CRIV CONNECTION

The CRIV semiannual call with Thomson Reuters took place Tuesday, June 25, 2024. This update includes company information, product enhancements, and Q&A. The products discussed will be on display at the Thomson Reuters booth and exhibitor showcase sessions at the 2024 AALL Annual Meeting & Conference in Chicago July 20-23. We encourage readers attending the conference to visit with Thomson Reuters representatives. 

Participants: Mary Jenkins (AALL CRIV Liaison to Thomson Reuters), Blythe McCoy (Thomson Reuters Information Management Consultant), Dave Corbett (Westlaw Product Development), Joel Hurwitz (Thomson Reuters Vice President of Primary Law Editorial), Jon Meyer (Thomson Reuters Reference Attorney Team Lead), Valerie McConnell (Thomson Reuters Senior Director of Customer Success), Zach Ratzman (Director, Practical Law), Vani Ungapen (AALL Executive Director), and Michelle Hook Dewey (AALL Executive Board Liaison to CRIV.)

Joel Hurwitz addressed our questions related to changes in the editorial function in recent years, as well as authority records and controlled vocabulary, remarking on Thomson Reuters’s legacy of and commitment to editorial excellence. The organization currently has 1,500 editors, with 500 dedicated to primary law. U.S. case law editors summarize points of law (synopsis) and classify the summaries (headnotes) to the Key Number system. As part of the review process, editors, with court approval, make thousands of corrections to case law text annually. Headnotes employ a fixed taxonomy, terms of art, and consistency in formatting and syntax. As the law changes, Thomson Reuters makes changes to the Digest and Key Number System taxonomy and topics.

Editorial additions to cases on Westlaw Precision over the past few years allow researchers to find on-point, fact-specific cases by legal issue and outcome, fact pattern, material facts, cause of action, motion type and outcome, governing law, industry type, party characteristics and area of the law. Hurwitz noted that decisions on which cases get reported are largely dictated by judges and court rules; still, there has been a significant appetite for and an increase in the volume of unreported cases on Westlaw.

Next, Jon Meyer responded to our questions regarding chat and phone customer support for the Reference Attorney team. He noted that the team includes more than 70 bar-admitted attorneys with a rigorous training and development program. Meyer offered metrics: the team handles over 100,000 contacts per year with 60 percent of those interactions via Chat functionality, which has experienced steady year-over-year increases. The average speed of responses is currently 3:50 minutes with phone calls averaging a 5:30 minute wait time and chats 2:52 minutes. The response time goal is five minutes. Response times can vary depending on a variety of factors such as time of day and time of year. He also noted that customer support is not a tiered system; the reference attorneys respond to both chat and phone calls. Customer satisfaction is currently over 90 percent. Thomson Reuters does not employ bots for the Chat function as research questions are too sophisticated and unique. They may use bots in the future to gather information about the caller, but chat bots will not assist with any research requests.  

Valerie McConnell provided a brief overview of the generative AI legal assistant, CoCounsel, and recent product developments. Thomson Reuters currently offers CoCounsel Core for document insights and analysis, Westlaw Precision with CoCounsel for legal research, and Practical Law’s toolset with CoCounsel.  CoCounsel Core is available for both transactional and litigation work. It is a legally trained AI that can analyze legal documents to answer sophisticated questions, even identifying tone from language. It can find inconsistencies in expert testimony, for example, and review contracts in many different languages. Using the Westlaw Precision integration, CoCounsel can conduct legal research, generating a short synopsis of the legal research issue and a list of relevant sources. CoCounsel’ s results include hyperlinks to the source materials considered by the AI when generating its answers, enabling users to verify the AI’s work. 

Thomson Reuters will release a CoCounsel drafting package for transactional attorneys in July, which will enable lawyers to draft contracts using AI with Practical Law content and the firm’s own document repositories. The product integrates seamlessly with Microsoft Word, offering end-to-end capabilities from searching documents to drafting and modifying contracts, leveraging both internal documents and trusted Thomson Reuters content within one platform. CoCounsel Drafting can generate new clauses, modify and compare clauses, and redline contracts using a firm’s playbooks. The litigation drafting package, which will be released later this year, will allow lawyers to draft discovery requests and responses, among other litigation documents. Note that academic access is not in place for fall 2024, but a pilot is in place now, with several law schools exploring prompting techniques and ethical issues.

Next, Dave Corbett offered a Westlaw update, highlighting enhancements to the key number system (featuring, notably, a revised 349, Search, Seizure, and Arrests) and a new special resources page on Artificial Intelligence Legal Materials and News (located under Specialty Materials on the Content tab.) He pointed to developments in Precision Research, an expansive editorial project to tag case law and built topically. Newer Westlaw Precision topics of note include Federal Criminal Discovery and Evidence, Search and Seizure, and New York Criminal Discovery and Evidence.

Since CRIV’s last call with Thomson Reuters in December 2023, GPT-4 Turbo has been deployed within AI-Assisted Research (AAR), reducing Thomson Reuters AAR search response times to under a minute. AAR responses now include in-line citations that are linked to case law, statutes, and regulations within the response. Research results also include additional related material for administrative materials and guidance, Practical Law, and secondary sources. We asked Corbett how search is changing. Westlaw Precision with GenAI is meant to help users jump start their research and to obtain key resources faster. He responded that the addition of AI-Assisted Research expands the already robust selection of tools available when searching and that there is continued value in both plain language searching and the mathematical precision of Boolean searching. He added that researchers can choose the best tool or tools for their search project rather than rely on keyword searching for every task. Lastly, he noted that law school access for the AI component in Westlaw Precision is anticipated in early 2025, but possibly sooner.

Zach Ratzman rounded out the Thomson Reuters presentation with an overview of Practical Law Dynamic, which is expert-written legal “know-how.” Content is created and kept current by a team of more than 650 full-time editors globally, and includes thoughtful, time-saving resources such as how-to guides, forms, and templates, checklists, and jurisdictional comparators. He showcased Ask Practical Law AI, launched in January 2024, which is a user-friendly, conversational experience that leverages a large language model to quickly generate synthesized answers using only Practical Law’s trusted content as its source material.  Zach highlighted that every response the AI generates includes hyperlinks to the underlying Practical Law resources, making the necessary verification process simple and straightforward.  He explained that Ask Practical Law AI has been trained to tell users when the system is unable to generate a response—e.g., if there is insufficient Practical Law content on a particular topic—which is a safeguard built into the system to help reduce hallucinations. Ratzman also highlighted Practical Law Dynamic’s Knowledge Map, which allows users to navigate the Practical Law library using a visual, interactive format to help users find additional helpful content and spot related legal issues. Lastly, he noted that Practical Law launched a new experience for its robust collection of global ESG content, which went live on the Practical Law Global page in March 2024.  

AALL and Thomson Reuters participants on the call were mutually appreciative of the opportunity to discuss developments and direction. We encourage AALL members to connect with Thomson Reuters at the AALL Annual Meeting or via their representatives with any product or customer service-related questions or comments.