By Sean Fitzpatrick | CEO, LexisNexis North America, UK, Ireland
At LexisNexis®, we work with our customers to transform legal work … that mission is at the heart of every product we develop and solution we deliver. Our focus on technology has positioned us as a leader in the legal industry’s innovative use of AI for several years.
Our Legal AI innovation journey began with “extractive” AI tools that use machine learning algorithms to find relevant results within data to surface deep insights. For example, our popular Lexis+® Answers product took users beyond traditional keyword searching to identify relationships between concepts and return key passages extracted from the LexisNexis network of authoritative legal sources.
The journey continued with “generative” AI tools that create new content from data based on user-entered prompts or instructions, allowing our customers to engage in human-like conversations and tackle complex legal tasks with ease. We recognized the immense potential of Gen AI and naturally began leveraging this new technology as part of our ongoing, customer informed innovation process, which led to the debut in October 2023 of Lexis+ AI®, the first comprehensive legal research platform powered by Gen AI for the legal profession.
Lexis+ AI represented a new standard for efficiency, precision and speed in legal technology innovation. We backed up this commitment by releasing a second-generation version of the Lexis+ AI platform in April 2024, with expanded use cases for legal professionals, faster delivery of AI-generated answers, and improved results for customers.
The Next Chapter Begins
We are proud to once again be on the leading edge of legal tech innovation: Agentic AI, which guides users to perform tasks aligned with their workflow, through custom AI models known as agents. While Gen AI focuses on creating content, agentic AI assists in professional decision-making and work task organization based on the user’s tailored requirements.
Welcome to LexisNexis Protégé™, our new AI assistant that leverages the power of agentic AI to transform legal work with personalization choices controlled by the user or their organization to optimize the individual’s AI experience.
Protégé understands individual preferences and then draws upon our comprehensive repository of authoritative legal content — as well as the customer’s own proprietary work product and other firm knowledge. It uses that universe of content as grounding data to provide deeply personalized answers, drafts, summaries and more.
For example, Protégé understands the user’s practice area, the jurisdictions in which they are working, and their unique drafting style and preferences. This context informs the answers that it creates and surfaces, enabling the tool to help guide the legal professional to the end result that best meets their specific need. Protégé leads the legal industry into a new era in which the Legal AI experience is tailor-made for each individual legal professional.
Driving Next-Level Performance
How does Protégé achieve these ambitious goals? Protégé will help lawyers achieve next-level legal performance for their clients in profound ways, such as:
Drafting transactional documents, as well as litigation motions, briefs, and complaints from a single prompt
Generating drafts based on uploaded sample documents
Suggesting legal workflow actions (e.g., summarize, draft, research, proofread, Shepardize®, etc.) based on the types of documents uploaded (including large, complex documents)
Drafting tailored deposition questions based on fact patterns, witness descriptions and other relevant information contained in the case documents
Reviewing an uploaded motion or argument and finding similar motions and arguments in the LexisNexis system to further refine the argument, find stronger authority, and identify potential weaknesses
Moreover, Protégé has the capability — with the user’s explicit permission and authorization — to extract information securely from the organization’s internal Document Management System (DMS). This data helps a lawyer leverage their internal work product as reference data for AI-powered drafting tasks.
Protégé is embedded now on the Lexis+ AI platform and in the Lexis® Create+ tool for Legal AI drafting in Microsoft Word, and will eventually be rolled out across the entire LexisNexis ecosystem.
The Innovation Journey Continues
As we look to the future, LexisNexis remains committed to staying at the forefront of innovation, continuously adapting and evolving to meet the ever-changing needs of our customers. The next chapter in the AI revolution is just beginning, and we are excited to explore new frontiers and push the boundaries of what is possible in the legal tech space.
We are confident that Lexis+ AI with Protégé will revolutionize the way legal professionals work, enabling them to deliver exceptional service to their clients while staying ahead of the curve in an increasingly competitive and complex legal landscape.
At LexisNexis, we’re not just embracing the future of AI, we’re shaping it. To learn more about Protégé, please go to www.lexisnexis.com/protege.
