Ask an AI Lawyer vs CoCounsel (formerly Casetext)

Ask an AI Lawyer lets you submit legal questions online and get a written answer in about five minutes at no cost. You pick a country for jurisdiction context, describe your situation, and the site publishes the response under Latest Questions for anyone to read. It covers traffic law, family law, employment, landlord-tenant issues, tax, and business contracts.

Most legal research sites point you to articles or paid attorney directories. Ask an AI Lawyer runs your question through Deepseek reasoning models hosted on Groq and returns a direct answer instead of a reading list. The trade-off is visibility: answers are public, so you should not include personal details, and the site stresses this is general information, not licensed legal advice.

The service fits people who need a quick orientation on a legal topic before deciding whether to hire counsel. Category pages cover car accidents, insurance, personal injury, divorce, tax, and medical malpractice, which helps narrow the jurisdiction and topic before you submit.

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.