Case study
Elevating audit and advisory work with CoCounsel Tax & Audit
Harris, Hardy & Johnstone, PC turns hours of manual review and research into minutes — improving responsiveness, confidence, and client experience
Executive summary
The team at Harris, Hardy & Johnstone adopted CoCounsel Tax and Audit from Thomson Reuters to relieve time pressure on its audit and tax teams, increase confidence in answers, and elevate client service. After due diligence and peer references, the firm adopted Thomson Reuters CoCounsel Tax & Audit and tasked auditors and managers to use it for board minutes, leases, contracts, and day‑to‑day research. Early results show meaningful time savings — summarizing lengthy documents in minutes and validating technical answers quickly — alongside higher‑quality workpapers and faster client support. Within six weeks, the team captured new business by using CoCounsel to pinpoint anomalies in a prospect's financials and translate those findings into clear, defensible insights. Going forward, the firm expects continued gains in consistency, confidence, and client satisfaction by embedding CoCounsel across audit and tax workflows.
Key results:
- Board minute and contract reviews cut from about an hour to five minutes, enabling auditors to move faster on core procedures
- Spot-checks and research validations completed in one minute versus 15 to 30 minutes using prior methods, speeding confident client responses
- New client won by analyzing a working trial balance in minutes and surfacing mispostings that demonstrated immediate advisory value
12x faster
Board minutes and contract reviews
15-30x faster
Spot-checks and research validation
Time savings
More personal time without stress
The challenge: Keeping pace with client questions and document-heavy audits
As a full‑service CPA firm serving thousands of clients, Harris, Hardy & Johnstone faced a steady stream of complex questions and document reviews that strained capacity for partners, managers, and staff. Board minutes, leases, and contracts consumed disproportionate time during audits, and routine research required context‑switching into titles and manuals that slowed response times. The stakes were highest for partners fielding rapid‑fire inquiries. The firm needed a way to deliver confident, cited answers quickly while maintaining quality and freeing up partner and manager time.
“We have approximately 4500 clients, and mine are very inquisitive. Before CoCounsel, I found it hard to keep up with answering all those questions in a way that I felt was comprehensive.”
George G. Crowell
Principal, Harris, Hardy & Johnstone
Legacy tools contributed to friction. For example, payroll and tax lookups could require digging through titles or going into separate products. As George G. Crowell, Principal at the firm, explained about a typical research project, "What took me one minute would have taken me at least 15 to 30, depending on how well I navigated through that title."
For audit teams, manually reviewing long documents to extract key terms and matters for workpapers added hours across engagements. The new normal is the growing expectation for immediate, defensible answers — without expanding staff, making it impossible to rely on slower, fragmented processes.
The solution: Secure, accounting-focused AI that fits real audit and tax work
After ongoing outreach from Thomson Reuters and rising industry "chatter," the firm conducted their due diligence, including speaking with a 100‑person peer firm whose successful test led to an all‑firm rollout. That endorsement helped resolve internal debate about timing and accelerated adoption. Security was also a deciding factor as George explains, "One of the biggest selling points is around the security of CoCounsel, the fact that it's an enclosed LLM, that it has the SoC certification so that we can load up whatever we wish into the platform."
Just as importantly, the curated research foundation aligned to tax and audit work, George states "Because CoCounsel is so enclosed with a massive amount of curated research material, I know that I have the best tool to evaluate taxes, financial statements, accounting services."
Implementation began with clear direction for the audit practice. George tasked all his auditors to use it to analyze and summarize all contract types and board minutes, and to use that summary as part of their workpapers. Day to day, partners and managers use CoCounsel to validate technical positions across tax and financial reporting, replacing time‑consuming title lookups and enabling quick, cited confirmations before responding to clients. The firm continues to learn prompting nuances and expand scenarios, early usage spans financial‑statement analysis, lease reviews that feed into the team's existing calculation tools, and nonprofit‑related research, including Form 990 questions.
The outcome: Faster answers, stronger workpapers, and new business
The firm reports immediate productivity gains and quality improvements in audit and advisory work. For auditors, CoCounsel's ability to read and summarize lengthy materials has been a game changer and George says "What they would take an hour to do, CoCounsel can do in the matter of five minutes… and give a better summary than my staff are usually used to putting out, so it enhances our quality."
CoCounsel has also contributed to business development. During a prospect engagement, the team uploaded working financials and identified an unusual spike in shipping costs as a percentage of revenue. This was traced by the client to a new AP clerk misposting transactions — helping the firm showcase advisory value and win the client.
Internally, managers and staff require less partner involvement in engagements as they feel more confident in their research. Research projects have included nonprofit issues like Form 990 treatments and footnotes for financial statements. They are then able to share what they have learned with partners, raising the level of knowledge for the whole team. Beyond just measurable efficiencies, George underscores the human impact, stating "Time is worth more than anything else. Our industry is so choked for time that any minute I get back could mean an extra evening with my wife or a vacation without stress."
Company overview
Harris, Hardy & Johnstone, PC is a Richmond, Virginia–based CPA firm providing tax planning and preparation, audit and attestation, estates and trusts, and strategic advisory services to businesses and nonprofits across the region. Established in 1993, the firm operates from 300 Arboretum Place, Suite 660, North Chesterfield, VA 23236.
