Product and intended use
Define the configuration, people, information and tasks being assessed.
What this record covers, and how the feature is sold
Public claim only
Deep Research is one of five features named on the Practical Law Australia features page, read 2026-09-27; the others are Search and summarise with Generative AI, advanced efficiency tools, global content and local expertise, and integrations with other Thomson Reuters products. There is no Deep Research product page, product name, plan tier or price on the Australian site: the overview page presents it under the heading 'Deep Research in Practical Law' and the products index promotes it as 'New regulation? Ask Practical Law with Deep Research'. It is therefore recorded as a named feature of a Practical Law Australia subscription, and the product-level record for that subscription is the practical-law-au profile.
Ask: Is Deep Research inside the Practical Law Australia subscription on our quote, or a separately priced entitlement, and is it enabled for every named user?
Deployment model
Public claim only
The feature is delivered inside the vendor-hosted Practical Law web service through a browser; the features page also describes Practical Law resources being reached inside HighQ and CoCounsel. No private-cloud, on-premises or customer-tenanted option, and no hosting location, is stated for Practical Law or for this feature on any page read on 2026-09-27.
Ask: Where is the Practical Law Australia application and the Deep Research retrieval and generation step hosted, and is any in-country or dedicated-tenancy option offered to Australian subscribers?
What the feature is published as doing
Public claim only
The features page describes Deep Research in three statements, read 2026-09-27: '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 'Fiduciary-Grade AI(TM) that is grounded in content written and maintained by 700+ expert lawyer writers globally'. The overview page adds that it 'delivers reliable answers grounded in authoritative Practical Law content, with citations, so you can verify results at every step' and carries a product screenshot and a demonstration video. The published description covers retrieval from the vendor's own guidance and templates and generation of a report; no other action is described.
Ask: Demonstrate Deep Research on our own practice areas and confirm what it retrieves from beyond Practical Law guidance and templates, if anything.
Jurisdictional coverage of the retrieval corpus
Public claim only
The corpus the feature retrieves from is Practical Law's own Australian practice guidance and templates, which the vendor states is created and 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. Cross-jurisdictional comparison is offered separately through Q&A guides rather than through this feature. Nothing published says whether Deep Research restricts itself to Australian resources when the question concerns Australian law.
Ask: When a question is about Australian law, does Deep Research confine retrieval to the Australian content set, and how does a report flag when it has relied on non-Australian guidance?
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 page, the Practical Law overview page, the Australian AI trust campaign page, the Australian AI solutions page or the Australian products index, and the Australian site map taken in the previous phase surfaced no /llms.txt, /ai-info or equivalent path. The vendor does apply the trademarked phrase 'Fiduciary-Grade AI(TM)' to this feature across those pages; that phrase is marketing and is not adopted in this record.
Ask: Does Thomson Reuters publish any machine-directed guidance, for example an llms.txt file or an AI-information page, about how its Australian products and their AI features 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 question can carry client facts, and the feature is promoted for complex matter questions. No published document addresses confidentiality of what a user types into it, client consent, or the firm's professional obligations. No subscription agreement or product terms for Practical Law Australia are published: the Australian footer links website terms of use and the global privacy statement only, and that privacy statement states it 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 and privileged material to be entered?
Foundation model and provider behind the feature
Not confirmed
Neither the features page nor the overview page names a model or provider for Practical Law Deep Research. The features page describes the neighbouring Search and Summarise feature as using 'large-language models trained by the knowledge and expertise of more than 700 expert lawyer writers', which is a statement about the vendor's editorial content rather than a named provider, and it is not stated of Deep Research. Separately, on 24 August 2026 the vendor announced Thomson, a proprietary model it states was mid-trained and post-trained 'drawing on decades of authoritative content from Westlaw, Practical Law, Checkpoint, and Reuters', whose stated first deployment is Tabular Analysis in CoCounsel Legal. The vendor names OpenAI and Google as AI partners on its CoCounsel pages. None of those statements is made about Practical Law Deep Research.
Ask: Name every model and provider used by Practical Law Deep Research, the country each inference endpoint sits in, and state whether the Thomson model or a third-party model serves this feature today.
Subprocessors
Not confirmed
No subprocessor list, register or schedule for Practical Law Australia or for this feature was found on 2026-09-27. 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 host, with entity, country, purpose, the data each receives, and our notice and objection rights.
Training on questions and reports
Public claim only
Nothing published addresses training on Practical Law question text or Deep Research reports. The Australian AI solutions page makes a suite-level statement 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 CoCounsel frequently asked questions answer 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 or this feature.
Ask: Confirm in writing, and identify the clause, that questions typed into Practical Law Deep Research and the reports it produces are not used to train or improve any model, including the Thomson model.
Feedback, ratings and usage analytics
Not confirmed
No statement about in-product feedback, ratings or usage analytics was found for Practical Law or for Deep Research. For CoCounsel the vendor states it analyses de-identified usage metrics to monitor account health, forecast capacity and inform the roadmap; that answer is about CoCounsel. The global privacy statement permits use of artificial intelligence, machine learning, automation and analytics to 'provide, improve, personalize, secure, or support our Services' where Thomson Reuters is controller, and lists 'the content of your queries on our Services, such as artificial intelligence prompts' among the personal information it collects.
Ask: Is Deep Research question text, report content or thumbs-up feedback used to improve the feature 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 question text, 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 that schedule, and applies where Thomson Reuters is controller. For CoCounsel the vendor states retention is configurable at organisation level with a client manager; that statement is about CoCounsel.
Ask: State the default and configurable retention for Deep Research question text, generated reports, intermediate research steps and query logs, and whether it can be set to zero for our organisation.
Deletion and certified erasure
Not confirmed
No deletion commitment for Practical Law customer content or Deep Research reports 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 statement is about CoCounsel. No certified-erasure statement was found for either.
Ask: On termination, what is deleted, in what period, and will you certify in writing that Deep Research question text and reports have been erased, including from backups and any model host?
Vendor and third-party access to question text
Not confirmed
No statement about who at Thomson Reuters can read Practical Law question text or Deep Research reports 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 frequently asked questions describe 'systemic controls to turn off third parties' abuse-monitoring solutions to ensure there is no human access to Thomson Reuters customers' data'; that answer is about CoCounsel. The global privacy statement addresses 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 put to Deep Research and the reports it returns, under what approval, and can we obtain those access logs?
Access control, single sign-on and audit
Not confirmed
No single sign-on, SCIM provisioning, multi-factor authentication requirement, role model or audit-log capability is described for Practical Law Australia or for Deep Research on any page read on 2026-09-27. The Australian 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 and matter?
Encryption in transit and at rest
Not confirmed
No encryption detail is published for Practical Law or for this feature. 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 for 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 whether a zero-retention model API is used for Practical Law Deep Research, in writing and by reference to the applicable document.
Independent security and AI-management assurance
Public claim only
The certifications the vendor names on its Australian pages are scoped to other products. The Australian AI trust campaign page states 'Thomson Reuters has achieved the ISO/IEC 42001:2023 certification for Westlaw and CoCounsel, a globally recognised standard for AI management systems'. 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 or for Deep Research was found. No certificate or report was read as a document.
Ask: Is Practical Law Australia, including Deep Research, 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 governing-law clause for Practical Law Australia is published, so there is no contractual document in which this feature's data handling could be checked. The only terms document linked from the Australian pages read is 'Terms of use for this website', which covers use of the website, is provided on an 'as is' and 'as available' basis and disclaims warranties about the site. The Australian privacy URL redirects to the global privacy statement, which states it does not apply where Thomson Reuters acts as a processor for a customer. On the entity: the Australian transparency statement linked in the site footer is made by Thomson Reuters (Australia) Pty. Limited and Thomson Reuters (Professional) Australia Ltd., states both are indirect wholly owned subsidiaries of Thomson Reuters Corporation, an Ontario corporation listed on the Toronto and New York stock exchanges, and carries no ACN or ABN; it is for the financial year ending 31 December 2021 and does not say which entity contracts for Practical Law.
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 that covers Deep Research?
Cross-border transfers and Australian residency
Not confirmed
No hosting region, data residency option or inference location is published for Practical Law Australia or for Deep Research. 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' answers a question about CoCounsel Core and is not stated for Practical Law, so it is not carried across.
Ask: In which countries are Deep Research question text, retrieval indexes, generated reports and model inference stored and processed, and is an Australia-only option available for this feature?
Incident notification
Not confirmed
No breach notification commitment, notification period or incident history for Practical Law Australia was found on any page read on 2026-09-27. The global privacy statement contains no notification clause for customer content, and there is no published subscription agreement or data processing addendum in which one could sit. The website terms of use do not address security incidents.
Ask: State the contractual notification period from discovery for a compromise affecting Practical Law question text or reports, whether it covers subprocessor incidents, and how you would support an assessment under the Notifiable Data Breaches scheme.
Change notice for the feature, its model and the terms
Public claim only
The Australian 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 unified Practical Law and Westlaw search with a connected CoCounsel experience 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 Deep Research 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. The retrieval corpus is the vendor's own licensed content, so what a firm could take on exit would be its own saved work, question history and Deep Research reports; nothing published says whether any of those is exportable, or for how long access continues after termination.
Ask: On exit, can we export our Deep Research reports and question history, in what format, and for how long does access to them continue after the subscription ends?
Connectors and data flows to other products
Public claim only
The features page describes three live connections for Practical Law content — linked Westlaw research from within Practical Law resources, Practical Law documents within HighQ, and search and summarise of Practical Law resources within CoCounsel — and a unified Practical Law and Westlaw search with a connected CoCounsel experience as coming soon. Deep Research itself is described only inside Practical Law. Each of those other products carries its own terms and, for CoCounsel, its own separately published data statements. No connector outside the Thomson Reuters portfolio is described for this feature.
Ask: If Deep Research becomes reachable from CoCounsel or HighQ, which product's terms, retention settings and hosting region govern the question text and the report?
Open-web retrieval
Public claim only
The published description confines retrieval to the vendor's own corpus: Deep Research 'retrieves the most relevant Practical Law guidance and templates', and the overview page describes answers 'grounded in authoritative Practical Law content, with citations'. No open-web browsing, and no retrieval from a firm's own documents, is described for this feature. 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 and is not made about Practical Law.
Ask: Can Deep Research reach any source outside Practical Law, including the open web, Westlaw or our own documents, and can any such retrieval be disabled by administrator setting?
Agent behaviour and action limits
Not confirmed
The vendor describes an agent that 'plans the research steps needed to answer it', then retrieves and writes a report. No action beyond retrieval and report generation is described. Nothing published says whether a user can see or change the plan before it runs, whether the steps taken and resources considered are logged, or whether a report can be regenerated deterministically. On the published description, the research plan is chosen by the system rather than by the lawyer.
Ask: Can a user see and amend the research plan Deep Research generates before it runs, and is there a per-report log of the steps taken and every resource retrieved?
Human review before use
Public claim only
The vendor's published position is verification by the reader rather than an enforced control: the features page says Deep Research delivers 'a clear, cited research report you can act on immediately', the overview page describes 'citations for verification' and verifying 'at every step', and the Australian 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 a report is used, and no in-product 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, filed or sent to a client?
