Brazilian lawyers will be the first in Latin America to use the new version of CoCounsel Legal, Thomson Reuters’ AI platform for legal work. The company announced it on 14 October, a year after launching the previous version in Portuguese in Brazil in October 2025. The new version is agentic: the lawyer describes the matter and the system plans the work, researches the sources and drafts with citations, drawing on Westlaw Brasil and Revista dos Tribunais content. Thomson Reuters expects it to be available in Brazil before the end of the month.
Rodrigo Hermida, the company’s vice-president of Legal Professionals for Latin America, attributes the priority to the size of the market. According to the Justiça em Números 2026 report by Brazil’s National Council of Justice (CNJ), cited by Hermida, 40.9 million new cases entered the Brazilian court system in 2025, the highest figure on record. The year closed with 75.5 million cases pending. According to the Brazilian Bar Association (OAB), more than 1.5 million lawyers handle that caseload.
Hermida also points to the Future of Professionals 2026 report, produced by Thomson Reuters itself from a Latin American sample concentrated in Brazil. According to the study, 84 per cent of legal professionals in the region use an AI tool at least once a week, but only 48 per cent have access to tools built specifically for professional work. Some 87 per cent see a gap between what they expect from AI and what it delivers. Two in three believe their firms will lose clients if they cannot show the value AI brings to their work, and 49.9 per cent expect that risk to materialise within the next two years.
The difference from the previous version lies in how work is assigned. Users previously had to choose a skill, define a workflow or write a detailed prompt, and the system delivered results task by task. Now the lawyer describes the case in plain language. The platform sets out an approach, searches authoritative sources in Thomson Reuters content and draws on the firm’s own documents and playbooks. It then drafts with citations and adjusts the analysis as the context changes.
The Brazilian version includes the same four features as the global launch, with local content:
Legal research: combines Westlaw Brasil with international Westlaw and Practical Law.
Workspaces: matter-specific spaces that retain documents, precedents and institutional knowledge across tasks.
Tabular Analysis: reviews up to 10,000 documents and answers up to 100 questions at once, with results linked to the source material.
Integrations: connections with document management systems and productivity tools.
Support will come from local Portuguese-speaking teams and the editors of Revista dos Tribunais.
For in-house legal teams and firms handling sensitive information, Thomson Reuters makes three commitments. Every citation links to its source. The system’s reasoning is visible so that lawyers can examine it. Clients’ confidential information is not used in outputs for third parties.
The new version of CoCounsel Legal is already available in the United Kingdom. Thomson Reuters expects to launch it before the end of October in Brazil, Australia, Canada, Singapore and the United Arab Emirates, and to extend it to more than 90 countries and territories during 2026.
On the same day, the company introduced an additional feature for the platform, Multinational Profile. It allows lawyers to research the law of more than 100 countries and territories in a single query. With it, they can compare legal requirements across jurisdictions, identify issues that require local counsel and trace each finding back to its source. Its rollout is narrower than the platform’s: it will be available during October only to clients in the United States, Europe, the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia. Neither the global announcement nor Hermida’s article mentions it for Brazil or any other Latin American market.
