In this product walk through of Westlaw UK’s AI-Assisted Research, we received a demonstration from Jessica Brown, who is director of client training at Thomson Reuters, and Andrew Buckley, who leads the team in the UK responsible for the product management of Westlaw.
The demonstration, recorded on 3 June, showcases Westlaw Edge UK with CoCounsel functionality. Brown demonstrated how users may interact with the system in natural language, and said that because the Assistant has been trained on Westlaw content and understands legal research, it doesn’t need that depth of prompt training that can be required to use generative AI properly elsewhere.
Inevitably how you phrase the question is likely to frame the answer and Brown said: “If you ask a closed question, you might get a limited summary.” She adds: “You ask it how you’d ask a colleague, in one or two sentences. You definitely don’t have to be a prompt engineer in order to use this tool.”
The AI Assistant runs a search on Westlaw content and the system leverages retrieval augmented generation (RAG) to reduce hallucinations. Then comes the generative piece, which kicks in when the documents are found. Brown said: “Because everything we’re doing is grounded we can reduce hallucinations because it has to look at that context, and the generative piece only kicks in when those documents are found.”
Buckley added: “The key word there is ‘reduces.’ No responsible vendor can claim to eliminate hallucination, but we can do a good job because of grounding it.”
Buckley said that Thomson Reuters had tested the system “thousands of times” and didn’t see any true hallucinations. He adds: “This is an incredible kickstart and will get you a good way along the line, but it won’t be doing it for you.”