Like many other industries, the legal profession is undergoing a rapid reshaping via new technologies.
Artificial intelligence is entering workflows and opening up a new kind of collaboration, in which trusted tools meet emerging intelligence. This is the promise of a human-centred AI legal ecosystem: a digitally enabled legal infrastructure built around people, ethics and expertise.
How to create a value-driven legal AI ecosystem with humans at the core
As AI becomes deeply embedded in daily lives, it’s critical the legal profession retains core values of empathy, accuracy, deep thinking and human connection.
Mid-sized firms often face pressure to do more with less, without compromising quality. AI presents enormous opportunities to handle repetitive tasks, freeing legal minds to focus on strategic enablement.
Greg Emsley, the chief digital officer at the law firm Maurice Blackburn, says AI tools such as CoCounsel, a legal assistant developed by the media, tech and AI company Thomson Reuters, should be embraced as opportunities to enhance productivity.
Greg Emsley, chief digital officer, Maurice Blackburn
“AI won’t replace lawyers,” Emsley says. “But it will elevate their productivity, freeing them to apply their legal expertise more strategically and deepen client engagement.”
Emsley has been testing CoCounsel with his legal colleagues and believes AI opens up access to justice.
“Our organisation is grounded in the pursuit of access to justice for everyday Australians,” he says. “The emergence of AI is set to transform how people will interact with the law, increasingly placing legal tools and services directly in the hands of individuals. It will invite important conversations about democratising legal services. Whilst this presents a challenge for the legal professions, it is also a profound opportunity to make the law more accessible, transparent and equitable for all.”
AI is also helping to reduce the burden of routine and time-consuming tasks that often weigh down legal practitioners, Emsley says.
“We’ve been piloting CoCounsel to better understand where it can create meaningful value, and early results are promising. It’s proving to be a genuine timesaver that works alongside our lawyers to reduce the administrative load that comes with legal practice.
“As the capabilities of AI continue to evolve, it will increasingly enable our lawyers to focus on what they do best: applying their deep legal expertise and building strong, trusted relationships with clients.”
Human-led with machine-assisted interactions
Catherine Roberts is the senior director of AI and legal technology at Thomson Reuters. She says CoCounsel isn’t used to build strategy or write arguments, but to streamline all the steps that come before that.
Catherine Roberts, senior director of AI and legal technology, Thomson Reuters
“Australia’s legal profession is used to trusting legal content from [the legal research platform] Westlaw … Now CoCounsel can make it even easier to find the guidance you need,” Roberts says.
“CoCounsel can draw on that trusted local legal content to ground responses to make it easier to find the information humans need to tackle complex problems.”
CoCounsel helps structure research, check compliance, and surface relevant case law, freeing up time for nuanced human judgment.
“CoCounsel can digest and analyse long documents or large data sets in a fraction of the time it would take to review manually. While a human lawyer will still need to review and check the output, you can skip copying and pasting into a table for a due diligence report … You can focus on higher value tasks and reduce wasted hours.”
More efficiency means more time to think and engage
Roberts outlines a Friday afternoon scenario in which a lawyer receives a complex statement of claim.
“Legal firms that adopt a genAI legal assistant will experience how they can make a real difference to employee engagement and retention,” she says.
CoCounsel can help by summarising the document, finding relevant practical law notes and precedents, creating timelines and suggesting client questions or supporting documents.
“Lawyers are entrusted with their clients’ deepest secrets and Thomson Reuters understands how critical data security is,” Roberts says. “Information uploaded to our legal AI-powered solutions stays confidential and is not used to train large language models.”
Thomson Reuters is integrating CoCounsel across platforms such as Westlaw Precision, Practical Law, Legal Tracker, HighQ, and Contract Express – embedding AI where legal professionals already work.
Reimagining legal practice and connection
Emsley is emphatic about the future role that AI will play at Maurice Blackburn.
“Agentic AI is going to transform the facilitation of the everyday for lawyers by driving real efficiencies and reimagining how systems and processes will work in conjunction with humans in legal practice,” he says.
It’s a sentiment echoed by Roberts, who says AI will go beyond affecting workflows, and change the very nature of legal practice in Australia.
“We are excited about the opportunity, not only to avoid drudge work, but for lawyers to be able to handle work that was not viable before,” Roberts says. “Lawyers will increasingly spend more time editing, refining and focusing on high-value strategic work, and waste less hours searching out relevant information.”
In the legal profession, the ideal future won’t require a choice between humans and machines; it will combine the best of both. Thomson Reuters believes that with the right tools and mindsets, law firms can build AI ecosystems that aren’t just efficient, but engineered with humans in mind.
Reliable generative AI for the legal profession is here with Thomson Reuters’ CoCounsel.
