Augment expertise with technology
May Elajami is the Founder and Principal Lawyer at ME Law, a dynamic and results-driven Canadian law firm focusing on corporate and commercial litigation, business law, and dispute resolution with precision and strategy. The firm prides itself on quality over quantity and stands out by delivering legal excellence backed by industry expertise and augmented by technology-driven intelligence.
In fact, Elajami and her team are vanguards in their use of technology to optimize time, costs, and outcomes for clients, while always putting human intelligence and personal relationships first. It is this blend of client focus, tech savviness, and legal expertise that first brought Elajami to Thomson Reuters CoCounsel, the industry’s first professional-grade generative AI (GenAI) assistant.
Thomson Reuters Westlaw Edge Canada with CoCounsel streamlines legal research at ME Law by combining a trusted, comprehensive content library with the speed and precision of GenAI-powered search capabilities. Elajami and her team use it to find credible, authoritative content quickly without compromising the accuracy and quality of their legal research.
General-purpose GenAI is not specialized enough for legal work
As Principal Lawyer at the 10-person firm, Elajami leads both legal practice and business strategy, balancing client advocacy with firm growth. She believes strongly in using technology to forward both goals. By using technology to work smarter and be more efficient, she can take on more clients and serve each one more effectively.
When she first began hearing about GenAI, Elajami quickly realized that general-purpose models — like ChatGPT — would not be specialized enough for legal research. “I’m always looking for software that can give information at the speed of light,” she says, but “I’m not an advocate for lawyers to use ChatGPT.” A general large-language model like ChatGPT will “pull everything off the internet and give you the answer — and it’s wrong, as we’ve been seeing in courts.” On the other hand, with Westlaw Edge Canada with CoCounsel, “I can type in a legal question, and it will give me back an answer with cases and statutes, and then I can go look at the case law to confirm the answer.” She adds, “Because Westlaw Edge is industry-specific, there are specific safeguards.”
Staying competitive with larger firms
Elajami shares that her firm is all about using technology to “make our work better.” For example, she has a policy of responding to clients within 24 hours at most, but often responds even sooner, with a quick message to let clients know her availability. “Clients come to a lawyer because they need help fast. They don’t want to wait a month. And that’s the difference between our firm and the bigger firms.” With Westlaw Edge Canada with CoCounsel, when she gives a paralegal or a junior lawyer a task, “instead of spending hours trying to find the case law on it, they could just put it in and provide you that answer in two seconds.”
Even better, “you can see what other cases they’re quoting. Because it’s a service provided specifically for my industry, I know there are specific standards already in place that I can trust, and it reminds you to verify the answer. That’s five seconds of your time versus three hours going through the case law.” In the end, “that’s what makes our firm competitive against larger firms.”
Cutting time spent on tedious work
The ME Law team also uses CoCounsel to cut time spent on routine, non-billable work. For example, turning legalese into something lay people understand can be a time-consuming challenge. When she needs to explain clauses to clients, May enters the clause and tells CoCounsel to “just make this as simple as possible for my client. Instead of taking an hour of my time writing it, it takes two seconds.” For case summaries, “I just say, ‘summarize the case,’ and it would provide me with a great summary. You can have a 30-page claim statement, and it organizes and summarizes it for you.”
More than worth the investment
Elajami believes Thomson Reuters CoCounsel can give even solo law practitioners a competitive edge. First, it provides access to an incredibly deep pool of legal knowledge. Second, it can help attract top talent by demonstrating a firm’s commitment to modern technology that makes work more efficient and enjoyable. Asked if the investment is worth it, May replies, “You have to invest in these tools to grow your business. You have to look at, long term, what do you want it to do for your practice? What kind of firm do you want to have? Do you want to grow? Do you want to stay solo?”
May concludes, “We’re profitable by delivering fast, efficient, high-quality legal services.” With CoCounsel, “we can take on more work because we’re not spending as much time on one thing that would take 10 hours to do — we can now do it at the speed of light.” She adds, “I think the first time using it, that was the moment where I thought, ‘This is a tool we cannot live without.’ I think if something were to happen, and I didn’t have access to this, I would be missing something from my practice.”
