About Spark and Spark Legal
Spark New Zealand is New Zealand’s largest telecommunications and digital services company, delivering mobile, broadband, cloud, IT, and digital solutions to consumers, businesses, and government agencies. As a critical national infrastructure provider, Spark operates in a fast-moving, highly regulated, and technology-driven environment.
Spark Legal’s in-house team supports the entire Spark Group. The team works closely with senior leaders across commercial, technology, network, regulatory, sales, marketing and corporate functions.
Its areas of expertise include commercial contracting in large technology, network, and outsourcing agreements, as well as corporate governance, regulatory and public law, privacy and data, and dispute resolution.
Spark has been on an active AI journey, with the Legal team deliberately involved from an early stage to help adopt AI responsibly and improve efficiency, consistency, and the quality of legal advice.
The Challenge
Spark Legal manages a high volume of complex matters, while supporting a fast-moving business that expects timely, commercial advice. Significant time was being spent on first-pass contract reviews, comparing document versions, summarising lengthy materials, and getting up to speed on unfamiliar subject matter.
The team was looking for a legal-specific AI tool that could reliably assist with document analysis, integrate into existing workflows, and be used with confidence in an enterprise legal environment.
“CoCounsel was selected because it is purpose-built for legal teams, grounded in trusted legal content, and well suited to the practical needs of an in-house legal team.” states Justine Gunn, General Counsel at Spark New Zealand.
The Solution
CoCounsel has become a practical day-to-day support tool for Spark Legal, particularly in document-heavy and time-sensitive situations. It enables rapid summarisation of lengthy documents, structured issue spotting during early-stage reviews, and analysis of contract databases to identify contractual positions.
This has reduced the time spent on manual document handling and allowed lawyers to focus more on commercial judgment, stakeholder engagement, and risk management. The team has seen improved turnaround times, particularly when responding to questions across large contract populations or working through complex and lengthy agreements.
“CoCounsel has become a genuine productivity multiplier for our legal team. It helps us get to the heart of complex documents quickly, so we can focus our time on commercial judgment, risk, and supporting the business — rather than reading and re-reading documents.” comments Justine.
As Spark Legal’s understanding of AI has matured, the team has expanded its use cases to include preparing executive summaries, stress-testing issue lists, and supporting internal knowledge-sharing and training. What the team values most is that CoCounsel feels like a trusted legal assistant rather than a generic AI tool.
Summary of key use cases
- Contract summarisation
- First-pass review
- Issue spotting
- Version comparison
- Contract set analysis
- Executive summaries
- Internal knowledge support
Looking Ahead
Spark Legal sees clear opportunity to continue expanding its use of CoCounsel as legal work grows in complexity and the focus shifts to optimising resources. CoCounsel supports scalable legal service delivery while helping maintain the quality and consistency of advice.
Spark sees Thomson Reuters as a key partner in supporting its responsible AI strategy and helping in-house legal teams adopt AI in a way that are practical, trustworthy, and aligned with internal risk and governance frameworks.
Thank you to the Spark Legal team for sharing their AI journey. As their experience shows, the right AI partner can help legal teams move beyond experimentation and turn efficiency gains into measurable time savings. If you’re looking for a fiduciary-grade AI legal assistant built for legal work, look no further than CoCounsel.
