The “Review Documents” skill performs a line-by-line review of your documents to answer your questions, enabling you to quickly extract the information you need. This is not a keyword search; instead, CoCounsel uses AI technology to read every word in your documents. It will then prepare a table that contains answers to your questions, including citations to the pages of your documents where it found the answers.
Please note: The “Review Documents” skill can be used with a wide variety of documents, but if you would like CoCounsel to analyze contracts, the “Extract Contract Data” skill is a better application for that task. The “Extract Contract Data” skill has been trained on thousands of contracts and is specifically designed to parse and comprehend contractual clauses.
Step-by-step instructions
(1) Launch “Review Documents”: To get started, click on the “Review Documents” skill from the CoCounsel skills menu.
(2) Choose the documents that CoCounsel should review: You will then be prompted to choose documents for CoCounsel to review. You have the option of manually uploading a document from your computer, selecting a document from an AllSearch database, or copying and pasting a text passage, as shown below:
**Uploaded file sizes should not exceed 500 MB per file.
Using AllSearch with “Review Documents”: To choose a document from an AllSearch database instead of manually uploading a document from your computer, click the “Select from AllSearch” option shown above and then choose the AllSearch database you would like to draw from. To learn how to set up an AllSearch database, please see the following article from Casetext’s Help Center, “How do I use AllSearch?”
(3) Enter the questions you want CoCounsel to answer: After you have either uploaded or selected the documents that you want CoCounsel to review, click on the “Analyze documents” button, and you will see a dialog box where you can type in questions about the contents of those documents. The dialog box will initially show you fields to ask three questions, but you can enter additional questions by selecting the “Add Another Question” button. You can also delete a question you’ve entered by clicking on the trashcan icon.
When you are finished, select the “Get Your Answers” button, as shown below:
(4) Review CoCounsel’s output: CoCounsel will read your documents and prepare a table that summarizes the answers to your questions about each document. This table will appear in a window in your chat history, but you can select the arrow to get a full screen view. You can also download CoCounsel’s output as an Excel spreadsheet.
The screenshot provided above shows you an example of the “full response” view of CoCounsel’s output from the “Review Documents'' Skill. The table lists the documents that CoCounsel reviewed along the Y axis and the questions asked about each document along the X axis. The table displays summary responses to your questions, including answers in simple “Yes” or “No” format, as applicable, but you can see additional information explaining how CoCounsel arrived at its answers by hovering your mouse above each answer.
As shown above, when you hover your mouse over the short answer in the table, an explanation “bubble” will appear, where CoCounsel will include applicable citations to the page(s) of your documents where it found its answers.
Advanced Tips:
If CoCounsel makes conflicting statements when answering your questions, it could mean that your documents contain conflicting information. You can investigate any conflicting information reported by CoCounsel by clicking on the links that show where in the documents CoCounsel found these statements.
Using clear, specific language in your questions yields best results. A vague question is likely to produce a vague response from CoCounsel.
CoCounsel’s ability to read handwritten documents can vary, depending on the legibility of the handwriting. Handwriting that mimics the appearance of typed words will be more easily understood by CoCounsel than cursive handwriting.