At its annual Inspire EMEA conference in London, NetDocuments unveiled a heavyweight addition to its growing interoperability ecosystem: Thomson Reuters. The collaboration connects Thomson Reuters CoCounsel Legal directly to NetDocuments through the company’s new ndConnect framework — a move that could redefine how law firms balance AI innovation with data governance.
NetDocuments, long a favorite among law firms for its secure cloud-based document management, is pitching ndConnect as a bridge between AI convenience and the legal industry’s non-negotiable compliance demands. The new integration means users can tap CoCounsel Legal’s deep legal research, document analysis, and drafting tools without exporting files, downloading data, or creating compliance headaches.
In essence, ndConnect promises to do for legal AI what APIs did for SaaS — make everything work together, securely.
A Smarter, Safer Workflow
The ndConnect platform allows firms to share select content with approved AI tools, store AI-generated output automatically within governed workspaces, and keep all documents searchable and auditable within NetDocuments’ environment.
That eliminates a major sticking point in AI adoption: the security risks tied to moving sensitive data in and out of third-party systems. For law firms, where a single misfiled contract can spell disaster, that’s no small deal.
“Legal professionals shouldn’t have to choose between innovation and information security,” said Dan Hauck, Chief Product Officer at NetDocuments. “Through ndConnect, we’re creating a bridge that lets firms use advanced AI solutions like CoCounsel Legal without losing the protection or structure NetDocuments provides.”
The new setup plugs Thomson Reuters’ CoCounsel Legal — and by extension, its heavyweights Westlaw and Practical Law — directly into lawyers’ existing NetDocuments workflows. Attorneys can now draft, research, and analyze files in a single, governed space that preserves document metadata and compliance trails.
Thomson Reuters: Expanding the AI Footprint
For Thomson Reuters, this partnership strengthens its push into agentic AI, or systems that can autonomously manage parts of a workflow. “CoCounsel Legal delivers agentic AI across the full legal workflow — unifying research, knowledge management, and workflow automation,” said Rawia Ashraf, Head of Product for CoCounsel Transactional at Thomson Reuters. “Through our collaboration with NetDocuments, we’re helping professionals seamlessly combine our trusted content with their proprietary work product.”
That “trusted content” is key: in a market suddenly crowded with generative AI tools, reliability and source integrity have become powerful differentiators.
The Bigger Picture: Interoperability Is the New Innovation
This partnership is more than just a tech handshake; it’s a signal of where legal AI ecosystems are headed. With ndConnect, NetDocuments is building an interoperability standard that could become the norm in enterprise legal tech — secure by design, vendor-agnostic, and deeply auditable.
Other sectors have already moved in this direction (think Salesforce and its AppExchange model), and the legal industry is finally catching up. The NetDocuments-Thomson Reuters collaboration could accelerate that trend, setting expectations for how AI tools should communicate securely across platforms.
“AI adoption in the legal industry is accelerating,” Hauck added, “but adoption that sacrifices governance or auditability isn’t sustainable. ndConnect ensures firms can innovate responsibly — connecting best-in-class solutions while keeping NetDocuments as their single source of truth.”
Bottom Line
As the legal tech arms race heats up, this partnership between NetDocuments and Thomson Reuters feels less like a one-off integration and more like a blueprint for the industry’s future. In a space where data security and workflow efficiency are equally sacred, ndConnect’s approach — interoperability without compromise — could become the model others follow.
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