�������� is working with Google Cloud to connect HighQ with Gemini Enterprise for Legal, giving legal professionals a secure way to bring authorized matter documents, structured data, and workflows into the AI environment where they are collaborating.

The HighQ MCP connection is now live alongside Google Cloud’s announcement of Gemini Enterprise for Legal.

This is an important milestone, but it is also exactly that: one milestone. HighQ is the natural place to begin because it contains the live matter context AI needs to be useful. Over time, we see opportunities to extend more of the trusted capabilities of CoCounsel Legal across the AI environments our customers choose to use.

Why matter context matters

Enterprise AI continues to improve, but legal work has always depended on context. That context is more than documents. It includes structured matter data, workflows, tasks, templates, collaboration history, deadlines, permissions, and the institutional knowledge surrounding a case or transaction. Much of that lives in HighQ.

Law firms and corporate legal departments rely on HighQ to manage matters, collaborate internally and externally with clients and outside counsel, power secure client portals, and organize work that evolves over weeks, months, or years. Connecting HighQ with Gemini Enterprise for Legal allows authorized users to securely access that context without exporting files, copying information between systems, or recreating it somewhere else.

A legal team could ask Gemini Enterprise for Legal to summarize documents in an authorized matter, identify upcoming deadlines from an iSheet, compare structured deal data with underlying agreements, or bring relevant matter information into a draft.

The value is not simply giving AI access to more information. It is giving AI access to the right information, with the governance legal organizations already depend on.

Governance isn’t optional

Legal organizations should not have to choose between adopting new AI capabilities and maintaining the controls their work requires.

The HighQ MCP connection is designed so organizations don’t have to make that tradeoff. Content remains in HighQ. Once a customer securely connects HighQ, users authenticate using their existing HighQ credentials, and existing matter walls; folder permissions, document-level security, and audit logging continue to apply. Gemini Enterprise for Legal can retrieve only the content an individual user is already authorized to access. The connection is read-only, allowing AI to retrieve authorized information without changing the underlying content.

That means organizations can confidently extend trusted matter context into Gemini Enterprise for Legal while keeping governance exactly where it belongs.

Extending CoCounsel Legal into the enterprise AI ecosystem

This announcement is about more than connecting two products.

CoCounsel Legal remains the trusted platform where legal professionals perform complex legal work. It brings together authoritative legal content, customer context, agentic workflows, verification, and human oversight to help professionals produce work they can verify and stand behind.

At the same time, legal teams increasingly collaborate with business colleagues, outside counsel, customers, and partners who may be working in different AI environments.

Open standards like MCP make it possible to extend trusted legal context and capabilities into those environments without requiring organizations to move their work out of CoCounsel Legal or compromise on governance.

Today’s HighQ integration is the first exciting step in that broader vision with Google Cloud.

Building an open ecosystem for trusted legal AI

The future of enterprise AI will not be defined by a single model or a single interface.

Organizations will continue using different AI environments for different types of work. Our role is to ensure that wherever legal professionals collaborate, they can securely access the trusted matter context, authoritative content, and professional capabilities their work requires.

That is why �������� continues to invest in MCPs, APIs, agentic systems, and strategic partnerships across the AI ecosystem.

“Customers have told us they want our AI solutions to connect seamlessly with the trusted systems they already rely on for everyday legal work,” said Satish Thomas, Vice President, Google Cloud. “Working together with ��������, we’re making it easy to bring critical matter context directly into their workflow today, while creating a path toward even deeper integrations over time.”

The launch of Gemini Enterprise for Legal and the HighQ MCP connection demonstrates what’s possible when trusted matter context and enterprise AI are designed to work together. It’s an important step in our collaboration with Google Cloud and another step toward making trusted legal AI available wherever professionals need it, while keeping CoCounsel Legal at the center of how that work gets done.

Those systems hold far more than files. They contain the history of matters, the experience of teams and the accumulated knowledge of the organization.

�������� and iManage have worked together for years to connect that knowledge with the tools legal professionals use every day. Our renewed and expanded agreement extends those integrations across products including CoCounsel Legal, HighQ and Noetica, while creating a foundation for the next generation of connections between our platforms.

Model Context Protocol (MCP) is one area where that next generation is beginning to take shape. As iManage expands access to its MCP capabilities, we plan to integrate them with CoCounsel Legal, HighQ and Noetica. MCP will add another way for these systems to work together, complementing the integrations customers already use to access, browse and sync iManage documents and bring them into �������� workflows.

Legal organizations have established workflows, permissions and governance around their information. New AI capabilities should build on that foundation while giving professionals more ways to use the knowledge they already trust.

A more connected legal workflow

Legal work rarely happens in one application. Research, drafting, document management, collaboration and transactional work all draw on different systems and sources of information.

Our longstanding integrations with iManage already help connect those environments. The renewed and expanded partnership allows us to continue supporting those workflows while opening up new ways for the systems, context and tools our shared customers rely on to work together.

When implemented, the MCP will allow shared customers to query iManage’s AI within CoCounsel Legal. For CoCounsel Legal, that fits within a broader ambition: helping professionals bring the right legal content, documents and tools together as they work. Westlaw and Practical Law provide authoritative legal content and expertise. Customer documents provide the facts and matter-specific context. Connections with platforms such as iManage make it easier to work across those sources without reconstructing the workflow each time.

Law firms have spent years building valuable institutional knowledge. As AI becomes more embedded in legal work, that knowledge should become easier to use while preserving the controls organizations depend on.

That is where partnerships like this one matter: connecting the systems professionals already trust with the AI experiences they increasingly rely on.

Deep Research in Practical Law (beta)

Legal research is consistently one of the most important AI use cases for legal professionals. CoCounsel’s Deep Research is being built on authoritative �������� content in Westlaw and Practical Law, giving lawyers the power to tackle complex, multi-step research through an agentic experience that is built on the legal authority they use and trust every day.

Deep Research on Practical Law, currently in beta with select customers, is a significant advancement toward the comprehensive, trusted, and seamless CoCounsel Legal research solution of the future. Deep Research on Practical Law plans the research steps, retrieves the most relevant guidance and templates from Practical Law, and presents clear, supported conclusions. It adapts as follow-up questions are asked, enabling deeper, more nuanced analysis.

This streamlined approach saves time, reduces friction, and builds confidence in the resulting work product. As the leading resource for legal know how content, Deep Research in Practical Law complements Westlaw’s primary-law expertise and supports the evolving needs of legal professionals.

HigQ and CoCounsel integration

Embedded with GenAI from �������� CoCounsel, HighQ users can maximize and build on AI-generated insights and outputs through new waves of integrations that bring AI directly into their workflows and deliver greater client service.

Document Insights

This integration embeds CoCounsel’s document review and summarize skills directly into HighQ enabling users to understand documents faster, gain critical insights, and pinpoint and extract information at the point of need.

Integration with CoCounsel drafting capabilities

Within their HighQ workflow, users can seamlessly access drafting capabilities in CoCounsel to review a document, edit, redline it against a playbook and more. The new integration allows users to leverage their documents in HighQ and eliminate versioning risks and manual uploads, saving significant time on drafting and review tasks.

Self-Service Q&A

A new AI-powered chat experience within modernized HighQ dashboards leverages CoCounsel’s search a database skill. Clients and stakeholders can now ask natural language questions about curated document sets and receive summarized, highly relevant answers in minutes, transforming static repositories into dynamic knowledge hubs.

Streamlined workflows, connected experiences and performance improvements

Practice area specific prompts in the CoCounsel Library

New expert-crafted prompts by Practical Law editors are now available directly in the CoCounsel Library, providing a precise starting point for tasks across various practice areas including criminal law, personal injury, data privacy, litigation, and more. Developed by legal experts, these prompts ensure accuracy and efficiency, helping move work forward faster.

Expanded CoCounsel Library accessibility

As the CoCounsel Library becomes even more accessible, users will be able to access CoCounsel directly from Westlaw and Practical Law in the U.S., and Microsoft Word and Outlook internationally. This reduces context switching and accelerates workflow with faster start times, improved document analysis, and quick access to frequently used prompts and skills without switching platforms.

Syncly Google Drive connector for CoCounsel Legal

For law firms using Google Drive, CoCounsel Legal now connects directly via Syncly. The connection allows users to upload documents from Google Drive into CoCounsel while preserving metadata and permissions. This will eliminate manual downloads and uploads, ensuring you’re always working with the most current and auditable document. version.

AI Overview for Statutes Compare

When comparing two versions of a statute, you can choose to receive an AI Overview of the substantive changes. This intelligent feature filters out minor formatting adjustments and highlights the changes that truly matter, saving you valuable time in reviewing lengthy statutory documents.

Moving Faster, Working Smarter

Platform updates led to a 97% reduction in CoCounsel’s average file download time. Additionally, the average time required to complete tasks using skills rooted in our industry-leading content has a 31% average improvement, reflecting changes in AI performance on features including Ask Practical Law AI, Summarize Documents and user’s open documents within CoCounsel.

In addition, through testing and optimization efforts, we have improved the quality and reliability of the draft skill in CoCounsel by migrating the underlying LLM to GPT5. Users should experience reductions in application startup times and higher-quality precision output enabling them to complete first drafts more completely and accurately.

CoCounsel grows internationally adding multiple languages

CoCounsel is expanding its footprint internationally and adding new languages including French, German and Japanese. The professional-grade legal AI assistant will be available in France, Benelux��/Brussels, Luxembourg and Quebec (French), Germany, Austria and Switzerland (German), Brazil (Portuguese), Argentina (Spanish), and Japan (Japanese) allowing more legal professionals to benefit from CoCounsel’s capabilities.

CoCounsel is also available in the U.S., UK, Canada, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Southeast Asia and United Arab Emirates.

And if you would like to see a deeper dive of Deep Research on Westlaw Advantage, check out the .

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Redesigned drafting capabilities unify CoCounsel tools, content, expertise, and workflows

Informed by customer feedback, we’ve reimagined the legal drafting experience – making it more intuitive, intelligent, and seamlessly integrated. The drafting capabilities in CoCounsel fuse users’ institutional knowledge with trusted �������� content and AI-powered technology to expedite the legal drafting process. The redesigned homepage puts everything users need right at their fingertips – CoCounsel Chat, skills, and powerful litigation and document analysis tools – all in one clean, intuitive space. Eliminating the need to jump between tabs or hunt for resources, it’s now an even smoother, faster experience that lets users stay focused, work smarter, and get more done with less friction.

Live Draft brings the ability to summarize and modify a document using natural language in Word. Live Draft also delivers contextual awareness of the document and understanding of the content and structure, so every suggestion and edit is tailored to the content. This helps to further reduce time spent producing a final draft, by delivering more accurate, relevant suggested changes.

Append Authorities enables users to combine all cited documents into a single file suitable for court use, reducing the risk of errors and increasing efficiency. Every cited document is linked for verification purposes, and a hyperlinked table of contents is included.

Region settings customizes CoCounsel tools for global legal professionals

The new region settings capability enables users to select their geographic preference from U.S., UK, Australia or Canada. Based on the selected region, region settings will automatically adjust tools and prompts in the CoCounsel Library making the work product more relevant. Users can now automatically tailor their documents using specific regional requirements, including for the UK and Australia, British English spelling variations, legal terminology, grammar, and content formats. Similarly, this will be coming soon for Canadian English. Additionally, CoCounsel Library is now available in the UK, Canada and Australia.

HighQ integrates CoCounsel AI for intuitive, conversational client data access

With��CoCounsel’s Search a Database skill embedded within HighQ, this customer-driven development allows clients the ability to pose queries regarding their data and receive summarized, highly relevant answers. Sourced from pre-approved content within their site, clients can quickly review summaries, generate reports, and make informed decisions without waiting for manual responses.

Legal Tracker adds AI-powered capabilities

Legal Tracker’s new AI features help users manage legal spend more efficiently. The AI-powered PDF-to-LEDES converter and invoice review speed up invoice evaluation and ensure accurate billing. An AI assistant also streamlines reporting and reduces manual data handling.

These transformative features reinforce our commitment to empowering legal professionals with the tools and solutions they need to excel. or to see firsthand how they elevate work to new heights.

To stay abreast of newly added features, monthly releases, and more, please sign up for the .

The generative AI-driven solution enables UK legal professionals to find the best starting point from their own databases or Practical Law templates, use content from Practical Law alongside their legal department’s or firm’s contract repository to draft or revise clauses, leverage Practical Law contract playbooks, and correct common drafting errors. It uses AI to refine and review documents, producing more accurate, higher-quality work – without leaving Microsoft Word.

I recently shared a CoCounsel Drafting demo with ’s Richard Tromans.

“The offering has been especially shaped for legal needs here and will directly engage with TR’s contract data in Practical Law,” Tromans said in .

I highlighted CoCounsel Drafting capabilities and features for Tromans, and we discussed how “LLM-supported drafting could be truly transformative.” We talked about how users will be able to use the large language model (LLM) to modify a clause, for example, and how CoCounsel Drafting uses generative AI grounded in retrieval augmented generation (RAG) to access��Practical Law content and notes.

We also discussed how CoCounsel Drafting delivers a level of detail similar to what a junior associate may produce when asked to draft a contract. I noted that CoCounsel Drafting allows customers to use their own playbook to draft a preferred set of terms for any contract type or use a Practical Law playbook for a range of popular contract types.

Finally, Tromans and I discussed integrations – with HighQ and with document management systems (DMS) including iManage – as well as security.

On the other side of the pond, U.S. customer feedback on CoCounsel Drafting, which we introduced earlier this year, has been overwhelmingly positive. I hope that UK legal professionals are equally pleased with the time savings and productivity increases CoCounsel Drafting offers.

As a former lawyer turned AI product leader, I’ve lived the pain of tedious legal tasks firsthand. That’s why I’m passionate about harnessing generative AI to transform legal drafting. I know how much time and energy gets wasted on repetitive tasks, taking away from the work that really matters. Now, I’m excited to help lawyers reclaim that time and focus on what they love – whether that’s helping clients, developing strategy, or simply enjoying a better work-life balance.

You can learn more about CoCounsel Drafting , and check out Tromans’ blog .

This is a guest post from Rawia Ashraf, vice president of Product Management, ��������.

To address customers’ pain points, my team has spent the last year improving useability for both complex and simple contracts by using the power of generative AI. Now that Contract Express customers are using our innovative solution, I wanted to share how it’s helping legal professionals better support their clients.

Document automation challenges

For context, lawyers routinely draft similar types of contracts, so they create templates that can be easily updated with customer-specific data like names and addresses. Document automation is about making it quicker and easier for legal professionals to create and update these templates for every case.

Yet a frustration with document automation is that it’s time-consuming to manually create and customize contract templates. It requires a human author to enter code or syntax into a document, line-by-line.��The manual process leaves room for error, and errors can lead to compliance risk.

How generative AI is revolutionizing document automation

This is where generative AI is changing the game. We’ve found that generative AI makes document automation��significantly��faster!

With the power of generative AI, Contract Express can now work much faster than human authors to generate documents. It eliminates the need to manually enter code; generative AI does the work, dramatically simplifying the authoring process. We estimate that a three-page contract takes about 30 to 60 minutes to complete manually, but Contract Express can automate that contract in about two minutes.

Customers who participated in our beta program were pleased with the time-savings our automation delivered. A senior developer at a large UK law firm told us that document automation takes “the drudgery out of that first-stage creation.”

A director at a UK-based legal automation consultancy said Contract Express “was noticeably different in terms of the sophistication in��the suggested fields,” compared to other document automation offerings, and would save time, “especially where you have��a��document where there��are��a lot of obvious questions.”

My team and I are incredibly proud of this innovation, and I’m grateful to my colleagues for working so hard to make this happen for our customers.

Generative AI-powered document automation is available to Contract Express Cloud and HighQ customers.��CoCounsel Drafting��customers who also subscribe to Contract Express can access this functionality within CoCounsel Drafting in the United States; in the UK, CoCounsel Drafting will be available in Q4. Practical Law customers should have access by the end of 2024.

This is a guest post from Mark Cullen, senior director, Product Management, ��������.

The UK rollout follows last year’s����of��l to help legal professionals quickly get answers to complex research questions.

“Westlaw Edge UK with CoCounsel will help users save time and work smarter by jumpstarting – not replacing – their current methods for legal research,” said Andrew Buckley, vice president, Research and Commentary, ��������. “AI-Assisted Research enables practitioners to ask a question in everyday language and get an answer grounded in the powerful combination of trusted, comprehensive Westlaw content and the latest in large language models. Working with increased efficiency is key for practitioners, who need the right research tools to be competitive as they navigate complex legal issues for their clients in a constantly evolving environment.”

In addition to empowering customers with AI-Assisted Research, Westlaw Edge UK with CoCounsel gives customers access to an AI assistant, called CoCounsel. It’s integrated with Westlaw Precision and Practical Law Dynamic Tool Set, and soon will be integrated with Document Intelligence and HighQ.

“Westlaw Edge UK with CoCounsel furthers our long-standing leadership in delivering the most sophisticated legal research solutions in the UK,” Buckley said. “We launched Westlaw UK nearly 25 years ago, marking the globalization of Westlaw, and we introduced Westlaw Edge UK in 2020. Adding AI capabilities to the Westlaw Edge UK portfolio of solutions represents the next chapter in our rich history of legal innovation in the UK and using AI technology to help legal researchers be more efficient.”

For more on Westlaw Edge UK with CoCounsel and additional new CoCounsel capabilities for legal and tax professionals, check out the��news release.

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.