NRMA Lawyers Use Thomson Reuters AI to Save 30+ Hours Daily and Focus on Strategy

NRMA's 16-person legal team uses Westlaw, Practical Law, and CoCounsel to speed research and ship cleaner drafts. Source-backed answers save 1-2 hours per lawyer each day.

Categorized in: AI News Legal
Published on: Oct 13, 2025
NRMA Lawyers Use Thomson Reuters AI to Save 30+ Hours Daily and Focus on Strategy

How NRMA's in-house team uses legal AI to cut research time and ship cleaner drafts

The NRMA's 16-person legal team has woven Thomson Reuters AI tools into daily work. The impact: faster research, cleaner first drafts, and more time for strategy.

The business spans roadside, holiday parks and resorts, EV charging, car rental, ferry services, cruising, and a large member benefits program. That breadth means different statutes, regulators and obligations across multiple states.

"We deal with a very broad range of legal issues both in terms of topic and jurisdiction," says Gemma Piper, general counsel and company secretary. "It means we have to get across the legal aspects of a lot of areas."

From fragmented research to one stack that people actually use

Previous research tools lost trust over accuracy, so usage fell. Lawyers drifted to public sources. The team needed something accurate, consistent, secure-and simple enough that everyone would adopt it.

After in-office demos, they rolled out Westlaw Precision, Practical Law, and CoCounsel. "We basically fell in love with it and it was exactly what we needed," says senior corporate lawyer Luke Joseph. Now research, drafting, and review happen in one place with shared standards.

Professional-grade matters

Jen Lee, product strategy director for CoCounsel (Asia and emerging markets) at Thomson Reuters, draws a clear line: general chatbots aren't built for legal work. They lack safeguards and domain training lawyers require.

Thomson Reuters tools use retrieval-augmented generation, grounding answers in verified legal content with citations and footnotes. You can click through to the exact source. Humans stay in the loop. Accuracy isn't optional.

What changes in the day-to-day

Joseph asks Westlaw Precision natural-language questions and gets a concise summary with the right statute, the exact section, and relevant cases. CoCounsel drafts and reviews contracts in seconds. Lawyers then shape the output to fit the business.

"That's 30 hours a day we're saving across our legal team." The estimate: one to two hours saved per lawyer, per day.

Piper uses the tools to interrogate heavily negotiated contracts in minutes, not hours. Practical Law is now a go-to for upskilling, with practice notes, templates, litigation strategy, crisis management checklists, and privacy best practice.

Practical playbook for in-house teams

  • Centralise research. Pick one authoritative stack for case law, statutes, guidance, templates and AI assistance.
  • Insist on verifiable answers. Citations and footnotes should link to precise sources.
  • Keep lawyers in the loop. Use AI for speed and structure; retain legal judgment for context and risk.
  • Track the gains. Quantify hours saved on research, drafting, and contract review.
  • Upskill continuously. Use practice notes, checklists, and templates to expand team range with confidence.

Tools the team uses

  • Westlaw: precise legal research with natural-language queries and source-backed answers.
  • Practical Law: continually updated how-to guidance, precedents and checklists.
  • CoCounsel: AI assistant for drafting, reviewing, summarising and comparing documents.

What's next

The goal is habit. Use the tools so often that they become the default path to an answer or a draft. As Joseph puts it: "You will not be replaced by AI, but you will be replaced by someone who knows how to use AI better than you."

If you're building AI capability for a legal team, explore curated training and certifications to speed adoption and raise standards. Start here: AI courses by job.


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