AI Built for Law: Thomson Reuters CPO David Wong on why purpose-built tools matter in legal
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What is Thomson Reuters’ legal AI platform CoCounsel and why does it matter?
Welcome to Building AI Boston. Our guest today is David Wong, the Chief Product Officer at Thomson Reuters, one of the oldest and most established names in legal information. He leads Co-Counsel, their AI product, which recently hit 1 million users across 107 countries. He also just published a widely read piece in Fortune, laying out his framework for where legal AI is heading. Welcome to the show, David.
Thanks, Anna. Really happy to be here.
Yeah. So my joke is we swim in the same pool, but just a different end of it, right? And what that means is that we're both legal tech people and we're both in this sort of this cool and suddenly very popular space of legal technology, which is interesting. But whereas Describe has been around for three years, Thomson Reuters has been around for centuries. So we met just sort of through the LinkedIn universe of talking about all the cool things in legal tech. And I think we were discussing a little bit back and forth, the Fortune article, because we like to nerd out on these things. And, you know, one of the funny things I said to David is everybody knows what Thomson Reuters is. And the truth is, is maybe outside of legal, not everybody does.
So, David, give us a primer. Like, who are you and what do you guys do? Why are you so
important? Well, thanks for having me on the podcast. And I think what is true is that every lawyer knows who Thomson Reuters is, but not everybody, I think, in the U.S. does.
I'm a paralegal, so I knew exactly who you were and why you
were here. Lawyer or lawyer adjacent, right?
Yes.
But yeah, just a little bit about Townsend Reuters. We've been around for over 100 years, so not quite centuries, but over
100
years. And most people know about Townsend Reuters from Reuters, which is our news agency, which is a meaningful part of our business, but actually one of our smaller parts of the business. The vast majority of what we do is provide software and data and information to professionals. Professionals like lawyers, like accountants, tax professionals and risk professionals. So the biggest part of our business is legal information and legal software. We provide Westlaw, which is the preeminent legal research platform in the US and
in
Canada, the UK and Australia and a few other countries around the world. And we are in many ways the standard for legal research. If you look in the US, lawyers as well as courts and judges all use Westlaw as a basis for research for authoritative information on the law and on cases and on any places where you need to do research. And we've also been a leader in the application of technology to legal work. For many, many years, we have invested in and built software for lawyers. And AI is the latest phase of the work that we're doing. And so that's, as you mentioned, CoCounsel. CoCounsel, which is the legal AI, assistant legal AI platform that we are delivering to our customers and have had in the market for now for almost three or four years.
Yeah. And for the listeners out there, so that's a great primer. And before I got into legal tech, I too knew it through Reuters, right? Through the news sort of idea. But there's so much infrastructure and things that are happening in this space that are really important to everybody's life. You just maybe don't know it because it's happening sort of behind the scenes. And the legal space is a really good example of that. And also, on the other hand, and David, you're right in the thick of this, it's also presenting some really interesting challenges or sort of opportunities both for legal research or legal tech in general or the law in general, the fact that AI is coming in hot and strong. It's not like we've never seen disruption before from technology, right?
Anna has some good stories back from her paralegal days from when new technologies came in.
How does the “plan vs. execution” gap affect generic AI tools in legal work?
But what do you think people out there should understand why legal tech is being so sort of impacted or sort of getting so much attention with the idea of legal, excuse me, with AI coming into the space?
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is Thomson Reuters’ legal AI platform CoCounsel and why does it matter?
0:07–3:59
2
How does the “plan vs. execution” gap affect generic AI tools in legal work?
3:59–9:48
3
Why is choosing the wrong AI tool a bigger risk than hallucinations for lawyers?
9:48–13:44
4
What makes purpose‑built legal AI tools like CoCounsel and Descrybe different from generic models?
13:44–18:00
5
How did Thomson Reuters rebuild Westlaw on a generative‑AI foundation?
18:00–22:45
6
What is the PC‑software ecosystem analogy and how does it shape the future of legal AI?
22:45–27:17
7
How does Claude act as an orchestrator for specialist legal AI tools via MCP connectors?
27:17–30:57
8
What are the expected impacts of purpose‑built AI on access to justice and the legal market?
30:57–35:08