Thomson Reuters today (22 October) announced a new partnership with AI search engine DeepJudge, which will enable law firms to combine CoCounsel research with their own work product.
DeepJudge, founded by former Google AI researchers, enables professionals to instantly surface insights across their internal knowledge bases with exceptional relevance and speed. The company was recently recognised as the most recommended legal AI tool by knowledge management group SKILLS.law. They are a technology partner to companies such as iManage and enable professionals to surface knowledge from across the document management system but also SharePoint sites, client portals and matter intake systems. DeepJudge respects permissions so that users can only access information they are authorised to see.
By integrating DeepJudge’s AI knowledge platform with CoCounsel Legal, Thomson Reuters says it will give legal teams a 360-degree view that unifies internal firm know-how and exclusive Thomson Reuters content. The integration is between DeepJudge and CoCounsel Drafting. A user will be able to access DeepJudge as they start drafting, to find clauses or agreements they have worked on.
Speaking to Legal IT Insider, Rawia Ashraf, head of product for CoCounsel said: “It will bring the firm’s knowledge into the drafting experience and it’s surrounded by the Westlaw knowledge and the Practical Law knowledge. So there’s a combination of what’s market and standard templates, citation checking and the important capabilities that Westlaw and Practical Law bring alongside the user’s data.”
The partnership was initiated to a great extent by mutual customers. Ashraf says: “Thomson Reuters and DeepJudge have been in touch for the better part of a year,” she said. The company is headquartered in Switzerland and we obviously have our enterprise center in Switzerland. Our teams are on the ground there and got to know each other. As we’re building out CoCounsel, the capabilities of DeepJudge are meeting a customer need, so we started to look for ways to work together and think about integrations and what the synergies could be. What really accelerated it is that our mutual customers asked us to start thinking about how to integrate. So as much as we were talking about these things conceptually, our customers pulled us into rooms together to say ‘how can we integrate these solutions? These are important parts of our tech stack and we want them to come closer together.’”
Law firms using generative AI tools want their work to be grounded in their own data and speaking to Legal IT Insider, DeepJudge co-founder Paulina Grnarova said: “The major question that we hear from our customers all the time is ‘have we done this before?’, which is the starting point of so many workloads, whether it’s drafts or strategizing or negotiating and DeepJudge really unlocks the entire internal world of a law firm via the enterprise search engine. Supplementing that with all the trusted content that Thomson Reuters has and plus bringing it inside the CoCounsel platform delivers a really incredible value for the customers that is currently not available.”
Examples of use cases and workflows include a corporate lawyer negotiating a deal where the other party says they have never accepted the term. Grnarova says: “You can use DeepJudge to find previous deals where they have negotiated that clause and what has been agreed and then cross check it with Practical Law and Westlaw as to whether the provision is enforceable. There are so many possibilities that can be unlocked by the combination.”
