“As fast as it started, it really feels like in the last year, there’s been an even more rapid acceleration, and many companies racing to become leaders in this field, including ��������,” said Joel Hron, chief technology officer, ��������.

Hron and David Wong, chief product officer, ��������, shared their takes on the most significant advances in generative AI technology, including improvements in accessibility to the technology, with more developer tools alongside reduced costs and more out-of-the-box capabilities.

Wong said he’s most excited about large language models’ ability to have longer context windows, enabling them to keep more information in their short-term memory and answer ever-more complex questions.

“That’s critical for the way �������� uses a lot of these models,” Wong said.

“The agentic behaviors of the models have become more robust in their ability to plan and ability to use reason over complex information,” Hron added.

They also discussed balancing the need to innovate and go fast with the need for ethical, responsible and high-quality AI development.

Wong noted how �������� is best positioned to develop professional-grade AI, grounded in fact and data. He emphasized customers’ need for measurable solutions, so they can discern tools’ accuracy rates, as well as the need for security and privacy.

Wong said �������� has the scale and infrastructure to understand customers’ needs and develop solutions to solve their biggest challenges, guided by a philosophy and process that ensures the right balance between moving fast and ensuring quality.

Hron said the company’s human-centric approach to AI development is key.

“Our human expertise at �������� and the level of rigor and quality we put behind both our content and our products for many years has really been a cornerstone of our brand,” Hron said.

Hron said the iterations between technology and domain experts are crucial to how �������� helps customers streamline their workflows with AI, such as with AI-Assisted Research on Westlaw Precision and CoCounsel Core.

They also highlighted the �������� acquisition of Materia, an AI assistant and platform for accounting and auditing professionals.

“It’s a reinforcement of our belief in AI assistants being in the hands of every professional and a reinforcement of our commitment around AI across our entire product portfolio,” Hron said.

He added that Materia’s strengths have included leaning into the long context and multimodal capabilities of generative AI as well as enabling agentic behavior.

Hear more of Wong and Hron’s insights on Materia as well as the evolution of generative AI in the of the TechConnect series, which brings diverse and dynamic perspectives from all corners of the technology world with thought-provoking questions and conversation.

The company also announced that AI-Assisted Research on Westlaw Edge UK will be available in the coming weeks. The generative AI legal research solution will help legal professionals get better, faster answers to complex research questions grounded in trusted Westlaw content. Together, they will lead the transformation of the UKs legal profession.

CoCounsel Core equips legal professionals with eight generative AI-powered core legal skills: Prepare for a Deposition, Draft Correspondence, Search a Database, Review Documents, Summarize a Document, Extract Contract Data, Contract Policy Compliance, and Timeline.

“This latest international launch of CoCounsel Core is yet another significant milestone in our mission to empower legal professionals to do better work, more efficiently, for more clients,” said Jake Heller, head of Product, CoCounsel, ��������. “In just over a year since CoCounsel debuted, our goal of transforming how people work is becoming a reality in more places across the world, more quickly than we could have imagined. It’s proof that the �������� build, buy and partner strategy is accelerating how quickly we can deliver generative AI solutions to the professionals who rely on us.”

Designed with the technical controls and data governance to meet legal professionals’ ethical and confidentiality obligations, CoCounsel Core is the only professional-grade generative AI assistant built specifically for the practice of law. Together with AI-Assisted Research on Westlaw Edge UK, CoCounsel Core’s capabilities constitute the industry’s most comprehensive set of generative AI skills, designed to help lawyers quickly gather deeper insights and deliver a better work product. No other suite of generative AI legal products offers this breadth of use, depth of content, and reliability of results. CoCounsel Core can save legal professionals as much as 60% of the time they spend on commonly executed tasks, freeing them for more high-value, strategic, and creative work.

CoCounsel Core is already being used by multiple UK law firms, including Addleshaw Goddard LLP and Linklaters LLP. Employing more the 1,600 lawyers in 19 offices worldwide, Addleshaw Goddard’s origins reach back to the UK’s first public record of solicitors, the Law List, in 1775. Linklaters is currently exploring use-cases for CoCounsel within its business. Linklaters has operated in the legal market for over 185 years, and is a leading global law firm, employing more than 3,100 lawyers in 31 offices across 21 countries.

“Generative AI has untold potential to support our lawyers and transform our client services now and in years to come.” said Kerry Westland, partner and head of the Innovation Group at Addleshaw Goddard. “While researching and exploring over 100 generative AI solutions, CoCounsel stood out as a solution that could be highly effective for a range of use cases, including bulk document analysis. We are already applying CoCounsel in the work we are delivering for our clients, and it is exciting to see the value that this technology can bring. We are looking forward to seeing CoCounsel and �������� other AI solutions working together, delivering a powerful suite of tools to our lawyers to enhance our delivery of legal services.”

Foundational to these launches and product developments planned for 2024 is the �������� Generative AI Platform, an overarching innovation resource that enables the company to quickly and easily launch new solutions by leveraging reusable components and bringing together content, AI, generative AI, and more, as the building blocks for future products.

Two of the new AI-driven capabilities were developed by leveraging the expertise derived from the �������� Generative AI Platform and insights from Practical Law experts – powered by �������� content and capabilities. Ask Practical Law AI on Practical Law is a generative AI-powered intuitive chat experience that dramatically improves how customers access trusted expertise and content – all in a single skill. Practical Law Clause Finder, built using AI models trained by Practical Law editors, is integrated with Microsoft Word and designed to dramatically streamline and improve efficiency in drafting contracts. Clause Finder allows customers to find contract language created by Practical Law experts, previously filed contracts with the SEC, and a customer’s own internal documents.

In addition, �������� delivers a key milestone by making its generative AI skills available to international customers with CoCounsel Core in Canada and Australia. Following the acquisition of Casetext, �������� is delivering on its strategy to make this key product available to customers in additional countries with access to the full suite of skills that are used to complete everyday legal tasks. The power of a combined team and resources has made the internationalization of the product a reality, with a more robust product drawing on both companies’ strengths.

“Last year, we began the introduction of new and exciting generative AI skills to the market. This will be the year that customers begin to realize tremendous improvements in productivity and work product quality. We are moving faster, launching more innovative products to better serve our customers than ever before,” said David Wong, chief product officer, ��������. “Our entire approach to generative AI starts with our customers and how best to meet their needs, bring together our strongest assets: our leadership in AI, our trusted content, and human expertise.”

These updates further strengthen the �������� industry-leading legal solutions and include the first in a series of 2024 generative AI-powered product rollouts. Foundational to these enhancements is the �������� Generative AI platform, an overarching innovation resource that enables the company to quickly and easily launch new solutions by leveraging reusable components and bringing together content, artificial intelligence, generative AI, and more, as the building blocks for future products.

Ask Practical Law AI on Practical Law

 is a generative AI intuitive chat that dramatically improves how customers access trusted expertise and content from Practical Law. It quickly provides summarized and synthesized answers grounded in Practical Law know-how, while connecting customers to deeper insights – all validated by trusted Practical Law content created and maintained by a team of more than 650 lawyers.

This first phase of Ask Practical Law AI decreases the amount of time needed to sift through results and read and summarize the material – moving users from questions to work product, faster. Future enhancements will leverage generative AI to deliver more in-depth access to features and capabilities in Practical Law, including What’s Market Analytics and Quick Compare. Additionally, Ask Practical Law AI will be integrated with the intelligent drafting solution that will launch later this year.

Practical Law Clause Finder

 enables customers to quickly find and add market and gold standard clauses from Practical Law, SEC agreements, and their own internal documents into their drafts without leaving Microsoft Word. Using AI models built and trained by Practical Law expert editors, the tool allows customers to access the best terms for their agreement and streamline their drafting without leaving the page, significantly reducing the time spent searching various platforms or locations to find and insert relevant clauses.

A foundational component to the future intelligent drafting solution that will leverage generative AI technology, Practical Law Clause Finder initially will be available in the United States with 12 agreement types before expanding to the UK and Canada.

“Lawyers rely on Practical Law to provide them with the right answer, quickly, along with tools and insights to improve their workflow,” said Emily Colbert, senior vice president, Product Management, ��������. “Our new generative AI tool capitalizes on the efficiency and know-how of Practical Law, quickly giving users a summarized answer. Practical Law Clause Finder takes efficiency to the next level by giving customers access to the resources they need – whether from Practical Law or their own – within the document they’re drafting, meeting them where they are working.”

CoCounsel Core

CoCounsel Core, introduced in the United States last year, is being launched to international markets. Its legacy CoCounsel skills are being rolled out to English-speaking countries beginning with its launch to customers in Canada and Australia, further demonstrating the strategic value of the Casetext acquisition. CoCounsel Core leverages innovation to empower customers with generative AI-powered core skills, including Prepare for a Deposition, Draft Correspondence, Search a Database, Review Documents, Summarize a Document, Extract Contract Data, Contract Policy Compliance, and Timeline.

Available now to customers in the United States, this skill helps legal professionals quickly get to answers for complex research questions. This generative AI skill leverages innovation in Casetext, created by taking a “best of” approach using the �������� Generative AI Platform.

With AI-Assisted Research and , attorneys are empowered with eight generative AI-powered core skills, including AI-Assisted Research on Westlaw Precision, Prepare for a Deposition, Draft Correspondence, Search a Database, Review Documents, Summarize a Document, Extract Contract Data, and Contract Policy Compliance. The company also laid out high-level product roadmaps to develop numerous additional generative AI skills to address customer-specific needs. Each additional skill will be built on a common software framework within the �������� Generative AI Platform.

AI-Assisted Research allows customers to ask complex legal research questions in natural language and quickly receive synthesized answers, with links to supporting authority from Westlaw content and links to further examine that authority. AI-Assisted Research streamlines the initial phase of legal research with sophisticated answers to questions and the authority those answers are based on, saving hours of work. These responses are founded on more than 150 years of �������� classification, analysis, and editorial expertise contributed by subject matter experts and attorney editors.

AI-Assisted Research employs Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) to prevent the large language models (LLMs) from making up things like case names and citations by focusing the LLMs on the actual language of Westlaw content. Future plans include expanding generative AI throughout the research process in Westlaw and bringing these capabilities to versions of Westlaw outside the United States.

Also, the company announced that it will be building on the AI assistant experience Casetext created with CoCounsel, the world’s first AI legal assistant. Later in 2024, �������� will launch an AI assistant that will be the interface across �������� products with generative AI capabilities.

The AI assistant, called CoCounsel, will be fully integrated with multiple �������� legal products, including Westlaw Precision, Practical Law Dynamic Tool Set, Document Intelligence, and HighQ, and will continue to be available on the CoCounsel application as a destination site.

In addition, �������� will introduce generative AI within Practical Law Dynamic Tool Set in January 2024. Customers will benefit from generative AI within Practical Law through a new interface with an AI legal assistant, which will quickly provide answers using conversational language – all validated by trusted Practical Law content created and maintained by a team of more than 650 legal experts.

Read the press release for more on AI-Assisted Research on Westlaw Precision, the new generative AI assistant connecting all �������� generative AI products, �������� Generative AI Platform, generative AI capabilities in Practical Law, and CoCounsel Core. For more on how �������� is ensuring that its AI products and skills are built responsibly, check out the company’s Data and AI Ethics Principles.