar Guidance Alignment
Read Oct 9, 2026
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Client Data in Training
Read Oct 9, 2026
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Third Party Request and Subpoena Notice
Read Oct 9, 2026
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Prompt and Output Retention
Read Oct 9, 2026
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Refusal and Uncertainty Behavior
Read Oct 9, 2026
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thomsonreuters.com/en-gb/help/highq/feature-updates/2026/highq-release-notes-for-2026-q1.html1 signal
Court Disclosure Support
Read Oct 9, 2026
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Ethical Walls and Matter Segregation
Read Oct 9, 2026
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Outside Counsel Guideline Readiness
Read Oct 9, 2026
£199 per user/month
- Thomson Reuters does not show HighQ prices on its own website.
- Its listing on the UK government's G-Cloud marketplace prices HighQ at £199 per user a month.
- The generative AI features need extra CoCounsel licenses, and the client question and answer panel is a paid add on.
- The basic HighQ AI for sorting documents and pulling out key details is included at no extra cost.
Thomson Reuters' G-Cloud 14 service listing for HighQ, with documents dated April 2024, prices the service at £199.00 a user a month, and the HighQ document automation listing carries the same price. Thomson Reuters' own HighQ pages carry no price. HighQ AI in the AI Hub has no per document cost for low volumes, and Kira or Document Intelligence need the customer's own account. Document Insights is available to Premium tier customers who also hold CoCounsel Core licenses, which can come through Westlaw or Practical Law subscriptions.
Self service Q&A is a paid add on, and CoCounsel Drafting needs a CoCounsel license. The order form sets user numbers by type: core internal, basic internal and external users.
Implementation: Not stated.
Confidentiality and data terms: Thomson Reuters' global data processing addendum and data security addendum apply. No business associate agreement is mentioned for HighQ.
Note: The £199 figure comes from the UK government G-Cloud 14 listing, not from a Thomson Reuters price page, and its documents date from April 2024. Prices for other regions and for CoCounsel licenses are not published.
Legal Signals
What each signal meansA signal records what public sources say on the date shown. It is not a grade and it is not a recommendation. Where a signal reads Not addressed, it means the index did not locate the material in public sources on that date, which is a statement about disclosure rather than about the product.
Client Data in Training
Can material a lawyer puts into this product be used to train a model?
The published terms prohibit training on customer content. Not a policy page, the agreement.
The Legal AI Product Specific Terms of January 2026 bar Thomson Reuters from developing, training or fine tuning any generative or foundational model with user prompts, user content or outputs unless agreed separately in writing. Section 3 of the HighQ Product Specific Terms, version 1.6 of July 2026, says Thomson Reuters shall not use customer content for any purpose other than performing its obligations. The General Terms license Thomson Reuters to use input to perform and improve its services, and sit below both documents in the HighQ order of precedence. HighQ AI document classifiers are trained by the customer from its own folders inside its HighQ instance.
Prompt and Output Retention
How long does the product keep what a lawyer typed, and can that be set to zero?
The customer controls the retention window, by product configuration or by contractual instruction, but zero retention is not stated as available.
Files analyzed with Document Insights are copied into CoCounsel databases and are not removed automatically. The customer deletes them with an unlink and delete option, and a database goes automatically only when its link to a site is removed. Self service Q&A gained chat history management in the first quarter of 2026. Answers written into iSheet columns stay in HighQ as ordinary data. The CoCounsel Essentials page says calls to its language model providers use zero retention, and HighQ states no retention period for prompts or output. Backups roll over every 30 days.
Ethical Walls and Matter Segregation
Does retrieval respect the firm’s ethical walls, or can the model read across them?
The product maintains its own permission model, documented, requiring the firm to keep it aligned.
HighQ keeps its own permission model, documented in its help pages. Access is granted by site group or individual user, folder permissions inherit from the parent folder unless an administrator breaks inheritance, and users with no group on a site see none of its content. Groups can mix members from different organizations. CoCounsel databases built from HighQ files are not permissioned the same way as HighQ sites, while the MCP server respects site and folder permissions.
There is no ethical wall or information barrier feature. External users are limited by contract to collaboration on services the customer provides to its clients. Customers who subscribe to bring your own key hold encryption keys Thomson Reuters cannot access.
Third Party Request and Subpoena Notice
If someone subpoenas the vendor for a firm’s data, does the firm hear about it first?
Terms commit to notice where lawfully permitted. No transparency report located.
Section 6 of the Thomson Reuters General Terms says a court or agency order for disclosure is promptly notified to the customer unless notice is prohibited. The data processing addendum refers regulator requests to the customer where permissible, and the Data Security Addendum says Thomson Reuters will try to notify the customer promptly of government correspondence about data security. There is no transparency report.
HighQ data stays in the hosting jurisdiction the customer chooses, while CoCounsel processes model calls in the United States. The Data Security Addendum commits to notify a breach within 72 hours.
Primary Law Corpus Provenance
Where does the law in this product come from, and does the vendor have the right to use it?
Sources are identified without stating the license or rights basis.
HighQ's AI works on the customer's own files. HighQ AI classifies and extracts from documents in AI enabled folders, Document Insights reviews files a user selects, and Self service Q&A answers from documents an administrator places in its database. The features page says due diligence workflows are informed by Practical Law expertise, Thomson Reuters' own content. No license or update basis is stated for that content, and the training data of the models behind CoCounsel is undescribed.
HighQ AI classifiers are trained by the customer from its own folder mapping and can be rolled back to earlier versions.
Good Law Verification
Does the product tell you when the authority it just cited has been overruled?
No located public material addresses whether authority is checked for subsequent history.
HighQ's AI reviews, extracts from and answers questions about the customer's own documents and does not cite case law or legislation, so a citator sits outside the product. Thomson Reuters' citator sits in Westlaw, a separate product, and no HighQ page connects it to HighQ output. How a client facing answer drawn from an outdated document in a Self service Q&A database is flagged is undescribed.
Refusal and Uncertainty Behavior
What does the product do when the answer is not in the corpus?
The vendor describes refusal or abstention behavior in public materials.
Self service Q&A answers questions unrelated to its database with a no relevant information found reply, and draws only on the top level folder an administrator sets, with a recommended capacity of about 100GB. Document Insights stores the passage behind each answer with a reference to its place in the file. HighQ AI yes or no fields record whether a field exists in the document. No confidence indicator is shown, and what Document Insights does when a file holds no answer is undescribed. HighQ AI supports English and German only.
Fabricated Citation Record
Does a public court record exist addressing fabricated or hallucinated legal citations in output from this product?
No court order, opinion or disciplinary record addressing fabricated or hallucinated legal citations produced by this product has been located as of the date shown. This is a statement about the public record on that one subject, not a finding about the product, and this signal is not a litigation history.
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 HighQ. HighQ's AI classifies, extracts from and summarizes documents in collaboration sites and portals, and its output is not court filings. Its generative features run CoCounsel skills, which carry their own record.
Bar Guidance Alignment
Has the vendor engaged in public with the ethics opinions its buyers are bound by?
Public materials refer to professional responsibility in general terms without naming guidance.
The Thomson Reuters AI Usage Policy bars using AI output for legal advice or decisions unless a professional with the right license or qualifications reviews it. The General Terms state that Thomson Reuters is not providing legal advice and leave review and reliance with the customer. No bar opinion, ethics rule or professional conduct guidance is named on the HighQ pages or in its terms, including for answers Self service Q&A gives to a firm's clients. The AI Usage Policy also bars presenting AI output as solely human generated.
Billing and Fee Posture
Does the vendor address what happens to the bill when the work takes an hour instead of six?
Public materials claim time savings without addressing billing or disclosure, and the product sits inside a fee relationship between a lawyer and a client where those savings would change the bill.
HighQ's lead buyers are law firms, which bill clients for the work done in client portals and on matters. Its case study for Best Best & Krieger reports sites created in a day instead of three to six months and proposal decisions in hours instead of three days. A September 2026 Thomson Reuters blog says the CoCounsel drafting integration can cut up to 30 percent of drafting and review time. How AI assisted work done in HighQ is recorded or treated on a client bill goes unaddressed. Self service Q&A is a paid add on, and Document Insights needs the Premium tier plus CoCounsel Core licenses.
Outside Counsel Guideline Readiness
Can a firm get this vendor through a client’s AI clause without a bespoke negotiation?
The material exists behind a sales conversation or an executed agreement.
HighQ's subprocessor list is dated June 2020, names only data center operators and is no longer linked from Thomson Reuters' current subprocessor index. The data processing and data security addenda are readable without an agreement. Current security material, SOC reports and bridge letters sit in product profiles on the Thomson Reuters trust center, which require an account. The CoCounsel Essentials page names OpenAI GPT and Google Gemini as model providers, and HighQ's release notes name GPT 4.1 for Document Insights.
Thomson Reuters' ISO 27001 certificate, issued by MSECB and valid to October 2028, lists HighQ in scope at its London and Sydney sites.
Court Disclosure Support
If a judge’s standing order requires an AI disclosure, can the product produce one?
Some elements of the record are available, short of a document level export.
HighQ logs all user and administrator actions and keeps audit logs for at least 12 months. System level audit log APIs arrived in 2026, and since the second quarter administrators can query users, sites, logins and content through the MCP server in plain language. All AI related API activity is logged for the MCP server. CoCounsel reports record who uploaded files, which skill was requested and who asked questions, and Self service Q&A answers download as Word documents.
CoCounsel Drafting keeps version control and an audit trail when changes sync back. Document Insights answers stay in iSheet columns with their source text alongside. There is no record of the model used for an output and no disclosure template.