CoCounsel Legal Pricing, Tiers, and AI: The Thomson Reuters Casetext Successor
What each of the four CoCounsel tiers actually bundles, why Thomson Reuters publishes a rate for Westlaw but not for CoCounsel, and what former Casetext subscribers are really being asked to pay.
How courts have ruled
Sample results, illustrative only. Informational research, not legal advice. Verify every citation.
In short
CoCounsel Legal is Thomson Reuters's legal AI assistant and the product line that absorbed Casetext, which was acquired in August 2023 for 650 million dollars and shut down as a standalone product on April 1, 2025. Thomson Reuters sells it in four configurations: CoCounsel Legal, Westlaw Advantage with CoCounsel Essentials, Practical Law Dynamic Tool Set with CoCounsel Essentials, and CoCounsel Essentials. As of July 2026 it publishes no rate for any of them, and firms above 10 attorneys are routed to sales. The only published figure in the whole lineup is Westlaw Advantage bought on its own, at 256.75 dollars per user per month for a single circuit and 399.75 dollars for all states plus federal. Because the top CoCounsel Legal tier contains full Westlaw Advantage access, that number is a sensible floor to negotiate from. If the part you actually need is finding the on-point case, Cases does that for a published 29 dollars per month. This is informational research, not legal advice.
Last updated July 2026
The four ways Thomson Reuters sells it
What each CoCounsel tier bundles
The lineup is easier to read once you notice the pattern: two of the four are CoCounsel Essentials welded onto a content platform, one is Essentials on its own, and one is everything. What changes between them is not the AI, it is which library the AI is allowed to reason over.
| Tier | Best for | What it bundles | Published price |
|---|---|---|---|
| CoCounsel Legal | Firms that want research, drafting, and document analysis in one subscription. | Full access to Westlaw Advantage and the Practical Law Dynamic Tool Set, plus every CoCounsel Essentials capability, agentic Deep Research, and an expert-created prompt library. | Not published |
| Westlaw Advantage with CoCounsel Essentials | Litigators whose core need is primary-law research with AI on top. | Westlaw Advantage primary law, Deep Research using custom-trained agentic AI, and the Litigation Document Analyzer for complaint review. | Not published |
| Practical Law Dynamic Tool Set with CoCounsel Essentials | Transactional and in-house teams working from know-how rather than case law. | Agentic workflows over Practical Law expert content, dynamic search and comparison tooling, plus document review and drafting. | Not published |
| CoCounsel Essentials | Teams that already have research covered and want the AI work product layer. | Tabular document analysis, clause drafting and revision, contract playbooks, deposition preparation, knowledge search, and a Microsoft Word integration. A free trial can be requested. | Not published |
Tier names and contents are read from the Thomson Reuters CoCounsel Legal plans page as of July 2026. Every one of the four routes to a pricing link rather than showing a rate, and firms with more than 10 attorneys are directed to a sales representative.
Published, reported, and guessed
What you can actually verify about CoCounsel pricing
Almost every article about CoCounsel pricing repeats a range without saying where it came from. Here is the same information sorted by whether a vendor page will confirm it, because that distinction is the whole difference between a number you can hold Thomson Reuters to and a number that was somebody else's negotiated deal.
| What | Figure | Status | Where it comes from |
|---|---|---|---|
| Westlaw Advantage, single-circuit coverage | 256.75 dollars per user per month | Published | Thomson Reuters sales site, Westlaw Advantage plans and pricing |
| Westlaw Advantage, all states plus federal | 399.75 dollars per user per month | Published | Thomson Reuters sales site, Westlaw Advantage plans and pricing |
| 2-year term discount | 12 percent | Published | Same page, stated saving |
| 3-year term discount | 18 percent | Published | Same page, stated saving |
| CoCounsel Legal | No figure shown | Quote only | Plans page links to pricing, routes to sales above 10 attorneys |
| Westlaw Advantage with CoCounsel Essentials | 639 dollars per user per month | Reported | Third-party write-ups, not confirmed on a Thomson Reuters page |
| CoCounsel range across plans | 104 to 639 dollars per user per month | Reported | Aggregator estimates, treat as somebody else's negotiated deal |
| Casetext, before it closed | 65 to 100 dollars per seat per month | Historical | Casetext's own published self-serve pricing until April 2025 |
The useful move that falls out of this table: CoCounsel Legal includes full Westlaw Advantage, and Westlaw Advantage on its own has a published small-firm rate. So before you take a CoCounsel quote at face value, price the component you can see. If a quote for the bundle lands far above the published cost of its largest included piece, you know exactly which part of the conversation to push on. Our CoCounsel cost breakdown works through the arithmetic, and Westlaw legal research covers the tier it sits on.
How a 65 dollar product became a quote
What happened to Casetext, and why it matters to the price
Thomson Reuters completed its acquisition of Casetext in August 2023 for 650 million dollars in cash. For roughly eighteen months not much changed, which is why a lot of write-ups still describe Casetext as having been quietly folded in. It was not folded in. The standalone product was shut down on April 1, 2025, and SmartCite, the citator Casetext users relied on, closed with it. There is no self-serve successor to SmartCite.
The technology lives on inside CoCounsel Legal, and on the engineering side that is a real continuation rather than a replacement. The commercial model is the part that did not survive. Casetext sold month to month with a price on the website, in the 65 to 100 dollars per seat range. CoCounsel sells in per-user tiers with no published rate and a sales conversation above ten attorneys. For a solo who signed up for a hundred dollar tool, that is not a version upgrade, it is a different category of purchase.
This is worth being precise about because so much competitor content gets it wrong. If you are reading a comparison written before April 2025 that talks about Casetext pricing in the present tense, everything downstream of that sentence is stale. Our write-up of the Casetext shutdown covers the timeline in full, and how to switch from Casetext is the practical migration guide.
Beyond the marketing page
What CoCounsel Legal actually does
Thomson Reuters positions CoCounsel Legal as the only legal AI that reasons from authoritative Westlaw primary law, Practical Law guidance, and an organization's own knowledge, under the trademarked phrase Fiduciary-Grade AI. Stripped of the branding, the pitch is that the model is grounded in content the vendor licenses rather than in whatever it scraped, which is a genuine architectural difference and the main reason a firm would pay incumbent prices for AI at all.
Plain-language requests with visible reasoning
You describe the task rather than construct a query, and the product shows its steps as it works. The visible chain matters more than it sounds: a research answer you cannot audit is a research answer you cannot file.
Deep Research, the agentic tier
Rather than answering one question, it plans a multi-step research task and executes each step. This is the capability that only appears on the higher tiers, and it is usually the reason a firm is looking at CoCounsel rather than at plain Westlaw.
Document analysis and drafting
Tabular analysis across a document set, clause drafting and revision, contract playbooks, deposition preparation, and a Microsoft Word integration. This is the CoCounsel Essentials feature set, and it is present in every tier.
Litigation Document Analyzer
Reviews filed litigation documents, complaints in particular, for issues and authority. It ships with the Westlaw Advantage bundles rather than with Essentials on its own.
Matter workspaces
Work is organized per matter rather than per chat, which is the small structural thing that decides whether a tool survives contact with an actual caseload.
Thomson Reuters cites a Forrester study in which 64 percent of respondents agreed CoCounsel Legal helped reduce risk, and reports about a one third average reduction in time spent on document review, research, and drafting. That is vendor-commissioned research and should be read as such, but the direction is consistent with what most firms report after adopting any competent AI drafting layer.
Match the tier to the practice
Who should buy CoCounsel, and who is buying too much
Firms that draft as much as they research
If contract review, clause libraries, and first drafts are a real part of the week, the Essentials feature set is doing work that a search tool cannot do. This is the clearest case for buying CoCounsel rather than research alone.
Litigation teams already committed to Westlaw
If you are renewing Westlaw Advantage anyway, the incremental question is narrow: what does adding Essentials cost over the published Advantage rate. Framed that way it is an add-on decision, not a platform decision, and it is much easier to negotiate.
Transactional and in-house teams
The Practical Law Dynamic Tool Set bundle is the one aimed at you. If your work runs on know-how and templates rather than on precedent, paying for full case law research you rarely open is the classic overspend in this market.
Former Casetext subscribers doing mostly case-finding
This is the group the migration hurt most. If you bought Casetext at 65 to 100 dollars a seat to find cases, the tier you are being pointed at is several times that and most of the difference is drafting tooling you did not ask for. Pricing the finding half separately is usually the honest answer.
Solos who need a citator more than an assistant
CoCounsel does not solve the good-law problem on its own; the citator is KeyCite, and it arrives with the Westlaw content rather than with the AI. If validation is your real need, work out which citator you are actually buying before you compare AI features.
Unbundle the two jobs
If what you lost with Casetext was case search
Legal research is two jobs that incumbents sell as one: finding the on-point authority, and confirming it is still good law. Casetext bundled both cheaply, which is why its closure left a gap that the CoCounsel tiers do not cleanly fill at the same price point. You do not have to buy both halves from one vendor.
For the finding half, Cases takes a legal question in plain English and returns on-point US federal and state precedents as headnote cards, each with the holding surfaced and a real citation. Pricing is published at 29 dollars per month, with no sales call and no quote, which is roughly where Casetext sat before it closed. For the validating half, run the citation through whatever citator you have, which for a lot of US lawyers is the Authority Check included with a bar-provided Fastcase or vLex library. Our citator comparison lays out every option and what each costs.
We are not claiming this replaces CoCounsel Legal. It does not draft your contracts, it does not analyze a document set, and we are not a citator. What it does is the search half, at a published price, and if you are verifying a citation somebody else produced, the case citation checker walks through how to confirm a case is real before you file it. For the head-to-head, our CoCounsel alternative comparison concedes where Thomson Reuters genuinely wins.
Questions buyers ask
CoCounsel Legal, answered
What is CoCounsel Legal?
CoCounsel Legal is Thomson Reuters's legal AI assistant, and the product line that absorbed Casetext after the 2023 acquisition. Thomson Reuters describes it as reasoning from authoritative Westlaw primary law, Practical Law guidance, and your own organization's knowledge, under the marketing term Fiduciary-Grade AI. In practice it takes a request in plain language, shows its reasoning step by step, runs agentic Deep Research, and returns a drafted work product with citations attached.
Is CoCounsel included in Westlaw?
Not automatically, and the naming makes this genuinely confusing. A plain Westlaw subscription does not include CoCounsel. Thomson Reuters sells them as separate line items that overlap: CoCounsel Legal contains full access to Westlaw Advantage, while Westlaw Advantage with CoCounsel Essentials is a different, smaller bundle that pairs Westlaw research with the Essentials feature set. So CoCounsel can include Westlaw, Westlaw can include some CoCounsel, and which direction you buy from changes the price.
Is CoCounsel part of Westlaw?
They are separate products from the same vendor that are increasingly sold together. CoCounsel came from Casetext, which Thomson Reuters bought in 2023; Westlaw is the legacy research platform. Today the AI capabilities are branded CoCounsel and the primary law is branded Westlaw, and the top CoCounsel Legal tier packages both. You can still buy Westlaw without any CoCounsel component, and CoCounsel Essentials without full Westlaw research.
How much does CoCounsel Legal cost?
Thomson Reuters does not publish a rate for any CoCounsel tier. The plans page lists all four offerings by name and sends you to a pricing link, and firms with more than 10 attorneys are routed to a sales representative. The only published number anywhere in the lineup is Westlaw Advantage sold on its own, at 256.75 dollars per user per month for a single circuit and 399.75 dollars for all states plus federal. Since CoCounsel Legal contains Westlaw Advantage, that figure is a reasonable floor.
What happened to Casetext?
Thomson Reuters completed its acquisition of Casetext in August 2023 for 650 million dollars in cash, ran it largely unchanged for about eighteen months, then shut the standalone product down on April 1, 2025. SmartCite, the Casetext citator, closed with it and has no self-serve successor. The technology continues inside CoCounsel Legal. What did not continue was the commercial model: Casetext was month-to-month with published per-seat pricing, and the CoCounsel tiers are neither.
Is CoCounsel worth it?
It depends entirely on whether you need the drafting and document analysis layer or only the research. If your team reviews contracts, builds deposition outlines, and drafts from templates all week, an AI layer sitting on licensed Westlaw and Practical Law content is a defensible spend. If your actual daily job is finding the on-point case and citing it, you are buying a large amount of work product tooling to get at a search box, and the tier pricing will reflect that.
Is CoCounsel free?
No. There is no free tier. Thomson Reuters offers a trial request on CoCounsel Essentials, and Westlaw Advantage carries a trial as well, but the products are subscription only and pricing above 10 attorneys is quoted rather than listed. If budget is the constraint, check your state bar first, because a large number of US bars include a Fastcase or vLex library in dues you already pay, and that comes with case law search and the Authority Check citator.
What is the difference between CoCounsel and CoCounsel Legal?
CoCounsel is the umbrella brand across Thomson Reuters, covering CoCounsel Legal, CoCounsel Essentials, CoCounsel Tax, and CoCounsel Audit. CoCounsel Legal is the specific top legal tier, the one that bundles Westlaw Advantage and the Practical Law Dynamic Tool Set alongside the AI capabilities. When somebody says they use CoCounsel without qualifying it, they usually mean Essentials or the old Casetext product, not the full Legal tier.
Keep researching
Find the case without the quote
Ask your question in plain English and get on-point US precedents with a real citation. Published pricing from 29 dollars per month, no sales call. Informational research, not legal advice, always verify the citation.