Thomson Reuters Unveils AI for Legal Justice Aid Program for Legal Aid Organizations

On Thursday, Thomson Reuters announced the launch of its AI for Legal Justice Aid program, which includes a partnership with select nonprofit legal aid organizations as well as the release of a subsidized version of its generative artificial intelligence assistant CoCounsel.

The partnership, called the Legal Innovators Incubator Program, includes participation from 15 various 501(c) legal aid organizations such as The Innocence Center, Lawyers Alliance for New York, and the Northwest Justice Project, among others. These first 15 will be given gen AI guidance and training as well as free access to CoCounsel through the program.

Thomson Reuters is also subsidizing its CoCounsel offerings for legal aid organizations, specifically CoCounsel Core, which is the AI assistant without a Westlaw subscription, and CoCounsel Drafting. CoCounsel underwent a major upgrade in August and was updated with new features earlier this month.

The AI for Legal Justice Aid program as a whole aims to make CoCounsel more accessible to legal aid organizations by limiting the financial and educational barriers.

“Many of these orgs are just like still trying to get all their stuff online and out of paper files. … It’s really challenging to be in a situation where you have not nearly enough resources to serve the needs of the community,” Laura Safdie, Thomson Reuters vice president of artificial intelligence, told Legaltech News. “AI can be exceptionally impactful, like right now, [but] it also can sometimes feel intimidating. … I realized that we needed two things in a really kind of structured way. One is to make this more operationally accessible and … to make it more financially accessible.”

Safdie explained that for habeas petitions, for example, legal aid organizations can use CoCounsel to sift through hours worth of documents and perform tasks such as identifying inconsistencies in eyewitness statements, citing those inconsistencies, drafting deposition questions, and more.

The legal aid organizations chosen for the program were selected based on a range of factors, including the variety of communities and clients they serve, location, how they receive funding and whether its federal funding or via the legal services corporation, in addition to other criteria.

As the partnership progresses, Thomson Reuters hopes to provide public resources and playbooks to legal aid organizations to enable them to use AI in legal processes such as asylum applications and habeas petitions.

“We are experts in the technology, but we are not experts in every practice of law, and so we really want to work with the people who are experts in the communities they serve and the legal areas that they work in, and develop these kind of playbooks that make it much, much easier for a broader swath of the legal aid community to adopt,” Safdie said.

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