Legal professionals in the UAE share their experience testing CoCounsel at Thomson Reuters’ AI Skills Challenges. CoCounsel is a generative artificial intelligence (AI) assistant that draws critical insights from trusted source materials.
AI’s value proposition of improved efficiency and automation has attracted significant interest across all industries. AI can save professionals up to four hours per week, according to the Future of Professionals 2024 report. This equates to an estimated 200 hours saved per professional.
The AI Skills Challenge demonstrated how Thomson Reuters’ genAI assistant can improve productivity gains for legal professionals.
Thomson Reuters hosted a total of three AI Skills Challenges in the UAE. Two in Dubai for law firms and in-house counsel, and one AI Skills Challenge in Abu Dhabi for in-house counsel. Unlocking time for higher value work is an attractive premise for the legal industry. The AI Skills Challenges demonstrated how quickly CoCounsel can complete work processes.
In-house counsel score ‘summarise’ skill highly
In-house counsel at both AI Skills Challenges were impressed by CoCounsel’s summarise skill.
CoCounsel’s ‘summarise’ skill can condense extensive legal documents into succinct, actionable summaries. The skill can be used in conjunction with the timeline skill. ‘Timeline’ in CoCounsel can provide chronological sequences of cases and events.
Rania Telfah is the General Counsel for Khalifa University in Dubai. She took part in the AI Skills Challenge, and tested CoCounsel’s ‘summarise’ skill.
“I actually liked the analytical skills it has, the review and amendment that it can propose amendments to you, as well as the fact that you can upload multiple documents to be compared against your policies, procedures and your own templates.”
“It shows you where you were not compliant or if you’re in a different position than your standard position,” said Rania.
Generative AI-powered legal technologies will be mainstream in five years. In fact, 56% of all professionals surveyed for the Future of Professionals 2024 report believe so. The explosion of data in the legal industry will lead to increased tech adoption.
Salma Abdussalam, Legal Counsel at Lean Technologies, actively participated in the challenge. She identified that CoCounsel’s summarise skill would enable her to unlock time for high-value work.
CoCounsel’s summarise skill is designed to read files word-for-word. It summarises long, complicated content quickly. Users have three options to choose from depending on what is required. CoCounsel’s summarise can produce a brief, detailed, or comprehensive recap and overview.
“The summarise tool breaks down the time that you need to spend pouring over all these documents,” said Salma.
“You just upload it then you give it about one minute, two minutes max. It brings out all the key takeaways that you need and sometimes it breaks down into practical tips as well.”
Ensaf Al Allaf, Legal Manager at TECOM Group believes the summarise skill is one of the CoCounsel he would lean on the most at work.
“Reviewing documents of probably one hundred pages of an email chain is the most time consuming for all lawyers,” said Ensaf.
“So I believe it’s a life changer and it’s going to really save time.”
CoCounsel users can get faster insights and key differences at-a-glance. The tabular summary highlights key differences clearly, and users can streamline document review.
Adrian King, Director of Legal at Majid Al Futtaim Properties agrees, after taking the opportunity to test CoCounsel.
“Every now again, we have contentious matters where you have to go through a large swathe of documentation to pick out certain things.”
“If you think about the timing, the resources could be better put to other functions and other tasks.”
“It was very impressive how it [CoCounsel] did it,” said Adrian.
Rizwan Rasool, Senior Legal Counsel at Al Ghurair appreciated CoCounsel’s multi-language capabilities.
“It reviews and summarises documentation in a language that is different from English and then generates results quite accurately, to a considerable degree of accuracy,” said Rizwan.
Data extraction with AI saves time
Legal professionals at the AI Skills Challenge in Dubai found CoCounsel’s data extraction skill saves time.
CoCounsel can search and locate specific data points in a document, then show the user where each instance was found within the document. For contract queries, users can ask CoCounsel to search for, highlight and extract parties in a contract, obligations of stakeholders, or renewal dates.
Sonya Syan, Head of Knowledge Management at Al Tamimi vouched for CoCounsel’s data extraction skill during the challenge.
“It’s amazing in terms of time saving, in terms of running several questions and queries at once on the same platform,” said Sonya.
“It revolutionises the way that a lawyer can interact with the documents in front of them.”
CoCounsel has plenty to offer legal practice, according to Ajai Ramakrishnan, Senior Associate at Hadef & Partners.
“It would add a lot of value, save clients money, save lawyers time,” Ajai added.
CoCounsel users can highlight key areas of interest and focus directly on information that matters most. Users can highlight key areas of interest from files and receive structured, refined chronology ready for review.
For Dimitriy Mednikov, Associate at Galadari Advocates & Legal Consultants, the data extraction along with the CoCounsel summarise skill is efficient.
“I asked CoCounsel to extract all the examples in a big contract where a specific term was used and provide a summary of each clause where that term was used, which was very helpful,” Dimitriy concluded.
Legal professionals who use CoCounsel can invest more time in value-added work. This is because it helps them complete tasks in minutes, as opposed to hours. Find out more about LegalTech trends and more on Thomson Reuters Legal Insight.
