Fiduciary-grade AI, built for Canadian law
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AI for high-stakes legal work needs a higher bar. Thomson Reuters’ CoCounsel Legal Canada clears it, pairing real speed with authoritative Canadian content and a fiduciary-grade standard that keeps professional judgment where it belongs
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ASK A Canadian lawyer about generative AI a year ago and the conversation would have stayed mostly hypothetical. Ask now and it has sharpened into something more practical, and more pointed.
“The Canadian legal market is moving from AI experimentation to AI adoption,” says Thomas Sander, vice president of product management at Thomson Reuters. “For many firms, the question is no longer whether generative AI will play a role, but which tools can be trusted for professional use.”
CoCounsel Legal Canada was engineered to answer that query. Thomson Reuters’ integrated platform couples advanced AI with the authority of Westlaw Advantage Canada and Practical Law Canada, along with the capability to draw on a firm’s own work product.
In times of constant change, the world looks to professionals to lead. But as complexity grows, even professionals risk being overwhelmed. Thomson Reuters clarifies today’s complex landscape with AI and technology, deep subject-matter expertise, and content the world has trusted for over 150 years – giving professionals the confidence to know today, navigate tomorrow, and lead a fast-evolving world. We empower professionals to reduce inefficiencies so they can do more of the work that matters, act decisively to add greater value for critical stakeholders, and anticipate future challenges to face the unexpected. As the future arrives faster than ever, we’re standing alongside professionals, ready to fulfill our purpose: to inform the way forward.
The pressure firms
now face
78% of corporate clients consider AI-enabled quality improvements very important or essential, yet just 6% say most providers deliver
“We’re on a trajectory toward increasingly agentic AI”
Thomas Sander,
Thomson Reuters
Overall, it is, in Sander’s words, “purpose-built for the way Canadian legal professionals actually work,” with an emphasis on “Canadian.”
Where the hours come back It’s increasingly clear that general-purpose AI tools weren’t built to meet the standard the profession demands, but the difference a bespoke version could make is significant: Thomson Reuters’ Future of Professionals 2025 report estimates that adoption of AI will free up close to 240 hours a year for the average legal professional.
With the Thomson Reuters team understanding what’s at stake, CoCounsel Legal goes after that time where the squeeze is felt most. Take a complicated legal question. With Deep Research, a lawyer can hand it off and get back a reasoned, sourced answer that pulls from both Westlaw’s primary law and Practical Law’s applied guidance in a single pass. Every report links to the resources behind it, so lawyers can verify the reasoning and follow best practices.
On document-heavy matters, tabular analysis works through a large volume of files at once, surfacing risk across several issues and producing draft reports at a scale that used to demand a serious commitment of people and time. Drafting, meanwhile, happens where lawyers already work. Inside Microsoft Word, CoCounsel builds high-quality first drafts from Practical Law Canada content and a firm’s own precedents.
“The platform is designed to help lawyers research, draft, and
analyze at substantially greater speed without compromising on quality,” Sander says. “Our Canadian customer data shows users are achieving more than double their speed on document review and contract drafting with CoCounsel Legal.”
Setting that pace also never comes at the cost of home-grown authority. A tool grounded in American or generic data would miss the distinctions that matter here: CoCounsel Legal Canada reasons specifically from Canadian content, so what comes back reflects the Canadian context, every time.
Fiduciary-grade AI: a higher bar for high-stakes work Coming back to the question of which tools lawyers can lean on, CoCounsel Legal is firmly in line with a new, more robust standard. Fiduciary-grade AI, which Thomson Reuters formally introduced in May, is in Sander’s words “a higher benchmark for AI used in professional contexts where accuracy, accountability, and trust are critical.”
“It defines how AI should perform when professional liability is on the line, representing our standard for a tool that supports work in high-stakes professions, whether in the courtroom or the boardroom.”
Thomson Reuters frames fiduciary-grade AI as an operational standard rather than a slogan, and it involves four pillars. First, the substance must come from authoritative, curated content, not whatever a model can pull from the open web. Second, privacy and security are treated as structural, designed into the architecture rather than layered on after the fact. Third, the system is shaped by credentialled experts who do the work themselves, not simply qualified-on-paper people who are asked to review it. And fourth, every material output must trace back to a source the user can locate and defend.
Of those four, the one Sander underscores is the content beneath the model. If you put a capable model on top of unreliable or non-authoritative sources, you risk receiving answers that are incorrect but sound so fluent that the errors are difficult to detect. He stresses again that CoCounsel Legal rests on the power duo of Westlaw and Practical Law, content kept current by more than 1,200 attorney editors, with KeyCite tracking whether a case is still good law. That editorial infrastructure, he argues, “is what makes the results defensible rather than merely plausible.”
A solution purpose-built for those, like lawyers, who operate under duties of care and regulatory oversight is a significant differentiator, Sander adds, because it provides the certainty their work requires. It embodies the fiduciary-grade AI standard, a commitment users can take to the bank.
“Before professionals operating in high-precision fields can fully embrace deeper AI integration into their everyday workflows, they need to know that the AI they are using stands up to scrutiny and that its outputs are reliable and verifiable.”
The lawyer still decides Even with a tool built on fiduciary-grade AI like CoCounsel Legal, the intention is never to replace professional judgment. It’s a point Sander is keen to make, confronting a common concern among lawyers as AI advances.
“The goal is to compress the time between intake of an issue and a lawyer being able to make that final judgment,” he explains, pointing to a common commercial litigation scenario as an example.
Say a lawyer needs to comb through a stack of contracts for relevant information and potential liabilities. CoCounsel Legal runs the full set against multiple issues at once, with every finding linked back to source documents. That reviewable trail is sufficient to allow the lawyer – or a regulator, court, or auditor – to evaluate the basis for the output and determine whether the result is reliable and defensible.
“CoCounsel Legal makes the process extremely efficient, and each step in its planning, reasoning, and execution is visible to the user,” Sander says. “Ultimately the lawyer still decides which issues to run, evaluates the results, and makes the recommendation to the client.”
Published August 31, 2026
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“For many firms, the question is no longer whether generative AI will play a role, but which tools can be trusted for professional use”
Thomas Sander,
Thomson Reuters
62% of professionals say professional-grade AI would factor into accepting a new role
The bar professionals now expect
96% say their AI must safeguard confidential data, 94% require verified authoritative content, and 90% need outputs they can explain and defend
Yet 41% lack access to professional-grade tools that meet those standards
Source: Future of Professionals 2026 report
Source: Future of Professionals 2026 report
From first matter to firm-wide The capabilities of AI are well understood at this juncture. What sets Thomson Reuters apart is that it’s seeking to move beyond those table stakes and carve out a niche: developing bespoke solutions exclusively for Canadian lawyers. Sander hears first-hand about the measurable difference it’s making for customers, and the constant refrain is simple: CoCounsel Legal makes them a better lawyer.
Sander urges those who have yet to explore CoCounsel Legal to start by presenting it with a recently concluded matter, where the outcome is known. Watch CoCounsel Legal work its magic and measure its output against the original. Sander is
willing to bet that after that exercise, they’ll grasp its full potential.
“Seeing how CoCounsel Legal does work that historically took days of manual effort in mere minutes wins over even the biggest skeptics,” he says. “It’s so powerful, and adoption becomes easy once users understand what it can do for them.”
And users never have to go it alone. Headquartered in Toronto, Thomson Reuters provides a strong support network including a robust customer success team that works with firms directly. Sander frames that guidance as every bit as important as the tool itself – and one more reason that now is the time to make the leap, if you haven’t already.
“We’re on a trajectory toward increasingly agentic AI – systems that respond to a plain-language question by forming a theory, executing a plan, and delivering work product – and that’s the direction Thomson Reuters is building toward,” he says. “One thing that’s true today and will be true years from now is that no matter how far technology advances, having a solution embedded with authoritative Canadian legal content will remain essential for a fiduciary-grade AI solution.”