By Barbara Engstrom
Articles about lawyers using artificial intelligence tend to fall into two general categories—either mocking the Luddites for not embracing the future of legal practice or engaging in schadenfreude at lawyers ensnared in AI’s hallucinated citations. Both views make solid points.
Joe Patrice had an interesting take on this dichotomy in his recent article “Lawyers Continue to Embrace AI in all the Wrong Ways.” The article tells of a UK law firm with offices in Asia that had to put the kibosh on AI usage by its attorneys after the firm’s CTO detected 32,000 hits to ChatGPT over a seven-day period and more than 3000 hits to the Chinese AI Service DeepSeek during the same period. DeepSeek was recently banned from Australian government devices over security concerns. In response the firm now grants access to AI usage only on request, saying “Like many law firms, we are aiming to positively embrace the use of AI tools to enhance our capabilities while always ensuring safe and proper use by our people and for our clients.”
Joe Patrice summed it up nicely:
Not to be a broken record, but this is exactly why trusted legal tech providers are throwing serious money at developing AI designed specifically for the law firm environment. Everyone wants AI to provide security, confidentiality, and accuracy, but law firms actually need it. Preferably one that can provide answers without turning that motion into an ethics investigation.
Or loading your client’s trade secrets onto a random server in Shanghai.1
Specialized Legal AI Drafting Assistance at KCLL
In past articles I have lamented the loss of smart, scrappy legal AI startups either by lawsuit (ROSS Intelligence) or by acquisition (Ravel Law and Casetext). Casetext was an especially hard blow. I was always impressed with how Casetext managed to continue to create innovative products while keeping their pricing well within reach of regular-joe attorneys. With their cost-effective AI driven research platform, Casetext had not only been able to hang in there but to thrive.
So yes, I was very sad to see that they had succumbed to the siren song of acquisition by Thomson Reuters. Though, in all fairness, I can’t imagine many people turning their backs on $650 million. I’m a glass half full sort of person, so while I mourn the loss of the old Casetext, I’m super happy to announce that the law library was able to license public access to CoCounsel, Casetext’s AI enabled legal assistant that can review and analyze documents, draft memos, create timelines, analyze contracts and suggest revisions, and even write emails for you in the tone of your choice.
How Does CoCounsel Work?
CoCounsel is primarily a drafting assistant. Think of it as Della Street on steroids. For those of you who grew up with more than three tv channels, Della was Perry Mason’s legal secretary who was smart as a whip and generally saved the day. You input the documents that you would like to focus on and CoCounsel works within that universe.
What Can CoCounsel Do for You?
There are myriad ways that CoCounsel can work with the document sets that you provide to slice, dice, and reconfigure the information within. The following are five of the most common ways that attorneys use CoCounsel.
Summarizing Lengthy Documents into a Digestible Format
One of the best uses of CoCounsel is to help make sense of complicated (or convoluted) documents. When we were testing CoCounsel, we input a court of appeals brief written by a non-attorney that was a very hard to follow. CoCounsel’s analysis of a rambling 40-page brief is succinct and outlines the main arguments. CoCounsel allows one to chose either a short summary or a detailed summary. The following is an example of a CoCounsel short summary:
Michael Schreck’s appellant brief argues that he was not given a fair trial, and that the court is not set up to deal with pro se litigants. Schreck references numerous cases and statutes to support his arguments, including cases related to substantive due process, procedural due process, equal protection, and race-based admissions systems. Schreck outlines errors made by the bailiff, trial court clerk, Judge Rogers, and Commissioner Judson, and argues that he was not given adequate information or time to understand rule 12(b)(6). Schreck requests a substantive due process ruling, a new trial, a change of venue, and an investigation into the Seattle Restored Program.
Original brief can be found here: https://www.courts.wa.gov/content/Briefs/A01/851543%20Appellant%20’s.PDF
Pulling Key Information from Transcripts or Pleadings
While bigger law firms can pay thousands to outsource document review, that is beyond the reach of most solo and small firm attorneys. CoCounsel evens the playing field by performing thorough and accurate document review in a fraction of the time it would otherwise take. An added benefit is that CoCounsel can take that extracted information and then use it in various, related tasks.
Identifying Potential Weaknesses or Inconsistencies in Arguments
This is where the Della Street factor really comes into play. Put an opponent’s briefs or pleadings into CoCounsel and get a summary of problematic arguments or inconsistencies. CoCounsel allows you to build upon this output with follow-up prompts and input to direct the results in a manner consistent with your objectives.
Crafting an Initial Outline for Depositions or Cross-examination
Often the hardest part in drafting questions for depositions or cross-examination is getting started. CoCounsel lets you jump a step or two ahead. Based on the documents submitted, you can then edit and refine the questions generated by CoCounsel to reflect the deposition or cross-ex goals. A huge time saver.
Drafting Correspondence
I find this one of the most interesting facets of using CoCounsel because you can prompt the AI to set the tone of the email. Are you writing to a colleague who will understand sophisticated legal terminology or to a client who needs layman’s terms? Using the same underlying set of documents, CoCounsel can adjust the language and tone of correspondence to suit the needs of the situation.
Tip of the Iceberg
CoCounsel is very new to the law library and we are still putting it through its paces but having watched several of the training videos, I was impressed with the level of sophistication of CoCounsel’s responses and the types of tasks it can complete. There was a great example of tasking CoCounsel with creating deposition questions for a medical malpractice case, then asking to refine the deposition questions to a particular focus area, and finally to use the deposition topics and questions to draft an email to the client to explain the deposition strategy. We are looking forward to doing a much deeper dive into all that CoCounsel can assist with.
Low Barrier to Entry
You don’t have to be an AI wizard to use CoCounsel effectively. In fact, CoCounsel is designed to be conversational. CoCounsel is centered around a chat box where you tell CoCounsel what you are trying to accomplish and then ask questions as you would to another attorney in a conversational tone. For example, if you need to extract data or information from a contract, you just tell CoCounsel that in the chat box and it will explain how to proceed and will ask follow-up questions if necessary. If the results are not what you are expecting, you can ask CoCounsel to refine the results. There are also examples of specific tasks that CoCounsel can assist with on the home screen if you prefer to use a method other than starting with the chat box.
Protecting the Integrity of Client Information
The theme of this column is using legal AI assistants in the right way—the primary concern being protecting client information. There are several layers of protection available when you use CoCounsel as opposed to an open-source AI system such as ChatGPT. According to Westlaw “all customer data within CoCounsel Core is subject to our rigorous security policies. Our GenAI solutions access partner LLMs through private, dedicated servers. We contractually prohibit partners from seeing customer queries or documents, and we never use customer data to train third-party models.” The law library adds an extra layer of protection on top of that. At the end of each computer session, any information input or stored by a user is wiped clean with no retention of data.
Come Visit Us at KCLL and Meet CoCounsel, Your Free and Trusted AI Drafting Assistant
We have one CoCounsel seat at the Seattle branch and one in the Kent branch. Come visit us and see what tasks AI-Della Street/CoCounsel can help you with. Keep an eye on our events calendar https://kcll.org/events/ for upcoming training sessions for CoCounsel or learn about CoCounsel at https://legal.thomsonreuters.com/en/products/cocounsel-core.
1 See Joe Patrice, Lawyers Continue to Embrace AI in all the Wrong Ways, Above the Law (Feb 12, 2025) available at https://abovethelaw.com/2025/02/lawyers-continue-to-embrace-ai-in-all-the-wrong-ways/
