Beyond Answers: How Agentic AI Is Redefining the Practice of Law

By Emily Colbert, SVP, CoCounsel Litigation, Thomson Reuters.

The next edge in legal tech is not bigger models, it is context. Agents that reason over trusted data, prove their work, and fit real workflows will win.

The legal industry is at a turning point. For years, technology promised to make legal work faster. Now it is beginning to make it smarter.

I have spent much of my career translating technology into results that litigators and transactional lawyers can trust. The first wave of automation helped us find information quickly. The second wave, generative AI, promised to create it on demand. The real shift underway is bigger. It is about reasoning. It is about systems that do not just retrieve knowledge. They think with it.

The Agentic Era Has Arrived

As recently as last year, AI in law often felt like a side project. Simple summaries. Early-stage drafts. Experiments. Today, I see entire workflows move through intelligent agents that plan, research, cross-check, and refine. Complex drafting. Deep research. Risk analysis. Work that once consumed teams for days can now complete in minutes with transparency and audit trails.

This is not a chatbot party trick. These are orchestrated systems operating over verified sources and firm knowledge. They do the hard, repetitive steps consistently. They show their work. They raise the floor on quality and compress the time to insight.

Trust Still Decides Everything

Legal work does not tolerate guesswork. One fabricated citation can sink a matter. This is why professional AI must anchor to authoritative sources and make verification effortless. The newest systems do both. They trace their logic. They cite what they rely on. They invite humans to verify in minutes, not hours.

AI can now help verify AI. Multi-agent checks catch inconsistencies and surface blind spots. Human judgment remains essential, and we apply it where it matters most.

From Research to Reasoning

The most interesting use cases are no longer clerical. They are cognitive. Lawyers are asking AI to run multi-step research, apply precedent to specific fact patterns, and surface the counterarguments that will come back at them. That demands synthesis and judgment.

The best agentic systems deliver by giving their teams of agents access to data, tools, and expert training. They execute the plan. They fill the gaps. They present a report with sources and rationale. The output is not just an answer. It is insight you can defend.

What matters to practitioners is transparency and control. That is why the strongest feedback I hear is about systems that can explain their plan, show their sources, and let lawyers verify quickly.

As Colleen Nihill, Chief AI and KM Officer at Morgan Lewis, put it when we launched CoCounsel Legal: ‘Thomson Reuters latest integration of advanced AI models into its core platforms marks an encouraging step forward in legal technology. Deep Research stands out for its ability to reason through legal questions rather than simply return search results. When faced with a complex issue, it can generate a research plan, explain its logic, and deliver a structured report. This level of transparency is essential to maintaining the oversight and trust lawyers need to confidently adopt AI in practice.’

The New Foundation for Legal AI

The next advantage in legal AI will not come from the largest model or the cheapest compute. It will come from context — the pairing of capable models with trusted data and deep workflow integration.

That foundation includes:

• Authoritative, structured legal content. Not scraped from the internet. Curated and classified sources that let agents’ reason over the law with precision.
• Built-in verification. Plans, citations, and audit trails that keep outputs defensible.
• Deep workflow integration. AI that lives where professionals already work and respects privacy and provenance.
• Human expertise at scale. Editorial oversight and domain knowledge that compound quality over time.

If the last decade rewarded those who could find information faster, the next will reward those who can prove it, contextualize it, and apply it with confidence. That is the competitive edge. That is the real differentiator.

Proof It Is Working

At Thomson Reuters, we are seeing a measurable impact as agentic systems move from pilot to production. Legal professionals have access to the same professional-grade AI used by courts across the U.S. federal court system and more than 20,000 firms and legal departments, including 80 percent of the Am Law 100. Customer feedback has been exceptionally strong, with firms citing significant time savings, enhanced research accuracy, and improved client outcomes.

A Profession Transformed

AI is not replacing lawyers. It is reshaping what lawyers do. Systems absorb the repeatable work. Humans move up the stack to advocacy, judgment, and strategy.

The junior lawyer of tomorrow will not spend their first years cutting and pasting clauses. They will arrive fluent in how to direct agents, verify results, and build arguments on top of machine intelligence. That is not a loss. That is a better apprenticeship.

Firms are also codifying their own expertise inside these systems. Playbooks. Strategies. Preferences. Institutional knowledge that used to live in pockets now informs every matter. The blend of proprietary know-how and agentic intelligence will define the next tier of competitive advantage.

The New Definition of Professional-Grade

Precision and precedent built the profession. Those values now govern our technology, too. The leaders will combine trusted data, human judgment, and intelligent automation to deliver outcomes with confidence.

AI will not replace lawyers. Lawyers who collaborate with AI will redefine the profession. The future of legal work is not man versus machine. It is man and machine, thinking together.

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You can find more about CoCounsel Legal here.

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Author Bio: Emily Colbert is Senior Vice President for CoCounsel Litigation at Thomson Reuters. She leads product and strategy for AI solutions that support litigation teams and complex legal research. Her focus is on agentic systems, verification, and the practical adoption of professional-grade AI across legal workflows.

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[ This is a sponsored thought leadership article by Thomson Reuters for Artificial Lawyer. ]

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