For litigators, that matters because some of the most important context in a matter does not begin in a research or drafting tool. It begins in the evidence.Ìý

Documents. Testimony. Facts developed over the course of discovery. The record a lawyer ultimately has to connect to the law and turn into analysis, strategy, and work product they can stand behind. AI should make that process easier.Ìý

This week at ILTACON, ¶¶Òõ³ÉÄê and Everlaw announced plans to integrate Everlaw with CoCounsel Legal. The first planned integration will allow mutual customers to bring Everlaw documents into CoCounsel Legal in bulk, making it easier to use litigation and investigation materials across CoCounsel Legal’s research, analysis, drafting, and workflow capabilities.Ìý

For customers, that means less friction between reviewing evidence and doing the legal work that follows.Ìý

For us, it is also one more piece of the broader CoCounsel Legal ecosystem we are building: connecting the systems, content, and tools professionals already rely on so they can move through complex legal work with more continuity and less unnecessary handoff.Ìý

Everlaw brings an important part of that ecosystem into the picture for litigation: the evidentiary record.

Connecting evidence, context, and legal analysisÌý

A litigator rarely asks a purely abstract legal question. The real question is how the facts, evidence, and applicable law come together: whether a particular document changes the argument, whether testimony is consistent with the rest of the record, or whether the evidence supports the position being put before a court. Carrying that context through the legal workflow is essential to making AI genuinely useful in litigation.Ìý

CoCounsel Legal brings together research, analysis, drafting, and other legal workflows with authoritative content from Westlaw and Practical Law. But in litigation, authoritative legal information is only one part of the picture. The evidentiary record matters just as much.Ìý

Bringing those worlds closer together can make AI much more useful in the day-to-day practice of law.Ìý

By reducing the need to manually move documents between systems, we can help lawyers spend less time on those handoffs and get to the substantive legal work faster.Ìý

Moving from evidence to analysis with less frictionÌý

Consider what happens when a litigation team identifies a set of important documents during discovery.Ìý

Those materials may already have been collected, reviewed, organized, and understood within an eDiscovery platform. But when the team moves into other parts of the legal workflow, that context does not always move with them.Ìý

That can mean exporting documents, uploading them into another environment, and reconstructing parts of the matter before the lawyer can move forward. Every handoff creates friction.Ìý

The planned Everlaw integration is intended to shorten that path. Once Everlaw documents are available in CoCounsel Legal, lawyers can apply CoCounsel Legal’s research, analysis, drafting, and workflow capabilities to those materials, creating a more direct connection between the evidentiary record and the legal work that follows.Ìý

It is also exactly the kind of connection we want to keep adding across the CoCounsel Legal ecosystem: bringing more of the places where legal work already happens into a workflow where professionals can research, analyze, draft, and act with the right context around them.Ìý

Connected AI still has to meet the standard of legal workÌý

Making more information available to AI cannot mean lowering the standard for what comes out. The lawyer is still responsible for the argument. Still responsible for the citation. Still responsible for understanding whether the evidence supports the conclusion.Ìý

That is why verification, transparency, and professional judgment matter so much. At ¶¶Òõ³ÉÄê, we describe this standard as Fiduciary-Grade AI: AI designed for high-stakes professional work, grounded in authoritative information and built so professionals can review, verify, and ultimately stand behind the work it helps produce.Ìý

Connecting more of the matter into that workflow should strengthen the lawyer’s ability to exercise judgment, not remove the lawyer from the process.Ìý

Building a broader ecosystem around legal workÌý

Law firms and legal departments have invested in specialized technology for a reason.Ìý

Evidence may live in an eDiscovery platform. Documents may live in a document management system. Legal research comes from trusted legal sources. Work product may move through several systems before it is complete. AI is not going to make that ecosystem disappear. The opportunity is to make it work together better.Ìý

That is the direction we are taking with CoCounsel Legal. We are building an ecosystem designed to connect the tools, content, and workflows professionals already depend on, while preserving the context, permissions, controls, and trust required for high-stakes work.Ìý

Everlaw is an important addition to that ecosystem because it brings the evidentiary record closer to the research, analysis, and drafting lawyers are already doing in CoCounsel Legal.Ìý

And it is one part of a much broader direction.Ìý

As we continue expanding the CoCounsel Legal ecosystem, we want professionals to be able to bring more of their work, their context, and the systems they trust into a more connected AI experience.Ìý

For customers, that can mean fewer unnecessary handoffs and a more direct path from evidence to insight and work product.Ìý

For the industry, it is another signal of where legal AI is headed. The next generation of legal AI will not just be more capable. It will be built to connect the work around it.Ìý

¶¶Òõ³ÉÄê 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 ¶¶Òõ³ÉÄê 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 ¶¶Òõ³ÉÄê, 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.

¶¶Òõ³ÉÄê 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 ¶¶Òõ³ÉÄê 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.