Thomson Reuters announced this morning that it’s partnering with DeepJudge, a Swiss-founded startup created by ex-Google AI researchers, to bring more search capabilities to the CoCounsel Legal product.
The value proposition is fairly simple. DeepJudge offers, in the words of Raghu Ramanathan, president of TR’s Legal Professionals group, “breakthrough contextual enterprise search that unleashes the full power of a firm’s internal intelligence.” In more practical terms, the company seeks to solve the problem of every associate who’s ever spent three hours looking for “that motion we filed in the Johnson case… or was it the Jensen case?” For the record, it was the Armstrong case and it was a different area of law and in Kentucky.
Law firms sit upon mountains of institutional knowledge — briefs, memos, research — that might as well be buried in a landfill for all the good it does at 1 a.m. on a Saturday. DeepJudge intends to assist the lawyers in finding those pearls of relevant research found in “Final_Memo_V8_REAL_FINAL.docx,” which is, in fact, not the final version. Years ago, a senior partner told our assembled first-year class that “plagiarism is your friend” and that nothing should go out the door without drawing lessons from the accumulated knowledge of our predecessors at the firm. Our firm, we were told, saw so much further because we stood on the shoulders of giants.
And an unobstructed harbor view, but mostly the shoulders of giants.
SKILLS.law recently ranked DeepJudge the #1 most recommended legal AI tool, a testament to how mastering the firm’s internal library is a widespread pain point.
Paulina Grnarova, DeepJudge’s CEO and co-founder, put it well: “What sets firms apart is how they leverage their unique assets — their expertise and the know-how and work product derived from it.” Clients spent millions and millions generating that corpus of work product. It would be nice if the next generation could actually find it and avoid reinventing the wheel next time.
Especially when it’s the same client who paid for it five years ago.
“Combined with TR’s trusted content, this gives law firms a complete view of insights for any legal question,” Grnarova continued. Being able to instantly surface every piece of work your firm has ever done on, say, Delaware appraisal rights while simultaneously accessing the latest case law and secondary source guidance from the Thomson Reuters database is genuinely useful. It takes expensive fishing expeditions through the document management system that could last hours and delivers results in minutes, giving the associate everything they needed to compile to start working in earnest.
We’re in the race for context now. The models aren’t getting any better no matter what their creators say while stumping for another infusion of cash they aren’t making. That leaves everyone applying these models searching for better results with better data. TR has an extensive library of external materials, DeepJudge improves access to internal materials. There you go.
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. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.
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