CoCounsel is a legal research and review assistant, now part of Thomson Reuters, and it does that job. It does not run intake, chase unbilled hours, or track filing deadlines, which is where most small and mid-size firms actually lose time.
Casetext and CoCounsel come up constantly in legal AI evaluations, and firms often end up comparing them against tools that do something entirely different. It is worth being precise about the categories before comparing features.
The short version: one makes your lawyers faster when they ask it a question, the other stops repetitive work reaching them at all.
Casetext's CoCounsel is a legal AI assistant focused on research, document review, and preparation work. Thomson Reuters acquired Casetext in 2023, and the product sits in that stack alongside Westlaw.
It is a research and review tool, and firms that use it for that generally get what they paid for. If you are comparing it against us on case law research, it is the more direct product and we would tell you the same on a call.
A research assistant finishes when the research is done. In a small or mid-size firm, that is the point at which most of the expensive administrative work starts. That gap is the reason most firms start looking for a Casetext alternative in the first place.
None of this is research. Making research faster does not reduce any of it.
The structural difference is who holds the work. An assistant waits to be asked and hands back an output. An agent owns a workflow and runs it whether or not anyone opens the app that morning.
| Research assistant | Operational agent | |
|---|---|---|
| Triggered by | A lawyer asking | An event: enquiry, deadline, unbilled entry |
| Output | A memo or summary | A completed step in your system |
| Writes to Clio | No | Yes, with approval |
| Runs out of hours | No | Yes |
| Best at | Depth on a legal question | Consistency on a repeated process |
These are complements more often than substitutes. Several firms run a research tool and operational agents together, and that is a sensible arrangement.
Choose a research assistant if your attorneys are spending real hours on case law, document review, or deposition prep, and that is the constraint on billable output.
Choose operational agents if the sentence you would say out loud is "we lose clients because we are slow to respond", or "we write off hours every month", or "administration is eating partner time".
Choose both if you have the volume for it. They do not overlap much.
We deploy one agent at a time in four to six weeks, against your real matters, with sign-off before production. Pricing is published: discovery $1,000 to $3,000, build from $5,000, management $1,500 to $5,000 a month.
Yash Vibhandik is co-founder of 100xforce. He works directly with operations leaders and founders to design and deploy AI agents across e-commerce, healthcare, legal, accounting, real estate, recruitment, and SaaS workflows. He writes about what actually works (and what does not) when AI is deployed inside real teams.
Start with a 90-minute discovery session. We map your workflows, design the agents, and show you what it looks like before you commit to anything.