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Today, legal AI company Casetext unveiled CoCounsel, the first AI legal assistant. CoCounsel leverages the latest, most advanced large language model from OpenAI, which Casetext has customized for legal practice, to expertly perform the skills most valuable to legal professionals.
"Our AI legal assistant is the first of its kind," said Jake Heller, co-founder and CEO of Casetext. "It creates a momentous opportunity for attorneys to delegate tasks like legal research, document review, deposition preparation, and contract analysis to an AI, freeing them to focus on the most impactful aspects of their practice."
CoCounsel introduces a groundbreaking way of interacting with legal technology. For the first time, lawyers can reliably delegate substantive, complex work to an AI assistant—just as they would to a legal professional—and trust the results.
"Casetext has transformed the AI landscape with CoCounsel," observed Scott Bailey, Director of Research and Knowledge Services at Eversheds Sutherland, a CoCounsel beta customer. "The power of this technology, deployed in a product that is secure and reliable, is a huge leap forward in what legal technology can do."
Unlike generalized, publicly available large language models, CoCounsel is a product that offers the reliability and security critical for legal matters, which are specialized, complex, and confidential. In building CoCounsel, Casetext has coupled the immense technological power of OpenAI's most advanced model with its own proprietary legal databases and market-leading legal search system, Parallel Search. As a result, CoCounsel can perform substantive tasks such as legal research, document review, deposition preparation, and contract analysis more quickly and accurately than ever before possible. Most importantly, CoCounsel produces results lawyers can rely on for professional use and keeps customers'—and their clients'—data private and secure.
"CoCounsel is a truly revolutionary legal tech innovation," noted John Polson, Chairman and Managing Partner of Fisher Phillips, the first major law firm to deploy CoCounsel firm-wide to its 500+ attorneys. "The power of this tool to help our attorneys perform efficient legal research, document review, drafting, and summarizing, has already resulted in immediate, sustained benefits to our clients, and we have only scratched the surface of what it has to offer."
To tailor general AI technology for the demands of legal practice, Casetext established a robust trust and reliability program managed by a dedicated team of AI engineers and experienced litigation and transactional attorneys. Casetext's Trust Team, which has run every legal skill on the platform through thousands of internal tests, has spent nearly 4,000 hours training and fine-tuning CoCounsel's output based on over 30,000 legal questions. Then, all CoCounsel applications were used extensively by a group of beta testers composed of over 400 attorneys from elite boutique and global law firms, in-house legal departments, and legal aid organizations, before being deployed. These lawyers and legal professionals have already used CoCounsel more than 50,000 times in their day-to-day work.
"CoCounsel is completely changing the equation for law firms," Chris Austin, Director of Records and Information Management at Bowman and Brooke LLP, stated. "Our firm has been part of Casetext's rigorous beta testing program from its first few days, and the benefits have been immense. CoCounsel doesn't just eliminate essential yet time-consuming work, it enables our attorneys to become more agile and precise—it's changing how we practice law for the better."
Wendy Butler Curtis, Chief Innovation Officer at CoCounsel beta customer Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP, commented, "Like our clients, we pay attention to technology that has the potential to improve outcomes and make work better. We've already seen CoCounsel's technology add value and we're excited to explore additional ways our teams can embed it in our practice."
CoCounsel's speed and high-quality output enable attorneys to focus on the most valuable parts of their practice and take on projects that would otherwise be impossible.
Immigration attorney and CoCounsel beta customer Greg Siskind reflected, "We are working on a class action case on behalf of Ukrainian refugees who were improperly charged millions of dollars in illegal fees. CoCounsel has been instrumental in supporting us. It was able to expedite the vetting process of a legal theory that is foundational to our arguments at superhuman speed."
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