Ask Abe vs CoCounsel (formerly Casetext)

Ask Abe is an innovative platform designed to be your personal assistant for legal education and research. With its AI-powered technology, users can effortlessly navigate through the intricacies of legal principles and discover comprehensive answers to their legal queries. Ask Abe features a conversational AI capable of providing detailed responses with direct citations to legislation, ensuring users can trust the information provided.

Ask Abe is committed to democratizing legal knowledge, making it an accessible asset to every individual. This commitment is reflected in keeping the tool free of charge indefinitely and striving towards global expansion. The platform's creators envision a world where legal literacy is not a privilege but a common resource that enables every citizen to confidently understand and engage with legal systems for a more informed and fair society.

CoCounsel is a legal research and drafting assistant now owned by Thomson Reuters after acquiring Casetext in 2023 for $650 million. It runs case law research, document review, contract analysis, and guided drafting grounded in Westlaw and Practical Law rather than the open web.

Standalone legal chatbots pull from generic training data. CoCounsel ties every answer to Thomson Reuters authority, which means citations trace back to Westlaw primary law and Practical Law guidance. The 2026 next-generation release adds Workspaces for matter-specific context, Brief Builder for agentic motion drafting, and a firm-intelligence layer for encoding internal expertise.

Litigation teams, transactional lawyers, and in-house counsel at firms already paying for Westlaw use it to cut research time and review contracts at scale. Pricing is sales-led with no public rate card, and the tool delivers the most value when bundled with an existing Westlaw subscription.