TORONTO, Oct. 24, 2024 /PRNewswire/ — Thomson Reuters (TSX/NYSE: TRI), a global content and technology company, today launched its AI for Justice Legal Aid program, including both the Legal Innovators Incubator and subsidized pricing for legal nonprofits.

“As the most powerful technology to emerge in our lifetimes, generative AI represents the greatest potential to meaningfully tackle the justice gap and to bring about a more efficient, effective, and equitable justice system for everyone,” said Laura Safdie, Vice President, Artificial Intelligence GTM & Global Affairs for Thomson Reuters. “We have the opportunity and the responsibility to ensure as many legal aid organizations as possible can access and effectively use game-changing AI solutions like CoCounsel, Thomson Reuters is fully committed to this mission. Our LSO Legal Innovators Incubator will provide these organizations not just the technology itself, but also the vital dedicated training and support to derive the greatest possible value from it.”

The inaugural Legal Innovators Incubator pilot class includes The Innocence Center, National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, and Lawyers Alliance for New York, among others. Participating organizations receive complimentary access to Thomson Reuters CoCounsel GenAI legal assistant, as well as close partnership and training to develop the GenAI use cases that will most benefit their organizations and clients. The resulting playbooks will also be used to empower the entire legal aid community to amplify their impact through AI.

Thomson Reuters has been incorporating AI into its platform for three decades, and so has seen firsthand the benefits of that investment. In addition, it has a longstanding history of serving, supporting, and helping strengthen the justice system worldwide, by collaborating with organizations including Lawyers Without Borders, the Justice Technology Association, and Equal Justice Works. Recent new programs to support courts include a joint initiative between the Thomson Reuters Institute and the National Center for State Courts (NCSC) to create the AI Policy Consortium for Law and Courts. The initiative aims to help court leaders and legal professionals understand generative AI’s risks and opportunities, and to create a forum for the exchange of views among various actors in the justice system.

Supercharging legal aid organizations

For the Legal Innovators Incubator pilot class, Thomson Reuters selected a group of 501(c)(3) organizations offering legal services to low-income individuals in the United States. Participants will have free access for one year to CoCounsel, which leverages OpenAI, and can complete complicated legal workstreams in a fraction of the time. CoCounsel can empower these organizations to better serve more people, in more places, more quickly. OpenAI also donated API credits to support the Legal Innovators Incubator program.

“As an early CoCounsel user, I’ve experienced the transformation this powerful tool can bring about for an organization. From summarizing voluminous records to finding inconsistencies between witnesses, all in a matter of minutes, the power is endless,” said Michael Semanchik, Executive Director of The Innocence Center. “I’m so glad to have been part of the evolution of this game-changing solution, and I’m honored that The Innocence Center is part of the first Legal Innovators Incubator class. In just two weeks of using its latest generation, CoCounsel 2.0, I’ve been able to apply CoCounsel even more broadly to advance our work. For instance, it completed 10 grant applications for me in about three hours. Normally I’d spend an entire day on just one. I’m excited to share our experiences with and learn from the other organizations in this first class.”

Bringing generative AI to the courts

Thomson Reuters has also been working to understand and develop use cases where CoCounsel can have the most impact within all levels of the judiciary. Using CoCounsel can markedly increase both the quality of work for the courts and the rate at which it can be completed. And the CoCounsel team is running a focused program on custom generative AI applications for the courts, built through a deeply collaborative process. The first project, with the Massachusetts Court of Appeals, resulted in the development of a prototype system for synthesizing input from a wide range of specialized documents involved in emergency eviction appeals, like what a clerk would prepare for a judge. And a project with Pennsylvania courts, exploring the use of AI to write bench memos, is in development.