Trowers & Hamlins hosts fourth annual hackathon powered by Thomson Reuters CoCounsel

Global News

11
Jul
2024

Editor

Trowers & Hamlins leverage the Gen AI capabilities of Thomson Reuters CoCounsel for their annual legal hackathon. The international law firm worked with Thomson Reuters, a global content and technology company, to facilitate the legal hackathon for over 50 of their summer vacation scheme students. 

The students were given the opportunity to experience the benefits of GenAI by addressing legal issues which many lawyers face in practice every day. This is advantageous as they begin their legal careers in the midst of technology disrupting the legal sector.

Anna Browne, Head of Innovation and Legal Technology at Trowers, commented: "Generative AI offers huge potential benefits for our practice and our clients. Partnering with Thomson Reuters on hackathons like this is valuable as we continue to assess the opportunities and challenges Gen AI presents and we begin to explore the potential use cases of Gen AI with our next generation of lawyers.  Enabling our lawyers of tomorrow to experience using these tools early on is crucial, as we consider how best to integrate this technology into the way we deliver our services." 

Pablo Arredondo, Vice President, CoCounsel at Thomson Reuters commented: “Despite all the excitement and progress to date, we are just scratching the surface of what large language models can do to improve the practice of law.  We partnered with Trowers & Hamlins to help the next generation of lawyers explore novel use cases. Thomson Reuters’ recent report showed the vast majority of law firms believe this technology will have impact over the next five years. We agree, and look forward to helping drive that impact.”

The Challenge

During the legal hackathon, organised by the Innovation and Legal Technology teams at Trowers & Hamlins and Thomson Reuters, participants were tasked with navigating the complexities of a merger between two companies and ensuring that the new entity leverages the strengths of both companies to offer a competitive and appealing office space solution in London. 

The students were challenged to analyse and report on documents relating to the merger using Gen AI. The students used CoCounsel to extract relevant information from the documents and draft both a report and an email to hypothetical clients with advice summarising the key issues. The students worked with the Trowers Innovation team and Thomson Reuters during the hackathon to materialise data insights from the document reviews and build these out on dashboards within the firm's TrowersEvolve portals. 

Judging process 

Each group presented their solutions to the judging panel which consisted of Trowers & Hamlins and Thomson Reuters experts: Anna Browne, Head of Innovation and Legal Technology, Victoria Robertson, Partner, Commercial practice and Innovation Partner Champion, Janet Scoones, Director of Information and Knowledge Management, and Ben Firth, Director of Sales and Customer Success. 

The teams were evaluated based on their use of of GenAI, data and their presentation of their solution. 

Winning solutions

There was a winning solution from each cohort of vacation scheme candidates:  

• Scheme 1 – Katie Mitocariu, Abigail Billingham, Alex Grazier, and Laylaa Mahmood were tasked with reviewing and reporting on commercial documents using CoCounsel and were selected for the quality of their solution and their excellent teamwork and collaboration.
• Scheme 2 – Kirsty Ludlam, Cerys Bool, Jessica Holland and Olivia Pearce won using a Corporate CoCounsel use case and were recognised by the judging panel in particular for their clear use of data and drafting of advice.