At Jansen & Company, I’m a Senior Tax Managing Director, working alongside a team that shares responsibility for client relationships and technical work. My role often centers on complex tax research, team training, and helping ensure we have the right tools in place to support our clients effectively.
Tax work at a small firm is rarely tidy. Client situations are complex, questions don’t always have clean answers, and the people responsible for figuring it out are often the same ones training the team, managing relationships, and evaluating every new tool that promises to make the job easier.
Over the past few years, our work has gotten more complex. We're seeing more clients with intricate, multi-layered situations: multi-state rental income, IRS scrutiny around solar energy credits, international partner allocations. These aren't challenges you can Google your way through. They require deep, structured research and nuanced interpretation — and time our team doesn't always have. So, when AI started reshaping workflows in the accounting world, I paid attention, and then I started testing.
The honest truth about general-purpose AI tools
I tried several, including ChatGPT. They're genuinely useful for certain things — brainstorming approaches, getting an initial lay of the land, translating dense concepts into plain language. But when I needed to dig into a complex tax issue with a real client on the line, I hit a wall. General-purpose AI tools don't always know where their answers are coming from. In our profession, that matters enormously. As I've told my team: I don't want a tool pulling an article from some guy in a basement.
For quick, low-risk questions, a general-purpose AI tool might be fine. For the work that actually keeps me up at night, I needed something purpose-built for professional-grade tax research.
Where CoCounsel Tax changed the game
That's what I found with Thomson Reuters CoCounsel Tax. The decisive factor was straightforward: every answer is grounded in Checkpoint-verified sources. I can see exactly where the information is coming from, trace it back, and stand behind it with a client or in IRS correspondence.
Take a recent case involving an IRS challenge around solar energy credits. Before, fully validating something that complex could take hours — I used to spend an hour and a half on an article and realize it wasn't what I needed. With CoCounsel, I reached a defensible, well-sourced answer in a fraction of the time. The same held true for a client who needed help converting an improperly structured passive rental C-corp, and another involving tax planning for a partner living abroad in Greece.
The benefit isn't speed alone. It's accuracy and confidence — and those two things directly affect how I communicate with clients and how well I can document my recommendations.
"Small and mid-sized firms are often navigating the same complexity as much larger practices,” says Elizabeth Beastrom, President of Tax, Audit & Accounting Professionals at Thomson Reuters. “CoCounsel Tax is designed to close that gap — giving professionals the fiduciary-grade, source-backed research they need to advise clients confidently on their most challenging cases."
What this means for firms like ours
It’s also changed how I develop my team. CoCounsel isn’t just a research shortcut — it’s become part of how we work through problems together, tracing the reasoning, not just retrieving the answer. That wasn’t something I expected going in, but it’s one of the things I find most valuable now. And increasingly, the tool meets that need well. The responses have grown more explanatory, more willing to walk you through the “why” rather than just hand you a conclusion — which, for professional tax work, isn’t a secondary feature. It’s often the whole point.
The bottom line
AI in tax is real, and it's here to stay. But not all AI is built for our work. If you're evaluating tools, my honest advice is to get past the hype and ask one question: where are the sources? For complex research that has to hold up — with clients, with the IRS, with your own professional standards — that's the only question that matters.