As AI becomes part of everyday legal work, lawyers remain responsible for what they submit, making verifiable sources, transparent reasoning and professional oversight critical.
Purpose-built legal AI can support tasks ranging from case research to document analysis and drafting. (Photos: Shutterstock, Thomson Reuters)
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15 Oct 2026 09:42AM
While artificial intelligence (AI) can reduce the time spent on legal work, those gains cannot come at the expense of quality, accountability or professional judgment.
A Singapore Courts guide on the use of generative AI, in effect since Oct 1, 2024, states that lawyers remain responsible for ensuring materials put before the courts are independently verified, accurate, true and appropriate. Court users remain responsible for any AI-generated content they submit. The guide also warns that generative AI can produce answers that appear authoritative but are inaccurate or fabricated, including invented cases and statutes.
A non-binding Ministry of Law guide published in March 2026 similarly states that legal professionals remain accountable for their work, regardless of whether generative AI is used. It recommends matching the level of human oversight to the nature and risk of the task, verifying outputs against authoritative sources and taking additional precautions when confidential information is involved.
That makes the ability to verify AI-generated work especially important for legal professionals. Thomson Reuters’ CoCounsel Legal, for example, is designed to make its sources and steps visible for review, allowing lawyers to check its outputs and understand how it arrived at its conclusions. The tool draws on established legal content from Westlaw and Practical Law, Thomson Reuters’ legal research and guidance platforms, alongside an organisation’s own expert knowledge.
IMPLEMENTING AI WITHOUT COMPROMISING QUALITY
CoCounsel Legal is built around what Thomson Reuters calls a “fiduciary-grade AI” approach, comprising four elements: grounding outputs in established legal sources, designing the system around legal reasoning and workflows, making its sources and steps visible for review, and operating within a secure, governed environment.
The company also describes CoCounsel Legal as being engineered to work “at the level of a senior associate”. According to the company, this means the system can develop an approach, plan and carry out multiple steps across legal research, analysis and drafting.
“CoCounsel Legal is governed by human-in-the-loop oversight for safety, accuracy and accountability,” said Ms Maureen Chong, vice president and market lead (Asia), Thomson Reuters. “It is designed to reduce the time a lawyer spends on routine work while keeping them in control of the analysis and final output.”
GROUNDING LEGAL AI IN HUMAN EXPERTISE
CoCounsel Legal was developed with input from lawyers, AI specialists and data scientists. “Across Westlaw and Practical Law, 1,200 lawyer-writers help keep the underlying legal content current and relevant,” said Ms Chong.
That work is backed by Thomson Reuters’ broader investment in AI. The company invests more than US$200 million (S$255 million) annually in AI products and works with Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, Anthropic, Google Cloud and OpenAI.
Privacy and data security are also built into CoCounsel Legal, which Thomson Reuters says is designed to meet the confidentiality and compliance requirements of legal practice. CoCounsel is covered by data security and AI governance standards, including SOC 2 Type II and ISO/IEC 42001:2023.
“The value of legal AI is not simply in helping lawyers work faster, but in giving them more capacity for work that requires judgment, strategy and an understanding of the client,” said Ms Chong. “The lawyer still needs to be able to stand behind the work and remain accountable for the outcome.”
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