On March 15, leading global law firm and long-time Casetext customer DLA Piper announced it will implement CoCounsel, our first-of-its-kind AI legal assistant, in their practice. CoCounsel is built on GPT-4, the most advanced large language model from OpenAI and the first AI to pass the bar exam.
DLA Piper, which ranks third in the Am Law 200 and Global 200, currently advises many of the world’s most prominent companies and governments on the legal and compliance risks of creating and deploying AI systems. The firm received early access to CoCounsel and has been using it since September 2022.
Bennett Borden, Chief Data Scientist of the firm’s Artificial Intelligence and Data Analytics Practice, commented on the benefits of CoCounsel. “With CoCounsel, our attorneys will be able to enhance their services and create more agile and focused workflows by leveraging advanced purpose-built, AI technologies,” said Borden.
“Casetext’s CoCounsel is changing how the law is practiced by automating critical, time-intensive tasks and freeing our lawyers to focus on the most impactful aspects of practice,” said Frank Ryan, DLA Piper’s Americas Chair. “No firm wants to be the last one to implement this game-changing technology.
The firm’s use of CoCounsel is indicative of the strength of the product—it amplifies the capabilities of lawyers by increasing their efficiency and enhancing the quality of their work product. Other law firms already using CoCounsel in beta include Am Law 100 firms Sheppard Mullin, Ogeltree Deakins, and O’Melveny.
With increasing adoption among law firms, CoCounsel is poised to transform the practice of law. Because the tool has the potential to save up to 60% of attorneys’ time, users will have significantly more hours for more complex, strategic work, accelerating and deepening their skills and freeing them to serve more clients.
Impact on the business of law is likely to be more gradual, but just as profound. While decreasing the time it takes to complete work could reduce the number of billable hours, it could also mean increased rates for enhanced work quality and more specialized expertise. It’s a win-win: Attorneys can become more agile and have greater freedom to focus on work they enjoy more, while clients—potentially quite a few more of them—benefit from higher-quality representation and faster turnaround times.
Read the full announcement from DLA Piper here.
Rapidly draft common legal letters and emails.
How this skill works
Specify the recipient, topic, and tone of the correspondence you want.
CoCounsel will produce a draft.
Chat back and forth with CoCounsel to edit the draft.
Get answers to your research questions, with explanations and supporting sources.
How this skill works
Enter a question or issue, along with relevant facts such as jurisdiction, area of law, etc.
CoCounsel will retrieve relevant legal resources and provide an answer with explanation and supporting sources.
Behind the scenes, Conduct Research generates multiple queries using keyword search, terms and connectors, boolean, and Parallel Search to identify the on-point case law, statutes, and regulations, reads and analyzes the search results, and outputs a summary of its findings (i.e. an answer to the question), along with the supporting sources and applicable excerpts.
Get answers to your research questions, with explanations and supporting sources.
How this skill works
Enter a question or issue, along with relevant facts such as jurisdiction, area of law, etc.
CoCounsel will retrieve relevant legal resources and provide an answer with explanation and supporting sources.
Behind the scenes, Conduct Research generates multiple queries using keyword search, terms and connectors, boolean, and Parallel Search to identify the on-point case law, statutes, and regulations, reads and analyzes the search results, and outputs a summary of its findings (i.e. an answer to the question), along with the supporting sources and applicable excerpts.
Get a thorough deposition outline in no time, just by describing the deponent and what’s at issue.
How this skill works
Describe the deponent and what’s at issue in the case, and CoCounsel identifies multiple highly relevant topics to address in the deposition and drafts questions for each topic.
Refine topics by including specific areas of interest and get a thorough deposition outline.
Ask questions of contracts that are analyzed in a line-by-line review
How this skill works
Allows the user to upload a set of contracts and a set of questions
This skill will provide an answer to those questions for each contract, or, if the question is not relevant to the contract, provide that information as well
Upload up to 10 contracts at once
Ask up to 10 questions of each contract
Relevant results will hyperlink to identified passages in the corresponding contract
Get a list of all parts of a set of contracts that don’t comply with a set of policies.
How this skill works
Upload a set of contracts and then describe a policy or set of policies that the contracts should comply with, e.g. "contracts must contain a right to injunctive relief, not merely the right to seek injunctive relief."
CoCounsel will review your contracts and identify any contractual clauses relevant to the policy or policies you specified.
If there is any conflict between a contractual clause and a policy you described, CoCounsel will recommend a revised clause that complies with the relevant policy. It will also identify the risks presented by a clause that does not conform to the policy you described.
Get an overview of any document in straightforward, everyday language.
How this skill works
Upload a document–e.g. a legal memorandum, judicial opinion, or contract.
CoCounsel will summarize the document using everyday terminology.
Find all instances of relevant information in a database of documents.
How this skill works
Select a database and describe what you're looking for in detail, such as templates and precedents to use as a starting point for drafting documents, or specific clauses and provisions you'd like to include in new documents you're working on.
CoCounsel identifies and delivers every instance of what you're searching for, citing sources in the database for each instance.
Behind the scenes, CoCounsel generates multiple queries using keyword search, terms and connectors, boolean, and Parallel Search to identifiy the on-point passages from every document in the database, reads and analyzes the search results, and outputs a summary of its findings (i.e. an answer to the question), citing applicable excerpts in specific documents.
Get a list of all parts of a set of contracts that don’t comply with a set of policies.
Ask questions of contracts that are analyzed in a line-by-line review
Get a thorough deposition outline by describing the deponent and what’s at issue.
Get answers to your research questions, with explanations and supporting sources.