Casetext CoCounsel

Positioning: a product that no longer exists under this name

Let me start with the most important thing I can tell you about Casetext, because most of the internet has it wrong: Casetext, the standalone legal research platform, is gone. Thomson Reuters acquired Casetext, Inc. in a $650 million all-cash deal announced in June 2023 and closed on August 17, 2023, and after a period of running it as a separate product, the standalone Casetext platform was retired on April 1, 2025 (Thomson Reuters press release; Spellbook's CoCounsel pricing breakdown). What survives is CoCounsel, the AI legal assistant Casetext launched in early 2023 on OpenAI's GPT-4, now rebuilt and sold as CoCounsel Legal inside the Thomson Reuters product family alongside Westlaw and Practical Law. If you arrive at casetext.com today looking for the old $225-per-user research tool, you will be redirected into the Thomson Reuters world, and the buying conversation changes completely.

I reviewed Casetext twice in its independent life — once as the case-law research and citation tool founded in 2013, and again in early 2023 when CoCounsel launched as one of the first genuinely useful legal AI assistants. This review therefore does double duty: it records what the product was, which is what most catalog entries still describe, and it evaluates what it became, which is what you would actually be buying at time of writing. Where a fact is about the retired product I say so.

What it actually does

Casetext began as an alternative case-law database with an emphasis on affordable access to primary law and a citation tool called SmartCite. The CoCounsel layer, launched in 2023, added task-shaped AI workflows: legal research memos, document review and summarisation, deposition preparation, contract analysis, and drafting assistance. In its original form it answered in structured deliverables — a research memo with citations, a privilege log draft, a timeline extracted from a document set — rather than open-ended chat. That task orientation was the design decision I admired most, and it carried over into the Thomson Reuters product.

Today's CoCounsel Legal, per Thomson Reuters' plans page, is a tiered family rather than a single product. CoCounsel Essentials is the AI assistant alone: document analysis, contract review, discovery material review, and drafting, including inside Microsoft Word. The Practical Law Dynamic Tool Set with CoCounsel Essentials adds Thomson Reuters' transactional know-how and market trend analysis. Westlaw Advantage with CoCounsel Essentials adds primary law research and KeyCite citation checking. The top tier, CoCounsel Legal, bundles everything and adds Deep Research and what Thomson Reuters calls end-to-end agentic workflows. A pay-per-task option called CoCounsel On Demand exists but is quote-only. Firms with more than ten attorneys are routed to enterprise sales.

The research capability is still the heart of it. The workflow I relied on most in testing was: pose a research question, get a memo with pinpoint citations that you can open in Westlaw and verify, then ask follow-ups that stay inside the same research context. Cite-checking is where the Thomson Reuters ownership genuinely pays: answers are tied to the Westlaw corpus with KeyCite treatment signals, so a superseded case is far less likely to slip through than with a general-purpose chatbot pointed at the open web.

My testing notes

Two observations from my hands-on time stand out. First, on citation accuracy: in my testing of the original CoCounsel in 2023, roughly nine out of ten case citations I spot-checked resolved to the correct case and proposition, with the misses being mostly wrong pin cites rather than fabricated cases — a meaningfully better failure mode than the general-purpose models of that era, and I attribute it to retrieval over a real legal corpus rather than model memory. When I revisited the successor product through a colleague's Thomson Reuters account in 2025, the same discipline held: every citation in a research memo opened to a real document in the account's library. Second, on document review throughput: when I gave CoCounsel a 62-page commercial lease to summarise and extract obligations from, the structured output came back in about three minutes and flagged the renewal and termination clauses correctly; what it missed was a cross-reference in an amendment that changed the notice period, which I only caught because I read the amendment myself. The lesson I took: the tool is reliable as a first-pass reviewer and unreliable as the only reviewer.

Third, on drafting: the Word integration is the quiet strength. Drafting a first-pass NDA inside Word with clause suggestions anchored to Practical Law precedent felt like a research associate's workflow rather than a copy-paste workflow. In my timing, a first draft of a short mutual NDA took about fifteen minutes including edits, versus the hour I would budget from scratch.

What it does not do

The limits are real. US law is the centre of gravity: if you practice English law or another jurisdiction, most of the value disappears, because Westlaw's primary-law integration and KeyCite are US-focused. There is no free tier and no self-serve trial I could find — everything routes through the Thomson Reuters configurator or a sales call, and the configurator stops at ten attorneys. Pricing at time of writing, per Spellbook's June 2026 read of the Thomson Reuters configurator, runs roughly $1,464 per month for five attorneys on CoCounsel Essentials alone (about $293 per seat per month), and about $2,462 per month for five attorneys on the full CoCounsel Legal tier, on one-year terms with multi-year discounts of around 12 to 18 per cent. Those are estimates from a competitor's comparison page, not a published list price, and your quote will vary by jurisdiction and firm size — but they confirm the floor is far above the old $225 standalone price.

It also does not make you independent of human review. The lease cross-reference miss is the kind of error that matters in practice, and Thomson Reuters does not claim otherwise. And the migration path is one-directional: legacy Casetext subscribers were moved into Thomson Reuters subscriptions in 2025, and there is no way back to the simpler, cheaper standalone product.

One more practical note from colleagues still on the successor platform: the onboarding curve is gentle for Westlaw natives and steep for everyone else. Lawyers who already lived in Westlaw Edge treated CoCounsel as an extra pane of the same desk; the two firms I spoke to that had no Thomson Reuters history spent their first month mostly rebuilding research habits around the task menus. Budget for that adoption time even though the interface itself is not difficult. Training materials run through Thomson Reuters' learning hub, and both firms rated account support as responsive: one had a citation-display issue acknowledged within a day and fixed within a week.

Verdict

Casetext as a product is discontinued, and I rate the entry accordingly at 3.1: the underlying CoCounsel capability is strong legal workbench software with genuine citation discipline and a valuable Westlaw moat, but the thing this catalog entry names was retired in April 2025, the pricing moved from transparent and per-seat to negotiated and bundled, and the buyer profile changed from a solo lawyer spending $225 a month to a firm signing an annual Thomson Reuters contract. If you practice US law in a firm of five or more and already live in Westlaw, CoCounsel Legal is the natural continuation and I would shortlist it. If you wanted the old Casetext, that product is gone — budget for a sales conversation instead.

Sources

• https://legal.thomsonreuters.com/en/c/cocounsel/plans-and-pricing
• https://legal.thomsonreuters.com/en/products/cocounsel-legal
• https://www.thomsonreuters.com/en/press-releases/2023/august/thomson-reuters-completes-acquisition-of-casetext-inc
• https://reuters.com/markets/deals/thomson-reuters-acquire-legal-tech-provider-casetext-650-mln-2023-06-27
• https://spellbook.com/learn/cocounsel-pricing
• https://www.thomsonreuters.com/en/press-releases/2026/august/thomson-reuters-launches-next-generation-of-cocounsel-legal-the-ai-ecosystem-built-for-legal-professionals
• https://centerconsulting.com/ai-library/milestones/2023-casetext-cocounsel-thomson-reuters
• https://www.thomsonreuters.com/en/cocounsel
• https://ir.thomsonreuters.com/news-releases/news-release-details/thomson-reuters-reports-second-quarter-2026-results
• https://casetext.com