Thomson Reuters CTO Joel Hron on the DeepJudge Deal

In this AL interview, Thomson Reuters CTO, Joel Hron, explores their expanding partnership with KM company DeepJudge. See the earlier story here.

DeepJudge and TR have worked together before, how does this go beyond where you were before?

Our partnership launched in October 2025, and we’ve been building on it steadily ever since. From the start it has had two motivating principles — a product collaboration whereby our teams are building integrations that demonstrate the complementary value of CoCounsel and DeepJudge together as well as a reselling relationship, allowing firms to buy DeepJudge and CoCounsel Legal together.

What’s new is this full integration between DeepJudge’s search and the CoCounsel agent, available in the web application, Westlaw Advantage, and Practical Law Dynamic Tool Set.

Lawyers can rapidly and intuitively pinpoint internal knowledge at the point of need and directly build on it with CoCounsel Legal’s research, analysis, and drafting. This way, they can create high-quality work product, informed by both internal precedent and external authority, faster and at scale. It’s really a stronger way for a firm to capitalize on their unique expertise.

This integration is a significant step, but it is not the final item on the roadmap. We are continuing to explore a deeper integration via MCP (Model Context Protocol) and into the next version of CoCounsel. This will further enhance the ability for customers to bring together these two pivotal sources of context for work to be executed on the same foundations of trust, transparency, and verifiability that are built into CoCounsel.

On a technical point, how does Practical Law and Westlaw combine with DeepJudge’s ability to search a law firm’s DMS? How. ’Seamless’ is this?

It’s a seamless experience. You can open a DeepJudge search in one click, find the most relevant internal documents from across the firm’s systems, and bring them straight into the chat with no downloading or re-uploading. Sign-in is automatic with existing DeepJudge credentials and all existing user permissions and ethical walls stay in place.

From there, legal professionals can run any CoCounsel capability. For example, they can put a DeepJudge-sourced agreement into a workflow that modifies it based on Practical Law guidance, or pinpoint litigation filings with DeepJudge and then analyze them based on Westlaw authority.

What do you think about token costs and model usage? How does this play into what DJ offers and how it works with TR?

Deeper agentic workflows are driving token consumption higher across the industry. While older model variants typically see price compression over time, the ceiling for what AI systems can accomplish continues to rise. At the same time, in many areas of law, the need for high-quality outcomes that lawyers can trust and stand behind has never been greater.

The intersection of those trends is a major consideration for us. CoCounsel is engineered to optimize the context it uses to reach an outcome, drawing on both Thomson Reuters’ authoritative content and the organization’s own knowledge and data. That optimization is important not only for efficiency and cost, but also for accuracy.

Our partnership with DeepJudge strengthens that approach. By helping synthesize and surface relevant organizational knowledge, DeepJudge enables CoCounsel to ground its reasoning in the best available information while making more effective use of tokens. Ultimately, our focus is not on minimizing token usage for its own sake, but on maximizing the quality, reliability, and trustworthiness of the outcome.

Thanks Joel!

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