By June Ramli
Perth, March 24: Thomson Reuters is launching its new AI-powered legal research platform, Westlaw Advantage Australia, this week, and is calling on universities to start training law students on “professional-grade” legal AI rather than keeping them away from it.
Speaking to DailyStraits.com, Catherine Roberts, a trained lawyer and CoCounsel leader at Thomson Reuters, said the company’s AI tools are built specifically for high‑stakes legal work and are designed to speed up research and drafting, not replace lawyers’ judgment.
“We see CoCounsel as like an intelligence layer that sits across the entire workflow of legal practice,” Roberts said.
“Accuracy is the non‑negotiable on the table… everything has to be 100 per cent accurate.”
Roberts said Westlaw Advantage and its underlying AI assistant, CoCounsel, are grounded in authoritative, editorially enhanced legal content owned and curated by Thomson Reuters, rather than scraped from the open internet.
That, she argued, is a key distinction from consumer AI tools that have produced hallucinated court cases and incorrect citations.
CoCounsel can accelerate research, assist with drafting and flag jurisdictional nuances, but Roberts stressed that it is there to support – not substitute – human reasoning.
“It compresses those hours of database searching into minutes, but the learning really starts after that moment in time,” she said.
“The student still needs to read and synthesise the output of the AI and verify why the AI is making those comments and suggestions.”
The platform is built to make that verification easier: when the AI produces an answer, users can click straight through to the underlying case, legislation or commentary.
Roberts said this verification‑first design makes the technology suitable for law schools, many of which currently subscribe to Westlaw Classic but either ban or heavily restrict the use of AI in assignments.
“I would say that they do need to take the tools that they will be using when they’re out in practice,” she said.
“Academic institutions should be showing them how to use these products safely and securely, so they can understand how to use it in practice.”
According to Roberts, universities that embrace trusted, domain‑specific AI will be better placed to “equip their students for the future” and differentiate themselves in an increasingly competitive education market.
On the product side, Vishal Bali, Managing Director for Asia Pacific and Emerging Markets at Thomson Reuters, said Westlaw Advantage is built on what the company calls “fiduciary‑grade agentic AI”.
He said the system understands a research question, autonomously builds legal research strategies, explains its own reasoning and shows the sources it relies on – all while working only with Thomson Reuters’ vetted content.
“Westlaw Advantage is actually a deep research product that enables legal professionals, using agentic AI, to handle full research questions,” Bali said.
He added that research tasks which might previously have taken multiple hours can now be completed in “six to seven minutes”.
Thomson Reuters’ tax and compliance product, One Source Plus, uses the same AI approach to help organisations manage complex, multi‑jurisdictional tax obligations.
It aims to deliver “touchless compliance” by automating the process from importing data through to ready‑to‑review returns, while ensuring calculations comply with local law.
Both Roberts and Bali rejected the idea that these tools are about cutting out professionals.
“This is not designed to eliminate people. This is designed to make them more productive,” Bali said, emphasising the company’s “human in the loop” stance on AI.
Roberts said AI is already reshaping roles inside law firms, with new positions emerging in areas such as AI strategy, data science and behavioural science, rather than simply reducing headcount.
Westlaw Advantage Australia becomes commercially available on March 26 under Thomson Reuters’ existing subscription model.
Existing Westlaw customers will be able to upgrade from Westlaw Classic to Westlaw Advantage, while retaining classic functionality inside the new platform.
One Source Plus is expected to roll out for Australian customers in the second quarter of this year.
Bali said demand is expected across large law firms, mid‑tier and small practices, as well as enterprise tax teams operating across multiple countries.
“The beauty about agentic AI is that it can cut across everywhere,” he said.
For Australian law schools and students already using Westlaw Classic, the question now is how quickly they will follow their counterparts in practice and step into an AI‑enabled future of legal work.
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