About Hull & Hull LLP
Hull & Hull LLP is a specialized estates, trusts, and capacity litigation firm with offices in Toronto, Oakville, and Ottawa in Canada. With 22 lawyers, the firm has a reputation for its focused expertise and commitment to quality client service. Ian Hull, Partner at the firm, is recognized for his innovative approach to legal practice and shares his journey using CoCounsel as their legal AI solution.
The challenge: Maintaining quality and staying ahead in a changing legal landscape
Hull observed that, following major industry changes such as the rise of the internet and the impact of COVID, AI is driving the next significant transformation in the legal sector. Focused on delivering exceptional work and client service, Ian identified workflow bottlenecks in the review process, particularly for junior lawyers. Manual reviews, while necessary to ensure consistency and quality, could be a source of delays on time-sensitive litigation.
Furthermore, Hull recognized growing client expectations around billing and the need to consistently improve productivity and value. To maintain the firm's competitive position and uphold its standards of excellence, he determined that adopting AI was crucial.
The solution: Embracing CoCounsel for enhanced workflow and quality
Hull and his firm began exploring AI tools and dedicated a full year to internal training and implementation. Their goals centered around using AI as a tool to enhance quality, streamline workflows, and maintain their boutique firm's market position.
Hull & Hull LLP chose CoCounsel after a thorough evaluation, recognizing its superior capabilities compared to other available tools. Ian highlights that CoCounsel was a better solution with robust analytical abilities, noting that competitors hadn't yet reached the same level of analytical power and didn’t have the same authoritative content as Thomson Reuters. The firm also valued Thomson Reuters strong security protocols, a crucial factor when dealing with sensitive client information.
“After a comprehensive review of the AI tools on the market, our firm chose CoCounsel for three reasons. First, CoCounsel’s analytical abilities were significantly beyond what were available from the competing products on the market, and the analytical power, even a year ago, was impressive. The second part of our decision was guided by Thomson Reuters ability to keep a model built on an established body of authoritative legal content, which was important to us — we needed the assurance that the AI’s information was grounded in reliable, established materials. The final piece was security — our clients rely on us to provide the highest levels of security and confidentiality, and we needed a system that could meet our standards.” — Ian Hull, Partner, Hull & Hull LLP
Initially, Hull & Hull LLP adopted a gradual implementation approach, starting with early adopters to ensure a smooth rollout to the broader organization. They then rolled it out to all lawyers and are now working on integrating AI with the rest of their staff, acknowledging the cultural shift in AI usage required across the entire firm.
Specific workflows and tasks improved by CoCounsel:
CoCounsel has been integrated into various aspects of Hull & Hull LLP's practice, benefiting both their solicitor and litigation work:
- Analysis of solicitor work. Analyzing historical wills, identifying executors, understanding estate plans, creating family trees, and benchmarking against the instructions provided for new wills.
- Litigation support. Generating cross-examination questions, creating chronologies, and performing rapid analysis of extensive medical records, such as thousands of pages in seconds, to identify weaknesses in cognition or other relevant information, providing references and document links for verification.
- Pre-Curated prompts. CoCounsel's built-in tools have significantly reduced the headache of training lawyers on effective prompting, making the tool more accessible and user-friendly.
The impact and value: Why Hull won't turn back
While acknowledging that quantifying the precise ROI can be challenging, Hull firmly believes that the benefits far outweigh the costs. His strategic decision was driven by the understanding that not adopting AI would be far more detrimental in the long run.
He highlighted several key impacts and benefits, including elevated quality control through CoCounsel's ability to address the mid-tier quality issues common in junior lawyers' work, minimizing errors and preventing bottlenecks. This improved the firm’s mentorship process, reducing the time senior lawyers spent correcting basic and intermediate-level mistakes, allowing them to shift their focus from error correction to strategic legal work and broader tactical considerations within litigation.
The integration of CoCounsel has also led to increased efficiency and reduced engagement with mundane tasks. By automating time-consuming activities like document review, chronology creation, and complex analysis of large volumes of records, lawyers are freed from mind-numbing work. This change not only allows them to concentrate on higher-level problem-solving and client advisory roles but also contributes to improved Associate development. Young lawyers can bypass tedious tasks and directly engage with the analytical aspects of their cases, accelerating their learning and allowing them to contribute in more meaningful ways from the outset.
Furthermore, CoCounsel is currently helping Hull & Hull LLP maintain its market position by enabling the firm to deliver specialized, high-quality work efficiently in an increasingly competitive landscape. Hull emphasized that embracing AI also fulfills a crucial professional obligation for lawyers to stay current with technological advancements, ensuring they provide the best possible service to clients and contribute to greater access to justice.
Ultimately, Ian believes CoCounsel makes legal practice way more fun, reducing drudgery, boosting job satisfaction, and ensuring the firm is future-proofed against a rapidly evolving legal industry, where failing to adopt AI would leave them significantly disadvantaged.
Hull's journey powerfully illustrates a truth Canadian law firms can't ignore — jumping on the AI train now isn't just smart, it's essential. As he candidly puts it, "2026 is like 100 years from now in AI terms." It’s a stark reminder that the window for getting ahead is closing fast. Firms sitting on the sidelines risk not only falling behind, but could possibly struggle to keep pace as legal AI rapidly becomes the norm.
