Today, we’re announcing the next generation of CoCounsel Legal, now available in Beta. Built from the ground up, it delivers on the vision we set out from the start: an AI companion that works alongside lawyers through every task and every stage of a matter, grounded in the trusted sources of knowledge they rely on.

Built on the most advanced AI, and engineered for how legal work actually gets done

Built on Anthropic’s Claude Agent SDK, the next generation of CoCounsel Legal is a unified agentic platform that plans, selects tools, retrieves authoritative content, and adapts mid-workflow just as a junior partner would, not a first-year waiting for the next instruction. Critically, the lawyer remains in control—able to see the agent’s reasoning as it unfolds, step in to redirect its approach, challenge its assumptions, and probe whether alternative angles have been considered.

CoCounsel Legal doesn’t reason from the web – it’s built with Westlaw and Practical Law content and tools natively embedded. Different by design, the technology and the sources are built as one system, making defensibility part of the architecture rather than a feature. As a result, when CoCounsel Legal produces a deal term sheet, contract, or litigation strategy memo, every step of its reasoning is grounded in authoritative legal sources, guided by 35 million West Key Number classifications and 3.9 million Precision Research attributes, and fully transparent through verifiable Practical Law resources and Westlaw citations. Developed and evaluated by practicing-attorney editors working alongside top AI data scientists, the breakthrough isn’t simply faster task completion – it’s the ability to produce complex work product across the many decision points of a legal matter, moving beyond task execution to true legal reasoning.

Our leading evaluation framework encodes quality at each step. This means before any capability ships; we measure it. Licensed attorneys, including our Practical Law editors, define what the correct output looks like for each task type. Every new capability must demonstrate measurable improvement against that benchmark before it reaches production. The framework evaluates not just final outputs, but the full chain of reasoning that produced them, because an agent that arrives at the right answer through flawed reasoning cannot be trusted to do so consistently.

And we’ve gone further to protect the integrity of that reasoning, with patent-pending tools for citation integrity and output verification:

• Verification and grounding as system primitives. Authoritative retrieval, explicit source handling, and verifiable citation flows are product infrastructure -not post-processing or marketing language.
• Patent-pending citation integrity. Our citation ledger architecture creates a session-verifiable evidence trail for legal citations, ensuring the agent can only cite what it actually retrieved and enabling trustworthy, clickable references in output.

This is ; outputs grounded in authoritative content and customer context – making verification part of the system’s architecture rather than an afterthought. In a profession where a single missed citation can cost a client their case, defensibility isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s the whole point. In a profession where a single missed citation can cost a client their case, defensibility isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s the whole point.

What our customers are telling us

The feedback we’re hearing from customers reflects this.

Brooke Conkle, partner in Consumer Financial Services at Troutman Pepper Locke, asked CoCounsel Legal a broad question about recent TCPA developments across two circuits and the solution “immediately zeroed in on the precise ascertainability nuances” between them, the kind of careful parsing that typically requires significant time and research. Her conclusion: “The underlying legal analysis genuinely blew me away and made me rethink what is possible with AI in complex litigation work.”

That’s not the response of someone who found a faster tool. That’s the response of someone who found a different kind of tool.

Andrew Medeiros, managing director of Innovation at Troutman Pepper Locke, captures something I think is fundamental to why this matters: “Lawyers don’t want to just operate software, and that’s not what great AI should do.” What he’s seeing is that CoCounsel Legal keeps lawyers in the analytical mindset they were trained for, going back and forth, challenging answers and steering the work.

He added: “The next generation of CoCounsel Legal seems to be a total game changer as we’ve introduced it to litigation and transactional attorneys. It’s meeting them within their workflows, allowing them to ask plain language questions and then see the step-by-step approach that CoCounsel [Legal] takes to help them draft the document relying upon Westlaw Deep Research and the Practical Law guidance.”

The AI Knowledge Management Department at Morgan Lewis, shared, “We were really impressed with the enhancements to the CoCounsel Legal platform. In our evaluation, it demonstrated strong capabilities in supporting efficient document drafting and in addressing gaps in information, such as filing party details, with both speed and accuracy when prompted. The outputs were well-structured and immediately usable, and the overall workflow was intuitive and easy to navigate. Performance was consistently fast. We are really looking forward to what’s next!”

Why we’re launching this as a beta, and building in public

Just as important as what we’re building is how we’re introducing it to customers.

We are deliberately launching the next generation of CoCounsel Legal as a beta, with a clear commitment to building in public and in partnership with our customers. This beta includes leading law firms such as Troutman Pepper Locke, Morgan Lewis, Carlton Fields, and Caplin & Drysdale, as well as four large enterprise customers. As we move through successive beta waves ahead of general availability later this year, we’re putting the solution in the hands of real lawyers working on real matters – listening closely to where it earns confidence, where it doesn’t, and incorporating that feedback directly into how the product evolves.

We’re inviting customers to help shape what CoCounsel Legal becomes – an AI that works at the level of a junior partner, built with Anthropic with cutting edge technology, engineers for legal work with authority and verification at its core.

This reflects a core belief I hold: the solution itself should be the argument. The strongest validation won’t come from launch announcements or benchmarks alone, but from sustained use – when lawyers choose to rely on the product because it holds up under real professional accountability.

Today’s beta is just the beginning. I’m excited to put the next generation of CoCounsel Legal in the hands of more customers as the year progresses.

I encourage you to explore how it works.

Rooted in Your Knowledge

Draft an Agreement Based on Your Precedent & Practical Law Content

Draft agreements faster without starting from scratch as CoCounsel’s drafting agent enables U.S. users to generate a comprehensive first draft in minutes using a trusted precedent or a Practical Law Standard Document. Simply upload source material, add key details and requirements, and CoCounsel analyzes the template, applies its structure and style, and produces a tailored multi‑page draft aligned to the instructions provided. The result is a quicker path from blank page to a client-ready draft in a streamlined workflow with less manual assembly allowing users to spend more time reviewing, negotiating, and advising. Review and then export to Microsoft Word when ready.

My Clauses

Using the new My Clauses in CoCounsel (U.S.), transactional lawyers can build a personal, searchable library of preferred contract provisions saved from playbooks, draft and modify outputs, or added manually so the right language is always within reach. Find what is needed in seconds, tailor it to the specific matter, and reuse it instantly across new agreements. That means less time hunting through old files, fewer drafting interruptions, more consistency across matters, and faster turnaround from first draft to final.

Built for How You Work

Draft Editor

Draft Editor is an integrated editing environment available in the U.S., UK, Canada, and Australia that lets users refine AI-generated outputs directly in their browser – no need to export to Word or switch applications. Available across key skills including Review Documents, Draft, Summarize, and Timeline, simply click ‘open editor’ to start refining work. By enabling in-place editing, it keeps users focused on their work instead of managing workflow. The result: faster turnaround times, fewer interruptions, and a seamless path from AI assistance to polished work product.

Region Settings

Now available in the U.S., UK, Canada and Australia, lawyers can access a flexible, jurisdiction selection feature built directly into CoCounsel for Microsoft Word that enables seamless switching between region content and localization – regardless of regional subscription. Users also can access corresponding Westlaw and Practical Law content from existing subscriptions without purchasing separate regional entitlements or managing multiple logins. Additionally, an improved capability to switch between jurisdictions eliminates geographical limitations in the drafting workflow.

Citations Format Update

CoCounsel now delivers citations as endnotes (with hyperlinks) instead of footnotes in the U.S., UK, Canada and Australia – so your finished Word document reads cleanly from start to finish – a key preference often heard from customers. When exporting the output of any CoCounsel skill or workflow, citations appear at the end of the document, and each in-text citation links to the supporting source and back again. This creates less scrolling and fewer distractions while the work is reviewed, shared, and finalized, especially on longer drafts and research-heavy documents. The in-app experience stays the same; this update improves the readability of exported documents while keeping sources easy to verify.

Tabular Analysis

Tabular analysis is now available in Canadian French.  Users can review up to 10,000 documents and 100 questions, viewing the results in a dynamic, filterable table format.  This flexible capability enables users to add or remove files or questions mid-review, analyze results in a three-pane viewer, and run multiple tables simultaneously. The powerful solution significantly reduces document review time while enabling easy verification with clickable footnotes. This allows legal professionals to concentrate more on strategic, high-value tasks, and enhancing productivity while reducing valuable resource needs.

Explore These New CoCounsel Legal Features Today

Sign in to CoCounsel Legal today to enhance the speed and effectiveness of your drafting, document analysis, and review workflows. Or explore training options at the

To keep up to date on CoCounsel Legal new enhancements, sign up for the today.

* certain capabilities or integrations may require a subscription to other products

Smokeball and ¶¶ÒőłÉÄê to create a legal technology ecosystem that connects the business and the practice of law in a single, integrated experience. By bringing together Smokeball’s industry-leading practice management platform with CoCounsel Legal, our agentic AI solution for authoritative legal research, document analysis, and drafting, we’re giving legal professionals in small law firms something that simply hasn’t existed in the market until now.

Smokeball brings operational excellence to running a firm; ¶¶ÒőłÉÄê brings two centuries of legal expertise – the driving force behind the power of CoCounsel Legal – purpose-built for the rigor the practice of law demands. Law firms finally have both in one place.

Why This Partnership Matters for Our Customers

For too long, legal professionals have had to stitch together disconnected systems. They rely on one tool to manage matters, another to do research, another to draft documents, and another to bill. Every handoff between systems is a place where time is lost, errors creep in, and client service suffers. This partnership changes that.

Smokeball’s platform already handles the full operational layer of running a legal practice: case management, document automation, billing, time tracking, calendaring, and client communications. Right away, our joint customers in the U.S. will be able to connect matter documents directly to CoCounsel Legal in bulk, saving significant time, reducing the risk of errors, and streamlining workflow like never before.

This is only the start of the journey, as additional exciting integration phases are in progress. The trajectory is to create a unified interface where legal professionals can effortlessly access ¶¶ÒőłÉÄê legal content, AI, know-how tools, and current matter data – all in one seamless interface.

Built on a Foundation of Trust and Proven Scale

This partnership does more than just create an ecosystem, it connects a shared commitment to serve legal professionals at the highest level and with solutions they trust.

¶¶ÒőłÉÄê recently announced that one million professionals have chosen CoCounsel, the company’s professional-grade AI technology, across 107 countries and territories. That milestone is a testament to something important: AI is moving from experimentation to production. Rather than standalone solutions, firms are embedding AI directly into daily workflows where accuracy, sourcing, and data protection are essential.

Professionals are not deciding whether to use AI anymore. They are deciding which AI they trust when their reputation and their clients’ data are on the line. CoCounsel is built for exactly that moment.

The next generation of CoCounsel Legal, entering beta soon, is designed around conversational task execution, meaning the best is still ahead for our customers.

Leading the Industry Forward

With Smokeball and CoCounsel Legal, no other combination of technology in the small law firm market brings together this depth of legal content and AI capability with this breadth of practice management functionality. This is what legal tech leadership looks like – not just building great individual products, but creating ecosystems that meet lawyers where they are and give them the resources they need to serve their clients at the highest level.

The legal industry is moving fast. ¶¶ÒőłÉÄê is committed to making sure our customers don’t just keep up, but that they lead. Our partnership with Smokeball is a continued step in delivering on that, and we’re just getting started.

Aaron Rademacher is the general manager of Small Law Firms at ¶¶ÒőłÉÄê.

Building on the excitement of ¶¶ÒőłÉÄê announcing that more than one million professionals have chosen CoCounsel, the company’s professional-grade AI, this month’s CoCounsel Legal release brings a wave of new capabilities to streamline research, drafting, and document review for legal professionals. These updates reflect the principles driving our roadmap: Agentic AI grounded in deep legal expertise, rooted in your own knowledge and workflows, and built to elevate the way modern legal teams operate.

Agentic AI Grounded in Deep Legal Expertise

Westlaw Advantage Canada with Deep Research

Westlaw Advantage applies agentic AI to trusted authoritative content, acting like an expert researcher to help you quickly move from research to strategy. At the heart of Westlaw Advantage is Deep Research, the legal industry’s first professional-grade agentic AI research capability. By combining advanced AI with Westlaw’s unmatched content library, it streamlines complex research in English or French, delivering comprehensive coverage while significantly reducing manual research time. Westlaw Advantage Canada is more than just a research solution; it’s a strategic element of CoCounsel, our AI technology, available to every Canadian legal professional.

Westlaw Advantage Canada Deep Research Report

Deep Research in Practical Law US

Deep Research in Practical Law brings a smarter, more intuitive approach to using all the know-how resources. It feels less like searching Practical Law and more like working alongside a Practical Law editor who has instant command of every resource and tool at your disposal. Powered by agentic AI and grounded in Practical Law’s trusted and up-to-date content, it automatically plans research steps, pulls the most relevant guidance and templates, and delivers a clear, well-supported research report. Deep Research reviews multiple Practical Law resources, synthesizing the key guidance, and iteratively exploring further until it has exhausted its work, eliminating manual tedious, multi-step workflows—helping you move from “how to?” to “here’s how” faster. And, with easy access to the underlying sources for verification, you can move confidently to the next phase of your matter.

Deep Research Verification Tools for US

Verifying AI generated research shouldn’t slow attorneys down—and now it doesn’t have to. CoCounsel Legal’s built in verification tools surface clear statements alongside their supporting sources, use AI to assess how well those sources align, and apply adversarial review to highlight potential gaps or missing context. By bringing together supporting evidence, counter perspectives, and direct connections to Key Numbers and KeyCite, attorneys can quickly validate research, strengthen their arguments, and stay confidently in control—without losing momentum.

Rooted in Your Knowledge

Draft a New Agreement Using Your Precedent Document (Beta)

This AI-powered capability provides transactional attorneys the ability to create a comprehensive first drafts in minutes. Upload a trusted precedent document, describe specific needs, and receive a complete, multi-page draft that follows the firm’s structure and style. This transforms hours of drafting work into minutes, delivering relevant drafts that reflect firm standards allowing attorneys to focus more on strategy.

Draft a new agreement using your precedent document

Create a Lease Agreement Abstract

First released in the U.S. and now available in the UK, Canada, and Australia, this capability efficiently produces concise, tabular summaries of lease agreements using a user-specified template. Upload lease documents and receive structured summaries in Markdown or Microsoft Word format, complete with instant citations to relevant contract sections for enhanced accuracy and rapid verification.

Create a Lease Agreement Abstract

Benchmark Document Against Standard

Now live in the UK, Canada, and Australia, as well as the U.S., this tool lets users assess a negotiated document by comparing it against a user-uploaded “ideal contract” to highlight missing clauses or key deviations. It enhances alignment and risk management by identifying gaps and offering practical recommendations that help streamline negotiations.

Benchmark Document Against Standard

Syncly Box and Dropbox Integrations

CoCounsel Legal now integrates with Dropbox and Box through Syncly, enabling secure document import. This simplifies workflows by bringing documents stored across systems into one continuous workflow for analysis, research, and drafting.

Customise a Practical Law Agreement

Now available in the UK, Canada, and Australia alongside the US, this workflow enables legal professionals to tailor a Practical Law standard document according to specified instructions and provisions of a term sheet. By incorporating deal-specific details into template agreements and utilizing expertly drafted Practical Law content as a foundation, it significantly streamlines the drafting process.

Customise a Practical Law Agreement

Built for how you work

Tabular Analysis

Now available in the U.S., with UK and Canada coming soon, transforms high-volume document review by allowing users to process up to 10,000 documents and 100 questions in a dynamic, filterable table. With the ability to modify reviews in progress and run multiple tables simultaneously, it offers unmatched scalability and efficiency, enabling legal professionals to focus on strategic, high-value tasks.

Tabular analysis

Find Practical Law Drafting Language – UK

Quickly find drafting language from trusted content using a simple prompt within Practical Law Search & Summarise or CoCounsel. This capability streamlines the drafting process by helping users locate specific, verifiable drafting language powered by Practical Law’s expert-written content.

Outline Case File

This litigation-focused skill for the US examines entire case records to identify relevant documents, extract key facts, and create an outline connecting facts to claims. It significantly reduces review time, helping professionals quickly get up to speed and identify strengths, weaknesses, and gaps in the factual record.

Outline Case File

Explore these new CoCounsel Legal features today 

Sign in to CoCounsel Legal today to enhance the speed and effectiveness of your research, document analysis and drafting. Or, explore training options at the .

To keep up to date on  new enhancements, sign up for the ÌęłÙŽÇ»ćČčČâ.

We’re starting 2026 with a powerful lineup of CoCounsel Legal releases that signal where the product is headed—and what continues to set it apart. Each new capability reflects the principles driving our roadmap: agentic AI grounded in legal expertise, rooted in your knowledge, and built for how you work. Here’s what’s new to help you begin the year with clarity, speed, and confidence.

Agentic AI, Grounded in Expertise

Deep Research on Practical Law UK (US coming soon)

Deep research is an advanced agentic research capability inside Practical Law that plans multi‑step research, retrieves authoritative guidance and templates, and produces a supported research report. The new capability in CoCounsel Legal eliminates tedious research steps, connects insights across multiple sources, and helps make faster, more confident decisions with traceable authority.

Deep Research on Westlaw Advantage UK

Deep Research on Westlaw Advantage UK is a multi‑step, agentic research tool that builds, executes, and iteratively improves a research plan using trusted Westlaw content.  It enables the ability to streamline complex research by easily gathering the right authorities with minimal effort and move from research to strategy with greater confidence and speed.

Smart Browse

Smart Browse automatically highlights the most relevant portions of case law and statutory materials based on your research purpose. Enabling faster case prep and reducing information overload, it cuts through noise and elevates what matters most, helping legal professionals save significant time scanning long documents while improving research precision.

Arguments and Counterarguments

Users can now quickly identify weaknesses in opposing arguments and develop stronger counter-positions with the new arguments and counterarguments skill. Leveraging Westlaw Advantage’s Litigation Document Analyzer, the new skill will summarize and extract the arguments, generate potential counterarguments, and provide legal insights grounded in Westlaw content for each counterargument, greatly reducing response preparation time.

Rooted in Your Knowledge

Custom Prompts & Sharing

You can now create, customize, save, and share prompts in empowering teams such as practice groups to standardize prompting for repeatable legal work and outputs.

Built For How You Work

Tabular Analysis

The tabular analysis capability, coming soon, lets users review up to 10,000 documents against 100 questions. Delivering results in an interactive, filterable table with source verification through clickable footnotes, users can add/remove files or questions mid-review and run multiple tables simultaneously. Tabular analysis helps relieve tedious document review delivering greater clarity more efficiently across thousands of documents.

UX/UI Refresh – CoCounsel Microsoft Word Add-in

dd-in offers a cleaner, more intuitive interface including simpler navigation, alphabetized skills, fast mode switching, and quick access to “What’s New?” updates. The refresh helps speed up your workflow and find the right skills more quickly—allowing more time spent practicing law and less time navigating menus.

Why Agentic AI Matters

The distinction between AI copilots and agentic AI solutions isn’t just semantic – it’s fundamental to how legal work gets done. While copilots offer suggestions and assistance, agentic AI like CoCounsel Legal takes on complex, multi-step professional work with advanced reasoning, authoritative content integration, and deep subject matter expertise.

The UK launch of CoCounsel Legal represents more than geographic expansion. It’s the convergence of critical innovations: Deep Research capabilities on both Practical Law and Westlaw Advantage, and seamless integration with existing legal technology ecosystems including Microsoft 365, document management systems, and ¶¶ÒőłÉÄê HighQ.

Sam Dixon, chief innovation officer at Womble Bond Dickinson, said: “We knew we needed to bring in a GenAI legal assistant to help us deliver the best possible service we can for clients. For us, the fact that CoCounsel had the ability to lean on the Westlaw content and the Practical Law content was really beneficial. And it already integrates with a lot of the rest of our legal tech stack, such as HighQ.”

CoCounsel Legal’s native integration with existing workflows means legal professionals don’t have to choose between innovation and productivity – they get both.

“We have found the working relationship with ¶¶ÒőłÉÄê very collaborative, transparent and supportive – real partners who go the extra mile to support us in getting value out of our relationship,” said Christina Demetriades, global operating officer, Accenture Legal. “CoCounsel is a massive opportunity for our function – we see it as a way of displacing outside counsel spend and augmenting our team in practice – I see it helping build the Future Ready Legal professional. I have already used it myself to prepare advice for our business on an upcoming opmodel transformation. It was a great value add.”

Deep Research: A Global First for UK Legal Professionals

The UK launch introduces several industry firsts. debuts globally in the UK, with its U.S. release set for February. The new brings professional-grade agentic AI research capabilities specifically tailored to UK legal content. Most significantly, both content sets are unified in a single platform, eliminating the need to navigate between systems while delivering comprehensive results across practice areas.

What makes Deep Research genuinely transformative is its ability to reason, plan, and execute comprehensive legal research autonomously. It doesn’t just retrieve information – it generates multi-step research plans, traces its logic with transparent reasoning, and delivers structured reports backed by Westlaw and Practical Law citations. Legal professionals can hand off complete research questions to an AI that understands the assignment, explains its process, sources its answers, and builds argument foundations, all with human oversight.

The Foundation for Professional AI

David Wong, chief product officer, ¶¶ÒőłÉÄê, said: “Professional-grade AI is fundamentally changing how legal work gets done, and with CoCounsel Legal, we’re delivering enterprise-ready agentic AI that helps UK law firms and legal departments future-proof their practices. This isn’t just about efficiency – it’s about empowering legal professionals with AI that reasons through complex problems, integrates seamlessly into existing workflows, and scales across entire organizations while maintaining the trusted, authoritative foundation our customers depend on. This isn’t just about convenience – it’s about delivering real value to our clients and their work.”

That foundation – combining advanced reasoning models, authoritative content, deep subject matter expertise, and native integration – represents the essential components needed to complete complex, multi-step professional work. It’s what separates professional-grade AI from consumer-grade tools, and what makes CoCounsel Legal uniquely positioned to transform how legal work happens in practice, not just in theory.

Looking Ahead

The UK launch of CoCounsel Legal signals a broader shift in how professional services will be delivered. As agentic AI capabilities mature and expand, the question isn’t whether AI will transform legal work – it’s whether legal professionals and organizations will embrace tools purpose-built for their needs or settle for generic solutions that promise much but deliver little.

For UK legal professionals ready to explore what professional-grade agentic AI can do for their practice, the opportunity is here. The future of legal work isn’t waiting – it’s embedded in the work itself.

Learn more about .

Agentic AI, Grounded in Expertise

Draft a Complaint (US)

Drafting a complaint typically means toggling between research, form books, and jurisdiction-specific requirements – assembling pieces manually. This agentic skill handles that orchestration for you by pulling relevant precedents from Westlaw, integrating guidance from Practical Law, and applying jurisdictional rules to generate a first draft you can refine.

What once took hours now takes minutes – with the research trail built in.

Know Your Judge (US)

Preparation for oral arguments or a key motion often starts with the same question: how has this judge ruled on similar issues?

The new feature, Know Your Judge, is powered by Litigation Analytics and analyzes a judge’s past rulings, fact patterns, and cited precedents to generate a concise summary of their decision-making tendencies and judicial philosophy.

Now, you can walk into the courtroom knowing what arguments have worked – and what hasn’t landed – with the judge you are facing.

AI Jurisdictional Surveys – Adding State Cases (US)

Gain more comprehensive and well-rounded answers to legal questions leading to faster discovery of important information.  Jurisdictional surveys now integrate state case law directly into your answers alongside statutes and regulations. This fills gaps where statutory text alone doesn’t tell the full story, giving you more comprehensive responses with the nuance that case law provides.

Rooted in Your Knowledge

Legal work depends on context – your documents, your counterparty’s positions, your specific research question. These features connect CoCounsel’s intelligence to the materials and situations unique to your matter.

Summarize Changes from Redlines and Comments (US, UK, Canada, Australia)

When a counterparty returns a marked-up contract, the real work is assessing what changed and whether it matters. This skill analyzes the specific document, extracts material changes, organizes them into a structured table with location references, and flags risk levels – so you can focus attention where it counts.

Take these new CoCounsel features into the new year 

These new CoCounsel capabilities can help you end the year right and start your new year with more productivity.  If you’re preparing for a motion – try Know Your Judge. Reviewing a redlined contract?  Run Summarize Changes from Redlines.  Save time reviewing cases or statutes by using Smart Browse to show you what’s relevant to your matter.

To keep up to date on and new enhancements, sign up for the today.