Legal AI And The ‘New And Improved Detergent’ Problem

Thomson Reuters announced a rebuilt CoCounsel last week, and to show it off they took over a two-story industrial loft space on West 38th Street. Demos and choice customer quotes flashed along the screens wrapping around us. One unknown user called it “F***ing. Fantastic,” and full credit to Thomson Reuters for highlighting that review. Seriously, if I told you just a few years ago that there would be a legal vendor that would advertise its successes with a customer testimonial of “F***ing. Fantastic,” and gave you a million guesses, you would still not come up with Thomson Reuters. It’s just not the vibe of the century-plus old legal industry mainstay. Yet it’s important that they did, because this review might be the best sales pitch they could’ve brought to this event. Because… how do you explain an AI advancement to an audience of lawyers? This isn’t just a Thomson Reuters challenge either — this cuts across the industry. AI is moving so fast that it approaches malpractice for a vendor to allow any significant capability improvement slide by without a splashy announcement. And yet, how do you explain these advances in words? Is Opus 4.8 better than Opus 4.7? Yes. Can I clearly articulate why? Nope. But it clearly is. I can tell whenever I ping it for something. Artificial intelligence improvements are sort of like Justice Stewart and porn… you know it when you see it. And, I guess when you think about it “F***ing. Fantastic” works for both. And this conundrum facing OpenAI and Anthropic obviously carries over to the products built atop these frontier models. CoCounsel used to take an attorney request, dive into the extensive Thomson Reuters moat of proprietary resources, and deliver quality output. The new CoCounsel… takes attorney requests, dives into the extensive Thomson Reuters moat of proprietary resources, and delivers quality output. But, like, better. This may sound like a criticism of the product, but it’s not. The new CoCounsel does its job better than ever. But legal tech has encountered a “New-and-Improved-Detergent” problem. You know how every detergent commercial — except for the ones saying “hey, now your kid probably won’t eat us” — follows the same arc. We watch as the new formula gets out the whole grass stain, and we’re expected to forget that last year’s commercial for the old formula also got out that grass stain. It’s hard to convince the customer that the product is better when you’re showing it do the exact same thing it’s always done. And we all know the new formula really DOES get out the stain better. We bought last year’s version and it worked really well, but still occasionally dropped a hallucination. Uh oh, we’re mixing the examples now. This is why you have to separate your laundry first. I guess the moral of this story is that lawyers need to embrace that we’re in an era of radical-incremental improvement. From the tech perspective, these changes are radical, but from the user’s vantage point it’s just making the output slightly better. There’s a story about how Steve Jobs pressured his engineers to shave 10 seconds off the original Macintosh boot time, explaining that it would save somebody’s life because multiplying millions of people, booting every day, 10 seconds apiece results in multiple human lifetimes a year. That’s sort of where we are with this stuff. The fact that Thomson Reuters made a fairly extensive pivot to the underlying architecture of this product — to the extent they call it “a complete rebuild” — and yet we only see it performing the same tasks a bit better sums up the challenge. Lawyers need to tamp down their cynicism and not get hung up on “what’s new,” and view these announcements more like turning a document. It’s not hard for a lawyer to understand that “Version_11_FINAL_TO_FILE_2” is better than the last one and that the 10 hours billed to make seven word changes actually was worth it on the road to perfection, so why is it hard to grasp that step improvements to tech are worth it? Which brings us back to the importance of the customer testimonial. When there’s a technical improvement on par with Steve Jobs saving 10 seconds, an advance that can only be felt rather than articulated, hearing about that feeling from other users is the selling point that matters. Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news.