Posted by Matthew Albino.
For my Legal Foundations of Business extra credit assignment, I chose an article entitled “Thomson Reuters launches new AI tools for legal professionals” by Eric Revell of Fox Business. This article was published on March 2nd, 2024. This article is about Thomson Reuters, a media and information firm based in Toronto, Canada. It details their release of a new artificial intelligence that helps legal professionals in a variety of ways. Most notably, David Wong, the company’s chief product officer, claims their new product will help legal professionals draft contracts and research complicated legal topics more efficiently. Some of the company’s new AI products include their Ask Practical Law tool and CoCounsel tool, with the company looking to spread their products to global markets.
This article highlights the company’s Practical Law tool, which uses generative artificial intelligence to provide law professionals with answers about legal questions in a timely manner. Wong compares his company’s Practical Law tool to SparkNotes and Wikipedia, stating, “I like to think of it as like a SparkNotes or Wikipedia of the law, but really helping you to do your work as a contrast to Westlaw, which is a deep research system for the details of the law.” This tool is used by a variety of legal professionals across the country, including independent lawyers, lawyers in law firms, and corporate lawyers. Another exciting feature Thomson Reuters has is called Ask Practical Law AI, where law professionals can access summarized content from a database created by 650 lawyers. In addition, the company’s AI-powered CoCounsel tool is also interesting, and this tool uses generative AI to help legal professionals prepare dispositions, draft correspondence, search databases, and summarize documents.
Thomson Reuters is making strides to expand its AI tools globally, too. For example, their CoCounsel tool which just launched in the United States in 2023 is now formally available in Canada and Australia. The company is currently working on it becoming available in Europe and the U.K. as well. While its tools are undoubtedly useful, Thomson Reuters makes sure to let its users know about the limitations of its tools. For example, its CoCounsel tool includes footnotes after the tool “hasn’t been able to successfully retrieve the sought after result.” According to Wong, this helps prevent “AI hallucinations” and fosters customer trust.
Matthew is a mathematical finance major at the Stillman School of Business, Seton Hall University, Class of 2027.