Product and intended use
Define the configuration, people, information and tasks being assessed.
Which tier and which features this covers
Public claim only
The product page describes Westlaw Advantage Australia as an 'Agentic AI-enhanced, professionally vetted platform' and lists six named capabilities: Deep Research agentic AI, KeyCite Cited-With Analytics, Automated Jurisdictional Surveys, Litigation Document Analyser, an Integrated Legal Outline Builder and Authoritative AI Summaries (read 2026-09-27). The features page details three of them and states Deep Research is accessed 'directly within CoCounsel' and is 'powered by CoCounsel'. Whether the Advantage tier is a separate SKU, an upgrade to a Westlaw Australia subscription, or bundled with a CoCounsel entitlement is not published, and every demo and contact link on the Advantage features page resolves to a westlaw-precision-australia URL.
Ask: On our order form, is Westlaw Advantage Australia a separate subscription or an uplift on Westlaw Australia, does it require a CoCounsel entitlement for Deep Research, and which of the six named capabilities are generally available in Australia today?
Release stage of the named capabilities
Public claim only
All six capabilities are presented on the product page as available, with 'Request a demo' as the only call to action and no beta, preview or roadmap labelling (read 2026-09-27). The Australian AI campaign page lists Litigation Document Analyser under 'What's new'. No release notes, dated changelog or general-availability date for the Australian Advantage tier was found on the vendor's Australian site.
Ask: For each of the six capabilities, state the Australian general-availability date and whether any is in preview, and point us to the release notes we will receive.
What the features are described as doing
Public claim only
Deep Research is described as taking a complex query and 'planning research strategy, exploring multiple angles, gathering relevant cases and statutes across all Australian jurisdictions, analysing secondary sources' and producing 'a structured, fully cited report', with the FAQ adding that it 'can break a research query into sub-tasks and execute a multi-step research plan automatically'. Jurisdictional Surveys 'aggregates legal provisions, case principles, and regulatory approaches into a clear comparative framework' across Australian states and territories. Litigation Document Analyser 'reads your draft documents - pleadings, briefs, contracts, or affidavits' and is described as flagging negative treatment or overruled precedent, identifying missing or weak authorities, checking quotation accuracy, suggesting further precedents from Westlaw's database and highlighting inconsistencies in reasoning or citation. All read 2026-09-27 on the vendor's own pages; none of this is independently measured.
Ask: Run each of the three features on our own matters in a trial, and show us the failure behaviour: what Litigation Document Analyser does with an authority that is not in Westlaw, and what Deep Research does with a question its collections cannot answer.
Australian legal content and currency
Public claim only
The page states coverage of authorised law reports for the High Court, the Federal Court, the Fair Work Commission and state superior courts, The Laws of Australia across 320-plus topics and every Australian jurisdiction, the Australian Law Journal, and Australian Commercial, NSW and Victorian precedents, across 21 practice areas (read 2026-09-27). Currency of the underlying collections is asserted ('Access the most current legal information across all Australian jurisdictions') without an update interval, and the store sells practice areas and law reports as add-ons, so coverage depends on the plan.
Ask: Which Australian collections will be in our licence, what is the publication lag for each, and does Deep Research search only the collections we license or the whole Australian corpus?
Checked for vendor content directing how AI describes the product
Not confirmed
Checked deliberately on 2026-09-27: the Westlaw Advantage Australia overview and features pages, the Australian AI campaign page and the CoCounsel Australia page contain no section addressed to AI models, assistants, crawlers or LLMs, and no 'Instructions for AI Assistants' heading. A site map run over thomsonreuters.com.au on 2026-09-27 returned no /ai-info, /for-ai or llms.txt path, and no such URL was guessed at. Separately, the FAQ on this page does make claims a firm should treat as claims and not evidence: it asserts 'six market-exclusive capabilities', describes Deep Research as 'like having a senior research assistant available 24/7' delivering 'junior lawyer-quality analysis at unprecedented speed', and answers a question about challenges by asserting that five named problems are 'solved', 'addressed' and 'resolved' by the product. None of those is measured on the page.
Ask: Do you publish any page or block of content that tells AI models or assistants how to describe Westlaw Advantage Australia, and which of the FAQ's claims - market exclusivity, and 'junior lawyer-quality analysis' - are warranted in our agreement rather than marketing?
Data, controls and requirements
Compare the actual configuration with firm, client and jurisdiction requirements, supported by evidence.
Client authority to put matter material into the product
Not confirmed
No matter-exclusion control, client-notification template or engagement-letter guidance for Westlaw Advantage Australia was found on the product pages, the Australian website terms of use or the Privacy Statement (all read 2026-09-27). The CoCounsel Australia FAQ states that a customer's content and prompts 'remain yours to the extent you hold ownership rights' and that, subject to applicable law and Thomson Reuters' terms and conditions, the customer owns the outputs; it says nothing about the authority a firm needs before uploading a client's material. Litigation Document Analyser is described as taking pleadings, briefs, contracts and affidavits by upload, so client material leaves the firm.
Ask: Can we exclude named clients or matters from upload to Litigation Document Analyser and from Deep Research queries, and what wording do you recommend for Australian engagement letters and client consents covering this tier?
Which model answers a query
Not confirmed
Neither the Westlaw Advantage Australia overview nor the features page names a model, a model version or a model provider for Deep Research, Jurisdictional Surveys, Litigation Document Analyser or AI Summaries (read 2026-09-27). The CoCounsel Australia FAQ names OpenAI GPT and states that Thomson Reuters' third-party AI partner is contractually prohibited from training on customer data. The 24 August 2026 press release states Thomson Reuters' own model, Thomson, is first deployed in Tabular Analysis in CoCounsel Legal and that 'CoCounsel Legal remains multi-model by design', with plans to extend Thomson models across the portfolio. Because Deep Research is described as accessed within CoCounsel, which model serves a Westlaw Advantage query is not published and is not inferred here.
Ask: Give us the current model and endpoint register for Deep Research, Jurisdictional Surveys, Litigation Document Analyser and AI Summaries on our Westlaw Advantage Australia subscription - which are Thomson, which are third-party, which version, and in which region each runs.
Subprocessors and their locations
Not confirmed
No subprocessor list or schedule for Westlaw Advantage Australia was found, and no subprocessor page exists on the Australian site (checked 2026-09-27, including a site map). The Privacy Statement (last updated 31 July 2026) says personal information may be shared with 'third-party service providers and partners that support our business, such as our content and other partners, vendors and subcontractors, analytics providers, advertising and marketing agencies, credit agencies, and other third parties we engage', naming none and giving no country; it also states it does not apply where Thomson Reuters acts as a processor for a customer, which is the position for matter material put into the product.
Ask: Provide the dated subprocessor schedule for Westlaw Advantage Australia and Deep Research, each subprocessor's country, and the notice period and objection right that apply when you add or change one.
Whether our queries and uploads train or improve models
Not confirmed
Nothing on the Westlaw Advantage Australia pages says whether queries or uploaded drafts are used to train or improve any model (read 2026-09-27). The Privacy Statement lists 'the content of your queries on our Services, such as artificial intelligence prompts' among the personal information collected, and says only that some Services 'may use artificial intelligence, machine learning, automation, analytics, or similar technologies to provide, improve, personalize, secure, or support our Services'. The CoCounsel Australia FAQ states that Thomson Reuters does not use customer content or prompts to train or enhance CoCounsel or any third-party LLM, that customer information is not stored by OpenAI GPT, and that abuse-monitoring at third parties is turned off where applicable; that answer is about CoCounsel. The 24 August 2026 press release says customer data is not used to train the Thomson model 'without explicit consent', which contemplates consent being sought.
Ask: Warrant in our agreement that documents uploaded to Litigation Document Analyser and queries put to Deep Research are not used to train, fine-tune, evaluate or improve any Thomson Reuters or third-party model, including embeddings and evaluation sets - and tell us what 'explicit consent' to train the Thomson model would look like on our account.
Usage data, feedback ratings and evaluation sets
Not confirmed
Nothing is published for Westlaw Advantage Australia. The CoCounsel Australia FAQ states that Thomson Reuters 'analyses de-identified usage metrics to monitor account health, forecast capacity needs, and inform the product roadmap' without defining de-identified, and separately that a Trust Team compares CoCounsel outputs to expert-crafted answers and uses those results 'to train an LLM for ongoing automated evaluations'. No statement was found about what happens to a thumbs-up or thumbs-down rating on a Deep Research report or a Litigation Document Analyser finding (all read 2026-09-27).
Ask: Can our prompt text, document text or output text appear in de-identified usage data or in the evaluation sets used to train your evaluation model, and is a feedback rating stored with the underlying query and document?
How long queries, reports and uploads are kept
Not confirmed
No retention period is published for Westlaw Advantage Australia (checked 2026-09-27). The Privacy Statement says personal information is retained under an enterprise records retention schedule that 'varies by Service, business function, country, record classes, and record types' and states no period. The CoCounsel Australia FAQ says retention of user content and prompts is configurable at organisation level with a Thomson Reuters client manager, with deletion per the customer's schedule; whether that setting reaches a Deep Research query raised from Westlaw Advantage, or a draft uploaded to Litigation Document Analyser, is not published. Backup retention is addressed nowhere.
Ask: State the retention period that will apply to our Deep Research queries and reports and to documents uploaded to Litigation Document Analyser, including logs, indexes and backups, and confirm whether we can set it to zero retention.
Deletion on request and certification
Not confirmed
No in-product deletion, export or certified-deletion statement was found for Westlaw Advantage Australia (checked 2026-09-27). The CoCounsel Australia FAQ says users can delete their own content and prompts in the product at any time and that Thomson Reuters deletes content per the customer's retention schedule. The Privacy Statement's access, correction and erasure rights are framed around personal information and are exercised through a data subject rights portal; they are not a commitment about matter documents held as processor.
Ask: Can a user delete an uploaded draft and its generated analysis from Westlaw Advantage immediately and irreversibly, how long do copies persist in backups and at any subprocessor, and will you certify deletion in writing?
Who can read our queries and documents
Not confirmed
The CoCounsel Australia FAQ states that, where applicable, Thomson Reuters has 'established systemic controls to turn off third parties' abuse-monitoring solutions to ensure there is no human access to Thomson Reuters customers' data', and that requests to model providers are sent under the 'Thomson Reuters' identity without identifying the customer. Nothing is published about which Thomson Reuters staff or contractors can read Westlaw Advantage queries, reports or uploaded drafts, whether such access requires a ticket, whether it is logged and disclosable to the customer, or which countries support staff work from. The Privacy Statement's only geographic statement is that personal information 'may be stored in and accessed from multiple countries, including the United States'. All read 2026-09-27.
Ask: Who at Thomson Reuters or its contractors can read our Deep Research queries and uploaded drafts, in which countries do they sit, is each access logged, and will you give us the access log on request?
Identity, single sign-on and deprovisioning
Not confirmed
No SAML or single sign-on, multi-factor authentication or SCIM provisioning documentation for Westlaw Advantage Australia was found on the product pages, the store pages or the Australian terms of use (checked 2026-09-27). The store's self-service purchase flow creates a Westlaw Australia account from user details entered at purchase. The Global Brand Database-style account controls do not apply here; the Australian terms of use contains no account security clause.
Ask: Does our tier support SAML single sign-on, enforced multi-factor authentication and SCIM deprovisioning, can we restrict Deep Research and document upload by role, and how quickly does a departing lawyer lose access to prior queries and reports?
Encryption in transit and at rest
Not confirmed
Nothing product-specific is published (checked 2026-09-27). The Privacy Statement says Thomson Reuters 'work[s] to implement technical and organizational measures designed to protect the security of personal information' and that no method of transmission or electronic storage is completely secure; it names no algorithm and says nothing about key management. The CoCounsel Australia FAQ states data is encrypted in transit using TLS 1.2 and at rest with AES 256, and that all interactions with generative AI model providers use zero-retention APIs; those statements are about CoCounsel.
Ask: Confirm in writing the in-transit and at-rest encryption applied to Westlaw Advantage queries, generated reports and uploaded drafts, whether it covers logs, search indexes and backups, and whether customer-managed keys are available.
Certifications and assessments, and their scope
Public claim only
The Australian AI 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' (read 2026-09-27), and the Westlaw Precision Australia page carries a badge stating Thomson Reuters 'achieves ISO 42001 certification for Responsible AI'. The CoCounsel Australia page adds that CoCounsel (Australia) was IRAP assessed on 22 June 2026 against PROTECTED classification level controls, naming CoCounsel only. No certificate, certifying body, scope statement, SOC 2 report, ISO 27001 certificate or IRAP letter was read, and no assurance document is published for Westlaw Advantage Australia itself. The Privacy Statement's only named regime is US FedRAMP Moderate 'In Process' status on certain products, which is about US government hosting and not this product. Unverified, not applied (2026-10-10): security claim GDPR (https://www.thomsonreuters.com/en/trust-center). not the vendor's domain. Unverified, not applied (2026-10-10): security claim ISO 27001 (https://www.thomsonreuters.com/en/trust-center). not the vendor's domain. Unverified, not applied (2026-10-10): security claim ISO 42001 (https://www.thomsonreuters.com/en/trust-center). not the vendor's domain.
Ask: Provide the ISO/IEC 42001 certificate with its scope statement, showing whether Westlaw Advantage Australia and Deep Research are named in scope; the IRAP letter of completion and whether it covers Westlaw; and any SOC 2 Type II or ISO 27001 report for the platform that serves this tier.
Contract, data processing terms and governing law
Not confirmed
No subscription agreement, master terms or data processing addendum for Westlaw Advantage Australia is published. The only contract documents found on the Australian site are a website terms of use, which governs use of the website only, states 'We may amend the Terms at any time by posting the amended terms on this site', disclaims all warranties on an 'as is' and 'as available' basis and contains no governing-law, forum or liability provision for a product subscription, and a ProView content licence agreement for e-books; a site map run over thomsonreuters.com.au on 2026-09-27 returned no other Australian product terms. The CoCounsel Australia FAQ refers to 'Thomson Reuters' terms and conditions' without linking them.
Ask: Send the Westlaw Advantage Australia subscription agreement and data processing addendum, naming the contracting Thomson Reuters entity and its ACN, the governing law and forum, the liability cap, and how liability is allocated for a wrong or fabricated citation in an AI output.
Where the data goes, and whether inference runs in Australia
Not confirmed
No hosting region, processing location or Australian data residency statement was found for Westlaw Advantage Australia (checked 2026-09-27), and none is inferred here from the product's Australian branding or its .com.au address. Two published statements bear on it and neither is about this tier: the Privacy Statement says personal information 'may be transferred outside of your home country and may be stored in and accessed from multiple countries, including the United States', asks the user to acknowledge the risk of transfer to countries with weaker protection, and says Thomson Reuters 'may not be able to prevent government authorities in some countries from accessing your personal information'; the CoCounsel Australia FAQ says that for CoCounsel Core 'all customer prompts, content, and output are currently stored and processed in Australia', qualified by the word 'currently'.
Ask: List every country in which Westlaw Advantage Australia queries, uploaded drafts, generated reports, logs, backups and support access are processed, state whether inference for Deep Research runs in Australia, and put any Australian residency commitment in the contract rather than an FAQ.
Security incident notification
Not confirmed
No breach or security-incident notification commitment, timeline or notice address for Westlaw Advantage Australia was found (checked 2026-09-27). The Privacy Statement contains no incident-notification clause, and the Australian website terms of use contains none. No incident history is published.
Ask: What contractual notice period applies from your discovery of a security incident affecting our Westlaw Advantage data, who is notified and how, and will you give us a summary of incidents affecting the platform over the last 24 months?
Notice of changes to the product, the model or the terms
Public claim only
The published change mechanics are unilateral. The Australian website terms of use states 'We may amend the Terms at any time by posting the amended terms on this site.' The Privacy Statement states 'We reserve the right to update it at any time for any reason' and that notice is given by updating the last-updated date and posting the revised statement, telling users to check the site frequently. The Australian AI campaign page says customers 'Continually benefit from the latest breakthroughs in legal AI, with automatic access to new capabilities as they become available'. No notice period for a change of model, feature behaviour or processing location was found, and the 24 August 2026 press release shows the model layer under active change. All read 2026-09-27.
Ask: What written notice will we get before the model behind Deep Research, the Deep Research workflow, or the processing location changes, and can we decline a change or terminate without penalty if we do not accept it?
Export and what happens on termination
Not confirmed
No export format, post-termination data window or deletion-on-exit term for Westlaw Advantage Australia was found (checked 2026-09-27). The store describes 12-month subscriptions with a 30-day guarantee and add-on content bought as add-on subscriptions or pay-per-view, with no termination or data-return terms. The CoCounsel Australia FAQ describes in-product deletion of content and prompts but says nothing about exit. Research output in this tier is a generated report, so the firm's own record-keeping obligations turn on whether reports can be exported and retained.
Ask: On termination, how do we export our Deep Research reports, queries and audit logs and in what format, what is deleted from Thomson Reuters and its subprocessors and within how many days, and will you certify it?
Connectors and what leaves our systems
Public claim only
The published inputs are typed queries and uploaded documents: Litigation Document Analyser is described as 'Simply upload your draft'. The product page lists CoCounsel, Practical Law Australia and HighQ as related products and the features page routes Deep Research through CoCounsel. The Australian AI campaign page states Thomson Reuters AI connects to Microsoft 365 and 'DMS partners like iManage, netdocuments and more', a portfolio statement rather than a connector list for this tier. No connector permission model, no statement of what content is copied out of a source system, and no administrator control over connectors was found for Westlaw Advantage Australia. All read 2026-09-27.
Ask: For Westlaw Advantage Australia, list each connector, what content is copied out of the source system and where it is stored, whether document-management permissions are enforced at query time, and whether we can disable upload and connectors by role.
Whether anything reaches the open web
Public claim only
The CoCounsel Australia FAQ states Thomson Reuters uses 'prompting guardrails that confine GenAI outputs to vetted sources, such as Thomson Reuters' own content databases', limiting the model to a defined set of verified information 'and not the open internet'. That is a statement about CoCounsel. The Westlaw Advantage features page describes Deep Research gathering cases and statutes 'across all Australian jurisdictions' and analysing secondary sources, and Litigation Document Analyser suggesting precedents 'from Westlaw's database'; neither page says whether any step queries the open web, and neither confirms the closed-corpus guardrail for this tier. All read 2026-09-27.
Ask: Confirm in writing that no step of Deep Research, Jurisdictional Surveys or Litigation Document Analyser sends our query or document text to an open-web search engine or to any source outside the Westlaw collections we license, and tell us what happens when the answer is not in those collections.
What the product can do without a person
Public claim only
The FAQ describes agentic behaviour inside the research task: the platform 'can break a research query into sub-tasks and execute a multi-step research plan automatically', and the vendor's comparison with Westlaw Precision says Advantage 'takes things a step further by employing agentic AI to conduct multistep processes without being prompted'. The published outputs are a report, a comparative survey and feedback on a draft. Nothing describes the product writing to, sending from or changing any other system, and no action catalogue, administrator control list or audit trail of agent steps is published. All read 2026-09-27.
Ask: Can any Westlaw Advantage feature write to, send from or change a connected system - CoCounsel, a document management system, Microsoft 365, our matter records - without a person clicking, what does 'without being prompted' mean in practice, and where is the audit trail of each step an agent took?
Verification and what the citations prove
Public claim only
The product page states that 'Every AI-driven response includes citations to authoritative sources' and invites the user to 'Instantly verify facts, catch inconsistencies, and ensure nothing is based on outdated law' (read 2026-09-27). The sibling Westlaw Precision Australia FAQ records the vendor's own caveat that a user should 'still conduct additional verification and follow-up research as you would with a skilled trainee or paralegal assisting you today'. The vendor's characterisation of the output as 'junior lawyer-quality analysis' is a marketing claim with no measurement behind it. Citations make verification possible; they do not establish that the reasoning in a Deep Research report or the authority list from Litigation Document Analyser is complete or correct, and the lawyer's duty to the court and the client is unaffected.
Ask: Show us Australian sample Deep Research reports and Litigation Document Analyser outputs with pinpoint citations, show what the product does when it cannot support a proposition from the licensed collections, and tell us what supervision you assume a firm has in place.
