Agentic Index
Clio vs CoCounsel (2026)
Clio last verified ·CoCounsel last verified
These are not competitors and the comparison still matters, because firms with one budget line for legal AI have to choose. That verdict is the Agentic Index coverage score, graded from each vendor's own published materials.
Clio runs the business of the firm, where Manage AI turns deadlines, invoicing and client updates into completed actions, from $49 per user a month, used by more than 400,000 legal professionals. CoCounsel does the legal work, an agentic assistant from Thomson Reuters for research, review and drafting grounded in Westlaw and Practical Law, with the rate card behind a qualification form. If billable output is the bottleneck, choose CoCounsel. If the firm's operations are, choose Clio.
This comparison is published by Agentic Index, an independent agentic AI vendor research platform. Clio and CoCounsel are each graded against the same 14 capability Agentic Index taxonomy, from the vendor's own public materials under the Agentic Index verification standard, alongside 1,084 researched vendors. No vendor pays for placement and no vendor has reviewed this page. How this evidence is graded
Choose Clio if
- Administrative load is the constraint, with deadlines, invoicing and client communication eating your week.
- Price sensitivity is real, and Clio's $49 per user a month is public while CoCounsel's rate card is not.
- You want one system running the firm rather than another tool alongside it.
Choose CoCounsel if
- Research, review and drafting quality is where the hours go and where you want the leverage.
- Grounding in Westlaw and Practical Law matters for defensible work product.
- Prebuilt skills like Deep Research and the Litigation Document Analyzer fit repeatable matter types.
| Feature | C Clio |
C CoCounsel |
|---|---|---|
| Action & orchestration | ||
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Integrations & Tool Calling Ability to connect agents to real systems through native integrations, OAuth-authenticated actions, custom tools, APIs, webhooks, or MCP-compatible tools. |
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ClioIntegrations & Tool Calling The Clio App Directory lists more than 300 apps, alongside native Gmail and Outlook, QuickBooks, Xero and TrustBooks accounting, court e filing and online payments, and a public API lets partners and firms build their own connections. SourceClio, clio.com/app-directory and clio.com/pricingread 2026-09-06 |
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CoCounselIntegrations & Tool Calling Integrations cover iManage, NetDocuments, SharePoint, HighQ, DeepJudge, Smokeball, Box and Litify for matter content, and since August 2026 administrators can connect iManage on premises, iManage Cloud and SharePoint directly through Syncly connectors. The next generation CoCounsel Legal agent works inside Microsoft Word, and CoCounsel also runs in Outlook and Teams, in Claude through MCP, and beside Supio and Noetica. Files are surfaced without manual uploads, and outputs are written back to the matter. SourceThomson Reuters, legal.thomsonreuters.com/en/products/cocounsel-legal and the CoCounsel Legal August and September 2026 releasesread 2026-10-25 |
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Workflow Orchestration Ability to sequence, branch, retry, route, and combine deterministic workflow nodes with autonomous agent steps. |
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ClioWorkflow Orchestration Clio Work runs multi step legal work from a matter. It reads the whole file, builds a timeline, surfaces authority through a citator, pressure tests arguments and drafts motions grounded in the result, and Clio Manage adds automated workflows on Signature and above that draft bills on schedule, turn documents into tasks and events and draft client updates from matter activity. SourceClio, clio.com/work and clio.com/pricingread 2026-09-06 |
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CoCounselWorkflow Orchestration From a plain language description of a matter, CoCounsel Legal builds a step by step plan, works through each step across research, analysis and drafting, and delivers cited work product, with the plan and reasoning visible as it runs. Deep Research plans, executes and iteratively improves a research plan, and Westlaw Brief Builder carries a brief from issue framing to a first draft. The next generation of CoCounsel Legal, a complete rebuild, launched in the US in August 2026 and in the UK in October, with general availability in more countries expected by the end of October. SourceThomson Reuters, legal.thomsonreuters.com/en/products/cocounsel-legal, the CoCounsel Legal August 2026 releases and the Multinational Profile release (14 October 2026)read 2026-10-25 |
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Triggers & Channel Coverage How agents wake up and where they work: schedules, webhooks, message events, CRM events, inbox events, chat, email, voice, and collaboration tools. |
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ClioTriggers & Channel Coverage Work reaches Clio's AI on schedules, events and inbound channels. AI drafts bills on a set billing schedule, documents are turned into calendar events and tasks as they arrive, performance reports are scheduled to the inbox, and Grow AI runs phone, web chat and email agents that engage and screen every inbound lead. SourceClio, clio.com/pricingread 2026-09-06 |
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CoCounselTriggers & Channel Coverage Work reaches CoCounsel Legal when a user prompts it, whether in the web app, Microsoft Word, Outlook, Teams or through Claude, and document management connectors surface matter files without manual uploads. There are no schedules, webhooks or event subscriptions that start work without a person. SourceThomson Reuters, legal.thomsonreuters.com/en/products/cocounsel-legal and the CoCounsel Legal September 2026 releasesread 2026-10-25 |
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| Knowledge & context | ||
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Knowledge Grounding & RAG Ability to ground agent behavior in company data through document ingestion, retrieval, external knowledge APIs, semantic search, or RAG layers. |
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ClioKnowledge Grounding & RAG The AI is grounded in the firm's own matters, contacts, documents and billing records held in Clio, and Clio Work extends that with a maintained legal library matched to the jurisdiction, returning cited results with a built in citator that confirms every authority is current. Both the matter corpus and the legal library persist and can be queried. SourceClio, clio.com/workread 2026-09-06 |
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CoCounselKnowledge Grounding & RAG Answers draw on Westlaw primary law, Practical Law guidance spanning more than 100 jurisdictions, and the firm's own documents and prior matter context, held in workspaces of up to 10,000 files and in connected document systems, with KeyCite flags and linked citations on every output. The Multinational Profile, rolling out through October 2026, brings legal content from more than 100 countries and territories into one research workflow, International Legal Research covers 44 jurisdictions, and Reuters news and Noetica deal term benchmarking sit inside the research conversation. Knowledge Search reaches the firm's own sources, which an administrator chooses. SourceThomson Reuters, legal.thomsonreuters.com/en/products/cocounsel-legal, the Multinational Profile release (14 October 2026) and the CoCounsel Legal September 2026 releasesread 2026-10-25 |
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Memory & State Persistence Ability to persist context across a run, conversation, workflow, user, team, or longer-term memory layer. |
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ClioMemory & State Persistence Clio Work is a conversational workspace over a matter, which carries session state, and the AI processes data in real time and does not store or reuse it. No memory layer with a stated scope and lifetime is described. The matter record is the application's data model. SourceClio, clio.com/work and clio.com/securityread 2026-09-06 |
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CoCounselMemory & State Persistence Workspaces keep a matter's documents, templates, conversations and history together, up to 10,000 files each, so a user can return and pick up where they left off, and workspaces can carry client IDs for billing and reporting. What is kept is scoped to the matter workspace and lasts across sessions, and a Prompt Library saves a user's best prompts for reuse. Retention of user content and prompts is set at the organization account level, and users can delete their own at any time. SourceThomson Reuters, legal.thomsonreuters.com/en/products/cocounsel-legal, thomsonreuters.com/en/cocounsel and the CoCounsel Legal September 2026 releasesread 2026-10-25 |
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| Control & trust | ||
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Human Oversight & Guardrails Approval steps, consent checkpoints, escalation rules, structured guardrails, policy constraints, and pause/resume controls. |
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ClioHuman Oversight & Guardrails The user reviews and approves everything before it reaches a client or the court, with the AI handling the first pass. The Core plan turns documents into calendar events and tasks confirmed against the source. SourceClio, clio.com/pricingread 2026-09-06 |
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CoCounselHuman Oversight & Guardrails Westlaw Brief Builder works step by step. The attorney reviews the facts, chooses the arguments, attaches the authority and validates the draft and citations before the brief advances, and every step of an agentic plan is visible for inspection as it runs. In the UK and Canada, Deep Research Verify checks each assertion in a research report against the cited Westlaw and Practical Law sources and flags where support may be lacking. Administrators decide which skills, workflows and features each user can run. The review happens inside the workflow, before the output is final, and there are no settings that limit how far the agent acts on its own. SourceThomson Reuters, legal.thomsonreuters.com/en/products/cocounsel-legal, the CoCounsel Legal August 2026 releases and thomsonreuters.com/en-us/help/cocounsel (user permissions)read 2026-10-25 |
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Security, Identity & Governance RBAC, SSO, auditability, encryption, least-privilege tool access, compliance posture, and data handling policy. |
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ClioSecurity, Identity & Governance Clio undergoes annual SOC 2 Type II and SOC 1 Type II examinations, with reports at trust.clio.com, and annual third party penetration tests. The access surface includes SAML single sign on through Clio Identity, MFA, role based permissions with unlimited custom roles on the Signature plan, password and login policies, and per user session and activity logs. AI is bound to the firm's existing user permissions. SourceClio, clio.com/security and clio.com/pricingread 2026-09-06 |
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CoCounselSecurity, Identity & Governance CoCounsel Legal holds SOC 2 and ISO 42001 certification, Thomson Reuters publishes its ISO 27001 and ISO 42001 certificates on its trust center, and a CoCounsel Legal security profile with SOC reports sits on Whistic behind an account. User content and prompts are never used to train CoCounsel or the underlying models, OpenAI and Google are contractually barred from training on customer data, and data is encrypted with TLS 1.2 in transit and AES-256 at rest. Users sign in with a Thomson Reuters account or through single sign on. A firm administrator assigns the CoCounsel Administrator role through the Self Service Portal or MyAccount, and administrators then set user level permissions for skills, workflows, prompts, databases and features such as Knowledge Search, web search and Tabular Analysis, one user at a time or in bulk. In the new version of CoCounsel that screen is reached by turning the new version toggle off. A Search Admin tool decides which content sources users can search and can limit a source to set folders, and retention of user content and prompts is set at the organization account level. SourceThomson Reuters, legal.thomsonreuters.com/en/products/cocounsel-legal, thomsonreuters.com/en/cocounsel, thomsonreuters.com/en/trust-center and thomsonreuters.com/en-us/help/cocounsel (sign in, request admin role, user permissions, Search Admin tool)read 2026-10-25 |
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Observability & Auditability Traces, logs, execution histories, metrics, audit events, and debugging detail for production agent behavior. |
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ClioObservability & Auditability A firm can see a log of every action taken by AI within the firm, alongside session logs recording the IP address and actions of every user, with active sessions reviewable and terminable. That per action AI log lets a firm reconstruct what the AI did. SourceClio, clio.com/securityread 2026-09-06 |
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CoCounselObservability & Auditability Every step of the reasoning is visible as the agent works, and every citation is linked for verification. Tabular Analysis traces every answer to its source document, and its Verbatim column returns the exact source text with the span highlighted when a cell is opened. Deep Research checks whether cited authority supports the assertions made, and users can download full chat transcripts with any generated artifacts. SourceThomson Reuters, legal.thomsonreuters.com/en/products/cocounsel-legal and the CoCounsel Legal August and September 2026 releasesread 2026-10-25 |
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Deployment & Data Residency Deployment modes and options, including SaaS, dedicated cloud, VPC, on-prem, hybrid, local runtime, and self-hosting. |
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ClioDeployment & Data Residency Firms choose where their data is hosted, in Canada, the United States, Europe or Australia, on AWS. Clio states that all data used by its AI is processed in the customer's region (US, Canada, EMEA or APAC). SourceClio, clio.com/securityread 2026-09-06 |
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CoCounselDeployment & Data Residency Hosting and processing default to the United States, including every call to OpenAI GPT and Google Gemini, with backups in separate US availability zones, and region based hosting is available in the UK, Australia and Canada. The customer can pick one of those regions, but on premises deployment is not offered. SourceThomson Reuters, thomsonreuters.com/en/cocounselread 2026-10-25 |
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| Solution readiness | ||
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Prebuilt Agents, Templates & Packs Ready-made workflows, packaged employees, templates, blueprints, industry solutions, and role-specific agents that reduce time-to-value. |
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ClioPrebuilt Agents, Templates & Packs Packaged assets come several ways, including Grow AI's named prebuilt phone, web chat and email agents, which each work alone, document templates and matter templates on Core and above, a court forms library and court calendaring rule sets, and a 300 plus app directory. The agents inside Clio Manage and Clio Work run as functions of those products. SourceClio, clio.com/pricingread 2026-09-06 |
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CoCounselPrebuilt Agents, Templates & Packs Prebuilt skills and workflows ready to adopt are Deep Research, Litigation Document Analyzer, Tabular Analysis, Westlaw Brief Builder, Draft and Modify Clauses, Contract Playbooks, Knowledge Search, Prepare for a Deposition, Contract Policy Compliance and Timeline, along with an expert created prompt library. A Judicial setting for courts adds curated workflows such as pro se brief standardization, statute of limitations checks and cross brief issue synthesis. Each does its own job. SourceThomson Reuters, legal.thomsonreuters.com/en/products/cocounsel-legal/plans and the CoCounsel Legal August 2026 releasesread 2026-10-25 |
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| Platform extensibility | ||
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Model Flexibility & Routing Ability to work across multiple foundation models, route tasks to different models, or let buyers bring their own providers and keys. |
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ClioModel Flexibility & Routing The model provider behind Clio's AI is not named. Clio Work processes client files under zero data retention agreements, which implies external providers without identifying them, and there is no customer or admin model selection. SourceClio, clio.com/work and clio.com/securityread 2026-09-06 |
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CoCounselModel Flexibility & Routing Thomson Reuters names OpenAI GPT and Google Gemini as models behind CoCounsel, called through zero retention APIs. In August 2026 it added Thomson, its own large language model, trained from an open source foundation on Westlaw, Practical Law, Checkpoint and Reuters content, which now runs Tabular Analysis by default. CoCounsel Legal is multi model by design, and Thomson Reuters picks the model for each job, so customers and admins cannot select one. SourceThomson Reuters, thomsonreuters.com/en/cocounsel, the Thomson launch release (24 August 2026) and the CoCounsel Legal August 2026 releasesread 2026-10-25 |
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APIs, SDKs & MCP Extensibility Composability layer: stable APIs, SDKs, MCP tool consumption/serving, custom tools, and integration into internal systems. |
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ClioAPIs, SDKs & MCP Extensibility API reference documentation is published for Clio Manage and Clio Grow, listing endpoints, data and actions, alongside two developer portals with free developer accounts, a private app route for a single firm's own integrations, and guides including single sign on with Clio Identity. The API covers the core platform; no API specific to the AI layer is described. SourceClio, docs.developers.clio.comread 2026-09-06 |
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CoCounselAPIs, SDKs & MCP Extensibility The CoCounsel Legal MCP lets Claude drive CoCounsel Legal from outside, and since August 2026 it reaches research, analysis and drafting, not only Deep Research. Thomson Reuters also runs a developer portal with an API catalog, but there is no API or SDK for CoCounsel Legal itself, so MCP is the only way in. SourceThomson Reuters, legal.thomsonreuters.com/en/products/cocounsel-legal and the CoCounsel Legal August 2026 releasesread 2026-10-25 |
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Testing, Debugging & Optimization Testing, debugging, scoring, retries, fallbacks, quality gates, and optimization loops for improving agent workflows before and after deployment. |
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ClioTesting, Debugging & Optimization Pressure testing of arguments and gap identification in Clio Work evaluate the customer's legal position, not the agent, and there is no evaluation harness, test cases, quality gate or optimization loop for the AI. SourceClio, clio.com/work and docs.developers.clio.comread 2026-09-06 |
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CoCounselTesting, Debugging & Optimization Thomson Reuters says CoCounsel is designed, tested and refined with subject matter experts validating the AI, which is its own release practice, and it opened its Thomson model to outside academics for evaluation. The Forrester study on the product page was commissioned by Thomson Reuters. Customers get no evaluation harness, test cases, quality gate or optimization loop. SourceThomson Reuters, thomsonreuters.com/en/cocounsel and the Thomson launch release (24 August 2026)read 2026-10-25 |
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| Specialist automation | ||
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Browser & Computer Use Browser, desktop, or remote/local computer control for workflows that cannot be handled through stable APIs alone. |
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ClioBrowser & Computer Use There is no browser, desktop or computer control. Clio for Word is an add in running inside Microsoft Word, and the mobile apps are the product's own surfaces, neither of which is an agent operating an interface. SourceClio, clio.com/workread 2026-09-06 |
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CoCounselBrowser & Computer Use There is no browser, desktop or computer control. CoCounsel runs inside Word, Outlook and Teams as an add in, its own surface rather than an agent operating an interface. SourceThomson Reuters, legal.thomsonreuters.com/en/products/cocounsel-legalread 2026-10-25 |
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Pricing snapshot
Sourced from the Index pricing dataset · open each vendor's profile for full detail.
| Pricing | C Clio |
C CoCounsel |
|---|---|---|
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Entry price Lowest public entry point |
From $49 per user a month on Starter. AI is included on Core and above. | Not published. The rate card sits behind a qualification form. |
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Pricing confidence How public the numbers are |
Public, partial | Contact only |
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Billing Primary billing axis |
Per user seats on the plan chosen. | Seats, under a per plan subscription. |
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Variable cost Workload / overage exposure |
Low variable cost | Low variable cost |
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Free tier / trial Try before you buy |
No free tierTrial
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No free tierTrial
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Buying motion Self-serve vs sales call |
Mixed | Mixed |
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Pricing verified When this pricing was last checked |
Product updates
Newest first, each linked to its source.
Clio
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· Browser/computer use
Clio Work can now fill in the submission form on a court's own electronic filing portal, using documents and matter details already stored in Clio.
Source -
· Agent capability
Clio launched Visualizations in Clio Work, where a legal professional describes a tool or view, such as a case chronology, a settlement calculator or a firm performance dashboard, and Clio Work picks the relevant data, writes and runs the code and builds it inside the platform.
Source -
· Agent capability
Clio added Canadian case law and legislation to Vincent for research, drafting, analysis and citation verification.
Source
CoCounsel
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· Agent capability
A new version of CoCounsel Tax, Audit & Accounting, now available to customers in the United States, is an agentic platform that plans the work and picks the tools for it.
Source -
· Integrations
Customers of both Thomson Reuters and Otto Schmidt can now use German law commentary inside the classic version of CoCounsel Legal through the Otto Schmidt Legal Data Hub.
Source -
· Agent capability
Thomson Reuters expanded CoCounsel's due diligence workflows within HighQ with missing document analysis, holistic review of interrelated documents, and categorical risk outputs.
Source
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