Brinks

Brinks, a global leader in secure logistics and security solutions operating across 54 countries, faced mounting pressure on its in-house legal function. Hal Snedden, VP of Global Privacy and Cybersecurity Counsel, needed to modernize how the team handled routine but time-intensive legal work: contract creation, redlining, negotiation support, legal research, drafting memoranda, and compliance presentations. Across a legal footprint spanning multiple jurisdictions and languages, reliance on outside counsel for associate-level tasks was driving up costs and creating bottlenecks. The status quo meant slower deal support, higher external spend, and attorneys stretched thin on work that didn't require their senior judgment.

Brinks ran a structured evaluation of multiple AI tools — both legal-specific and general-purpose platforms — scoring each against three criteria: relevance, efficiency, and user experience. CoCounsel (Thomson Reuters), built on large language model and generative AI technology, emerged as the clear choice, meeting all six target use cases in a single platform. Thomson Reuters supported a deliberate rollout that included onboarding resources and direct engagement with Brinks' global legal attorneys across languages, including Portuguese and Spanish. The deployment gave the in-house team a unified AI environment for compliance presentations, contract drafting and redlining, negotiation preparation, legal research, and memoranda — replacing fragmented, manual workflows with AI-assisted ones operating at scale across 54 countries.

CoCounsel delivered measurable impact across both cost and productivity dimensions. The in-house team took over associate-level research and drafting work previously outsourced, generating direct reductions in outside counsel spend. Research tasks that previously required several days were completed significantly faster, freeing attorneys to support a higher volume of deals and shift focus to strategic priorities. Multilingual capability allowed consistent AI support across all operating countries. Key outcomes:

• Research time: Multi-day research tasks completed in a fraction of the prior time
• Outside counsel savings: Associate-level work handled in-house rather than externally billed
• Geographic coverage: 54 countries supported, including multilingual prompts in Portuguese and Spanish
• Adoption: All six target use cases operationalized across the global legal team

• In-house legal teams can recapture meaningful outside counsel budget by using AI to absorb associate-level research and drafting — the ROI case is strongest when tied to specific, recurring task categories.
• Multilingual LLM support is non-negotiable for global legal departments; evaluate it as a first-order criterion, not a nice-to-have.
• Structured vendor evaluation against defined use cases — rather than broad capability demos — drives higher adoption and clearer post-deployment ROI measurement.
• A phased rollout with vendor-supported onboarding accelerates attorney confidence and reduces resistance to workflow change.
• Identifying six concrete use cases before tool selection gave Brinks a replicable evaluation framework applicable to future AI decisions.