TR Rolls Out Deep Research in UK + Tabular Review in US

Thomson Reuters is rolling out CoCounsel Legal featuring Deep Research for Westlaw Advantage and Practical Law in the UK. It’s also – see below – widely launching Tabular Analysis (AKA tabular review) in the US, which has been in a limited beta until now. In fact, for many transactional lawyers the tabular skill may well be a bigger deal than Deep Research.

So, if you’re in London or Leominster and have been salivating at the prospect of using the new TR AI tools, what the CoCounsel Legal roll out does is ‘bring together legal research, essential workflow automation, intelligent document search and AI-powered legal assistance within one unified solution’.

They add that ‘Deep Research in CoCounsel is built to reason, plan and deliver comprehensive legal research grounded in Westlaw and Practical Law content’. I.e. it’s doing the whole agentic thing.

Or, put another way, it’s tapping what LLMs can do, especially in terms of the more recent reasoning and ‘agentic’ capabilities, and then applying that to TR’s data stack for legal research and contract collection as well – and connecting it to the other AI skills CoCounsel already offers.

Thus, you can ‘hand off full research questions to an AI that not only understands the assignment – it explains its process, sources its answers, and builds the argument foundations, with human oversight. Additionally, it generates multi-step research plans, traces its logic with transparent reasoning and delivers structured, Westlaw and Practical Law citation-backed reports’.

And if you’re a bit confused by all the brands and sub-brands, then join the club. AL has to say it’s hard to keep up with CoCo, the other legal-related brands within TR e.g. Deep Research, and their offspring.

(Hint: why not just call it ‘Thomson Reuters Legal’ – and then you get the whole thing at one price…Westlaw, CoCounsel, Practical Law, DeepResearch, Tabular Analysis….etc, etc, etc,? Just an idea. P.S. AL is now offering legal tech branding advice for free 🙂

TR explains it like this: ‘Deep Research in CoCounsel is the legal industry’s first professional-grade agentic AI research capability, and its UK launch marks several deep research firsts:

• Practical Law’s version debuts globally, launching first in the UK with its U.S. release in February
• The new Westlaw Advantage brings the professional-grade agentic AI research capability to UK legal content
• A unified experience combines both content sets into a single platform, delivering comprehensive results across practice areas without requiring users to navigate between systems.’

So, there you go. Hope that’s clear 🙂 The simplest way to look at this is to say: TR’s giving you all the latest things you can do with genAI.

P.S. and TR also is launching Tabular Analysis AKA Tabular Review – which will be especially useful for things such as M&A deals. It’s a very useful skill that companies such as Hebbia pioneered, but which now multiple legal AI companies are offering. It’s live in the US now, and will be rolled out globally also in the near future.

Here’s what they say: ‘Tabular Analysis, launched in beta in November and now available in CoCounsel Legal in the US, is an enhanced process for high-volume document review. Users are able to upload extensive collections processing up to 10,000 documents and 100 questions, with Tabular Analysis presenting results in a dynamic table format that can be filtered and sorted to meet specific needs. Tabular Analysis will soon be available globally with localized versions.’

And so the race to bring to market as many new features as the ‘state of the AI art’ can provide continues. There’s everything to play for and TR, along with everyone else, is throwing the kitchen sink at product development. In fact, it’s probably fair to say TR and other large companies are bringing to market more new features than ever before.

As noted, the challenge for buyers is keeping up with large platforms that are offering so many constantly changing features and sub-features, especially as they’re expecting to be locked into long-term contracts.

Plus, the flipside of this rapid deployment by the sellers is to hope that software contract churn goes in their favour, i.e. X platform’s deal is coming up for renewal this April, so TR has a bunch of new features, thus why not go back to them for these extended AI skills?

And of course, all the other competitors are saying the same thing. Plus the dedicated point solutions are at the same time saying: ‘Don’t go with a big platform, choose us instead as we focus on doing really well at just one or two things.’ It’s a nice problem to have for legal innovation heads, although it must be time-consuming.

David Wong, chief product officer, Thomson Reuters, concluded: ‘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.’

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