Milestone indicators move from AI pilots to production systems and preview the next generation of Counsel Legal.
toronto – Thomson Reuters (TSX/Nasdaq: TRI), a global content and technology company, announced that one million professionals in 107 countries have chosen to consult the company’s professional-grade AI technology. This milestone reflects the broader transition underway in high-stakes industries including legal, risk, compliance, tax, accounting, audit and global trade professionals. AI is moving from experiments to production. Rather than standalone tools, firms are incorporating AI directly into daily workflows where accuracy, sourcing and data protection are critical.
General-purpose AI can produce understandable answers. However, regulated professionals need AI that can withstand scrutiny in courtrooms, audits and regulatory proceedings. These systems need to retrieve authoritative sources, verify citations, and apply jurisdiction-specific rules.
Counsel meets these requirements, powering intelligent capabilities across the company’s portfolio — including Counsel Legal, Counsel Tax and Audit, and ONESOURCE+. It integrates into tools professionals are already using, analyzes over 175 years of refined licensed content, incorporates expert-developed validation logic, and provides structured, citation-supported output. Customer data remains secure and is not repurposed to train third-party models. More than 4,500 Thomson Reuters subject matter experts contribute to the validation and continuous refinement of CoCounsel’s results in the legal, tax and compliance domains.
“Professionals are no longer deciding whether to use AI. They are deciding which AI to trust when their reputations and their clients’ data are on the line,” said Steve Hasker, president and chief executive officer of Thomson Reuters. “Counsel is built for those moments when almost being right isn’t good enough. It’s based on decades of authentic content, validated by domain experts, and backed by a clear commitment that customer data stays theirs. That’s why 1 million professionals rely on CoCounsel.”
“When work matters, AI must be professional-grade. Professionals need systems that can complete sophisticated tasks within the standards they are accountable to every day. That’s the difference between Counsel and everything else,” added David Wong, Chief Product Officer, Thomson Reuters. “One million Counsel users in 100+ countries reflect a shared global consensus.”
Designed for regulated work.
Counsel’s adoption reflects design decisions tailored to the professional environment:
- Licensed, authentic content. Outputs are based on editorially refined legal and tax sources, public data has not been extracted.
- Expert validation. Domain experts design workflow logic and quality standards in areas where errors result.
- Workflow integration. Counsel works within research, drafting, and compliance platforms rather than as standalone interfaces, enabling work to be performed within established professional systems.
- Data limitations by design. Thomson Reuters does not reuse customer input to train third-party models or generate output for other users.
- Multi-model architecture with governance. Thomson Reuters works with leading frontier models, including Anthropic’s Claude, OpenAI’s GPT and Google’s Gemini, with proprietary AI technology and structured data sets to maintain performance controls and system-level monitoring.
From the tool to the execution layer
In legal, tax, audit, and compliance workflows, AI must retrieve relevant authority, analyze structured and unstructured information, apply jurisdictional rules, and generate results that are predictable. This requires a vertically integrated system.
Counsel serves as an execution layer embedded within professional platforms, combining foundational models, proprietary AI engineering, licensed content, and domain expertise to complete end-to-end multistep workflows.
The next generation of Counsel Legal, which is entering beta soon, is designed around performing conversational tasks. Soon, legal professionals at law firms and corporations will be able to articulate an objective as they would brief a colleague. Counsel will create a plan, obtain authority from Westlaw and practical law, locate relevant user documents and precedent, analyze materials, verify that references remain in good law, and deliver structured work products within a single system. Additional next-generation capabilities within Counsel Tax and ONESOURCE+ are planned for post-2026.
As AI becomes embedded in professional systems, the defining question is not how quickly it can produce text, but whether it can support work with legal or financial consequences.
With 1 million professionals relying on Counsel, Thomson Reuters is not joining the AI race. It’s explaining how AI works in the world’s most high-stakes work.
About Thomson Reuters
Thomson Reuters (TSX/Nasdaq: TRI) informs the way forward by bringing together the trusted content and technology that people and organizations need to make the right decisions. The company serves professionals in legal, tax, audit, accounting, compliance, government and media. Its products combine highly specialized software and insights to empower professionals with the data, intelligence, and solutions needed to make informed decisions and help organizations achieve fairness, truth, and transparency. Reuters, part of Thomson Reuters, is a global provider of trusted journalism and news.
For more information, visit thomsonreuters.com/cocounsel.
