Product and intended use
Define the configuration, people, information and tasks being assessed.
Product and plan covered
Public claim only
Practical Law Australia is a subscription know-how and guidance service with five features named on the Australian features page, read 2026-09-27: Deep Research powered by agentic AI; Search and summarise with Generative AI; advanced efficiency tools (knowledge maps and cross-jurisdictional Q&A guides, neither described as AI); global content and local expertise; and integrations with other Thomson Reuters products. A curated In-house Centre collection is offered for corporate counsel. No plan tiers are published.
Ask: Which plan does our quote cover, are Deep Research and Search and Summarise included in it or licensed separately, and is the In-house Centre a separate entitlement?
Deployment model
Public claim only
The service is vendor-hosted and delivered through a browser, with Practical Law content also reachable inside HighQ and CoCounsel. No private cloud, on-premises or customer-tenanted option is described on any page read, and no hosting location is stated.
Ask: Where is the Practical Law Australia application hosted, and is any in-country or dedicated-tenancy option available for Australian subscribers?
What the two AI features do
Public claim only
Deep Research is described in three statements: 'Ask a complex legal question and the AI agent plans the research steps needed to answer it'; 'It retrieves the most relevant Practical Law guidance and templates, delivering a clear, cited research report you can act on immediately'; and that it is 'Fiduciary-Grade AI(TM) that is grounded in content written and maintained by 700+ expert lawyer writers globally'. Search and Summarise is described as taking a natural-language question and returning 'a synthesised summary with links to the most relevant Practical Law resources'. Both are illustrated with product screenshots on the features page.
Ask: Demonstrate both features on our own practice areas, and confirm whether Deep Research retrieves anything beyond Practical Law guidance and templates.
Jurisdictional coverage
Public claim only
The content set is Australian practice guidance maintained by an Australian team monitoring over 500 sources daily, with the products index stating resources are 'updated within 48hrs of a material change in the law'. The overview page names expanded Australian guidance for Intellectual Property and Technology and for Data Privacy and Cybersecurity, and lists practice areas including banking and finance, commercial, commercial real estate, company law, competition and consumer protection, corporate transactions, dispute resolution, employment, and insolvency and restructuring. Cross-jurisdictional comparison is offered through Q&A guides written by international and local experts.
Ask: Which Australian jurisdictions and practice areas are in our subscription, and does Deep Research restrict itself to Australian resources when the question is about Australian law?
Vendor content directing how AI describes the product
Not confirmed
Checked deliberately on 2026-09-27. No page or block directing how AI models, assistants or crawlers should describe the product was found on the Practical Law features or overview pages, the Australian AI trust campaign page, the Australian AI solutions page or the products index, and the Australian site map taken in the previous phase (33 URLs) surfaced no /llms.txt, /ai-info or equivalent path. The vendor does use the trademarked framing 'Fiduciary-Grade AI(TM)' across those pages; that framing is marketing and is not adopted here.
Ask: Does Thomson Reuters publish any machine-directed guidance (for example llms.txt or an AI-information page) about how its Australian products should be described?
Data, controls and requirements
Compare the actual configuration with firm, client and jurisdiction requirements, supported by evidence.
Client authority and professional responsibility
Not confirmed
A Deep Research or Search and Summarise question can carry client facts, yet no published document addresses confidentiality of what a user types, client consent, or the firm's professional obligations for this product. No subscription agreement or product terms for Practical Law Australia are published on the Australian site; the footer links only website terms of use and the global privacy statement, and the global privacy statement expressly does not apply where Thomson Reuters acts as a processor for a customer.
Ask: Which signed document governs confidentiality of the questions our lawyers type into Deep Research, and does it permit client facts to be entered?
Foundation-model providers
Not confirmed
Neither the features page nor the overview page names a foundation model or provider for Deep Research or Search and Summarise. The features page says Search and Summarise uses 'large-language models trained by the knowledge and expertise of more than 700 expert lawyer writers', which describes training on the vendor's editorial content rather than naming a provider. Separately, the vendor announced on 24 August 2026 a proprietary model, Thomson, which it states was post-trained drawing on content from Westlaw, Practical Law, Checkpoint and Reuters, and whose stated first deployment is Tabular Analysis in CoCounsel Legal. Nothing published says which model serves Practical Law's own AI features. The vendor's CoCounsel pages name OpenAI and Google as third-party AI partners for CoCounsel; that is not stated for Practical Law.
Ask: Name every model and provider used by Practical Law Deep Research and Search and Summarise, the country each inference endpoint sits in, and confirm whether the Thomson model is used for either feature.
Subprocessors
Not confirmed
No subprocessor list, register or schedule for Practical Law Australia was found. The global privacy statement says personal information is shared with affiliates within the Thomson Reuters group and with 'third-party service providers and partners that support our business, such as our content and other partners, vendors and subcontractors, analytics providers', without naming them, and applies to Thomson Reuters as controller rather than as processor for a customer.
Ask: Provide the current dated subprocessor register for Practical Law Australia including any model provider, with entity, country, purpose, data received, and our notice and objection rights.
Training on customer content
Public claim only
Nothing published addresses training on Practical Law customer questions specifically. The Australian AI solutions page makes a suite-level claim under 'Security and privacy': 'Highest standards of data security and privacy, and where no third-party large language models (LLMs) can access customer data'. The vendor's CoCounsel FAQ answers the training question directly but for CoCounsel: 'No. Thomson Reuters does not use your content or prompts to train or enhance CoCounsel or any third-party LLMs', adding that its third-party AI partner is contractually prohibited from using customer data to train their models. The frontier-model press release states the standard as one where 'customer data is not used to train the model without explicit consent'. None of these is a contractual document and none names Practical Law.
Ask: Confirm in writing that questions typed into Practical Law Deep Research and Search and Summarise are not used to train or improve any model, and identify the clause that says so.
Feedback and usage data
Not confirmed
No statement about in-product feedback, ratings or usage analytics was found for Practical Law. For CoCounsel the vendor states it 'analyses de-identified usage metrics to monitor account health, forecast capacity needs, and inform the product roadmap'; that answer is about CoCounsel. The global privacy statement permits the use of artificial intelligence, machine learning, automation and analytics to 'provide, improve, personalize, secure, or support our Services' where Thomson Reuters is controller.
Ask: Is Practical Law query text or feedback used to improve the AI features or the content set, and can that be switched off for our subscription?
Retention of questions, reports and logs
Not confirmed
No retention period is published for Practical Law questions, Deep Research reports or query logs. The global privacy statement says personal information is retained 'as required by our enterprise records retention schedule, which varies by Service, business function, country, record classes, and record types', without publishing the schedule, and applies where Thomson Reuters is controller. For CoCounsel the vendor states retention is configurable at organisation level with a client manager; that is stated for CoCounsel.
Ask: State the default and configurable retention for Practical Law question text, Deep Research reports and query logs, and whether we can set it to zero.
Deletion and certified erasure
Not confirmed
No deletion commitment for Practical Law customer content was found. The global privacy statement gives individuals rights to access, correct, complete and delete personal information subject to exceptions and only where Thomson Reuters acts as controller, through a data subject rights portal. For CoCounsel the vendor states users can delete their own content and prompts in the product at any time; that is stated for CoCounsel. No certified-erasure statement exists for either.
Ask: On termination, what is deleted, in what period, and will you certify in writing that Practical Law question text and reports have been erased including from backups?
Vendor and third-party access to content
Not confirmed
No statement about who at Thomson Reuters can read Practical Law question text was found. The Australian AI solutions page claims at suite level that 'no third-party large language models (LLMs) can access customer data', and the CoCounsel FAQ describes 'systemic controls to turn off third parties' abuse-monitoring solutions to ensure there is no human access to Thomson Reuters customers' data'; that statement is about CoCounsel. The global privacy statement limits access only in general terms and applies to controller processing.
Ask: Who inside Thomson Reuters, and in which countries, can read the questions our lawyers type into Practical Law, under what approval, and can we obtain those access logs?
Access control, single sign-on and audit
Not confirmed
No single sign-on, SCIM, multi-factor authentication, role model or audit-log capability is described for Practical Law Australia on any page read. The site publishes a general product logins page only.
Ask: Does Practical Law Australia support SAML single sign-on, SCIM provisioning and enforced multi-factor authentication, and can we export an audit log of Deep Research use by user?
Encryption in transit and at rest
Not confirmed
No encryption detail is published for Practical Law. The vendor publishes specifics for CoCounsel — 'Data is encrypted in transit using TLS 1.2 and at rest with AES 256' and that all interactions with generative AI providers use zero-retention APIs under the Thomson Reuters identity — which is stated for CoCounsel, not Practical Law. The global privacy statement says only that technical and organisational measures are implemented and that absolute security cannot be guaranteed.
Ask: Confirm the encryption standards, key management and any zero-retention model API used for Practical Law Deep Research and Search and Summarise.
Independent security and AI-management assurance
Public claim only
The certifications the vendor names on its Australian pages are scoped to other products. The AI trust campaign page states 'Thomson Reuters has achieved the ISO/IEC 42001:2023 certification for Westlaw and CoCounsel'. The AI solutions page states CoCounsel (Australia) was IRAP assessed on 22 June 2026 against PROTECTED classification level controls and HighQ on 18 May 2026. Practical Law Australia is not named in either statement, and no SOC 2, ISO 27001 or IRAP claim for Practical Law was found on any page read. No certificate or report was read as a document.
Ask: Is Practical Law Australia inside the scope of any ISO/IEC 42001, ISO 27001, SOC 2 or IRAP assessment, and will you provide the certificate or report with its scope statement?
Contracting entity, terms and forum
Not confirmed
No subscription agreement, master terms, data processing addendum or Australian-law governing clause for Practical Law Australia is published. The only terms document linked from the Australian pages read is 'Terms of use for this website', which covers site use and disclaims warranties for the site; the only product terms page in the Australian site map is a ProView content licence agreement. The Australian privacy URL redirects to the global privacy statement, which states that it does not apply where Thomson Reuters acts as a processor for a customer. On the entity: the Australian transparency statement in the site footer names Thomson Reuters (Australia) Pty. Limited and Thomson Reuters (Professional) Australia Ltd. as indirect wholly owned subsidiaries of Thomson Reuters Corporation, an Ontario corporation, but does not say which contracts for Practical Law and gives no ACN or ABN.
Ask: Which Australian entity contracts for Practical Law Australia, what is its ACN or ABN, and will you provide the subscription agreement and a data processing addendum governed by Australian law?
Cross-border transfers and Australian residency
Not confirmed
No hosting region, data residency option or inference location is published for Practical Law Australia. The global privacy statement says that because Thomson Reuters is a global organisation, personal information 'may be transferred outside of your home country and may be stored in and accessed from multiple countries, including the United States', and asks the reader to acknowledge the risk of transfer to countries with weaker protection; that statement applies to controller processing, not to customer content. The vendor's Australian statement that all customer prompts, content and output are 'currently stored and processed in Australia' is an answer about CoCounsel Core and is not stated for Practical Law.
Ask: In which countries are Practical Law question text, Deep Research reports and model inference stored and processed, and is an Australia-only option available?
Incident notification
Not confirmed
No breach notification commitment, notification period or incident history for Practical Law Australia was found on any page read. The global privacy statement contains no notification clause, and there is no published subscription agreement or data processing addendum in which one could sit.
Ask: State the contractual notification period from discovery, whether it covers subprocessor incidents, and how you would support a notifiable data breach assessment under the Privacy Act.
Change notice for features, models and terms
Public claim only
The AI trust campaign page states customers 'Continually benefit from the latest breakthroughs in legal AI, with automatic access to new capabilities as they become available', and the features page lists a connected Practical Law and Westlaw search through CoCounsel as coming soon. The global privacy statement reserves the right to update it 'at any time for any reason', with notice given by changing the last-updated date and posting. No notice period for a change of model, of AI feature behaviour, or of the content set was found, and no objection right is published.
Ask: What written notice will we receive before the model or behaviour behind Deep Research changes, and can a firm decline a new AI capability that is switched on automatically?
Export and exit
Not confirmed
No export capability, export format or post-termination access period is published for Practical Law Australia. Content is the vendor's own licensed material, so what a firm could take on exit would be its own saved work and query history; nothing published says whether either is exportable.
Ask: On exit, what can we export (saved resources, annotations, Deep Research reports, query history), in what format, and for how long does access continue after termination?
Connectors and data flows to other products
Public claim only
Three connections are described as live: Westlaw research linked from Practical Law resources; Practical Law documents accessible within HighQ; and search and summarise of Practical Law resources within CoCounsel. A unified Practical Law and Westlaw search with a connected CoCounsel experience is listed as coming soon. Each of those products has its own terms and, in CoCounsel's case, its own separately published data statements. No third-party connector outside the Thomson Reuters portfolio is described.
Ask: When Practical Law is used inside CoCounsel or HighQ, which product's terms and retention settings govern the question text and the output?
Open-web retrieval
Public claim only
Both AI features are described as retrieving from the vendor's own corpus: Deep Research 'retrieves the most relevant Practical Law guidance and templates', and Search and Summarise returns 'links to the most relevant Practical Law resources'. No open-web browsing is described for either. For CoCounsel the vendor states it uses 'prompting guardrails that confine GenAI outputs to vetted sources, such as Thomson Reuters' own content databases' and 'not the open internet'; that statement is about CoCounsel.
Ask: Can Deep Research or Search and Summarise reach any source outside Practical Law, including the open web or a firm's own documents, and can that be disabled?
Agent behaviour and action limits
Not confirmed
Deep Research is described as an agent that 'plans the research steps needed to answer it' and then retrieves and writes a report. No action outside retrieval and report generation is described, no confirmation step is documented, and no log of the steps the agent took is described. A firm relying on the published description would be accepting that the research plan is chosen by the system rather than the lawyer.
Ask: Can a user see and change the research plan Deep Research generates before it runs, and is there a log of the steps and resources it used for each report?
Human review before use
Public claim only
The vendor's published position is verification by the reader rather than an enforced control: Deep Research delivers 'a clear, cited research report you can act on immediately', the overview page describes 'citations for verification', and the AI solutions page describes 'Direct links to source documents for a seamless “trust, but verify” approach'. No product control that requires or records a lawyer's review before an output is used, and no disclaimer requiring review, was found on the pages read.
Ask: What control can we configure to require and record a lawyer's review of a Deep Research report before it is relied on or sent to a client?
