Thomson Reuters launches agentic AI for legal and tax work

Thomson Reuters launched agentic AI systems on June 2, 2025, starting with CoCounsel for tax, audit, and accounting professionals, to perform complex tasks with transparency and precision. This development follows the acquisition of Materia, an AI copilot startup specializing in agentic systems.

Agentic AI plans, reasons, acts, and reacts within real workflows, differing from AI assistants that simply respond to prompts. Thomson Reuters agents are refined by experts to align with professional standards, ensuring human oversight for validation and decisions.

David Wong, Chief Product Officer at Thomson Reuters, stated, “Agentic AI isn’t a marketing buzzword. It’s a new blueprint for how complex work gets done.” He added that the AI breaks complex tasks into steps and escalates for human input when needed.

The Thomson Reuters agentic platform has been in development for over a year and is now integrated into legal, tax, risk, and compliance platforms. This approach re-architects core product experiences, utilizing features and content from platforms like Checkpoint, Westlaw, and Practical Law.

Wong said, “We’re not just rebranding AI assistants. We’re engineering full agentic systems — backed by trusted content, custom-trained models, and real domain expertise.”

CoCounsel, the first live agentic experience, is designed for tax and accounting professionals. It automates tasks, such as client file review and memo drafting, connecting firm knowledge, Checkpoint, IRS code, and internal documents into an AI-guided workspace.

Kevin Merlini, Vice President of Product at Thomson Reuters and former CEO of Materia, stated, “This isn’t GenAI in a prettier wrapper — it’s a fully integrated, intelligent system built to do the work.”

Olivier Godement, Head of Product, Platform at OpenAI, said, “As more platforms launch agentic capabilities, OpenAI is thrilled to power use cases like the ones Thomson Reuters is bringing to its vast ecosystem of professional users.”

Rich Marlatt, Chief Information Officer at BLISS 1041, said that CoCounsel reduced the review time for residency and filing codes across 36 states from half a week to under an hour. “We built our own templates in CoCounsel for 1041 returns across 50 states and now due to agentic research and reusable templates, we can feed client-specific factors and instantly understand how each state handles them,” Marlatt said.

Launching next is Ready to Review, an agentic tax prep application built on the GoSystem Tax Engine that drafts returns, adapts to feedback, and resolves diagnostics independently.

Thomson Reuters plans to expand agentic systems across legal, risk, and compliance domains, including intelligent workflows for drafting, policy generation, deposition analysis, and risk assessments. These systems are:

• Built for goal-based execution across multi-step legal and compliance tasks.
• Designed with task-specific tool orchestration to engage both Thomson Reuters and third-party platforms.
• Governed by human-in-the-loop oversight for safety, accuracy, and accountability.
• Powered by transparent reasoning and traceable sourcing.
• Refined with custom LLMs trained by in-house legal, tax, and compliance experts.

Thomson Reuters possesses assets, including over 20 billion documents, 15 petabytes of data, and 500 content assets. The company has 4,500 subject matter experts and 180 AI engineers and serves over 500,000 customers, including the Fortune 100 and the U.S. federal court system. Deep integrations include OpenAI, Anthropic, AWS, and Google. The enterprise-grade platform has ISO 42001 certification and a secure, zero-retention architecture.

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