Despite the fact that ILTACON ended greater than every week in the past now, I’m nonetheless digging out from the deluge of briefings and conferences I attended there. One in all explicit observe was a media briefing with LexisNexis executives during which they offered additional data on the corporate’s AI technique.
Simply forward of ILTACON, LexisNexis had introduced the launch of Protégé Basic AI, as I reported at the time. This launch expanded its Protégé synthetic intelligence platform to incorporate safe entry to a number of general-purpose AI fashions alongside its current legal-specific AI instruments.
On the ILTACON media briefing, LexisNexis executives detailed new options of its Protégé AI platform, offered extra particulars on the rollout of the brand new Basic AI software, and mentioned the corporate’s broader imaginative and prescient of delivering what it calls “courtroom-grade AI” to the authorized occupation.
Sean Fitzpatrick, CEO of LexisNexis North America, UK and Eire, opened the session by describing the second as unprecedented by way of each technological change and monetary funding.
Associated: On LawNext: How LexisNexis and Harvey Are Partnering to Reshape Legal AI, with LexisNexis CEO Sean Fitzpatrick.
“The quantity of funding that’s going into these foundational fashions is tons of of billions of {dollars}, and we’ve by no means seen something like this,” Fitzpatrick stated. “That is the largest know-how spending cycle within the historical past of enterprise.”
With prices for giant language fashions dropping by greater than 99% since 2022, he added, the economics now make it attainable to function these techniques at scale.
To that finish, Fitzpatrick described his firm’s imaginative and prescient of constructing AI assistants broadly accessible.
“Our imaginative and prescient is that each lawyer goes to have their very own digital AI assistant, and it’s going to be personalised to them,” he stated. “It’s going to grasp their apply space, it’s going to grasp their jurisdiction, it’s going to grasp their fashion, their preferences, it’s going to have entry to our authoritative authorized supplies, and it’s going to have entry to their very own inner work product.”
Constructing ‘Courtroom-Grade AI’
Fitzpatrick stated that whereas consumer-grade AI instruments are broadly used amongst authorized professionals, they lack the privateness, quotation rigor, and reliability essential for authorized apply.
LexisNexis, he emphasised, is dedicated to creating “courtroom-grade AI,” which it defines by six rules:
- Grounding in authoritative authorized content material. “LexisNexis has 160 billion paperwork and information in our system,” Fitzpatrick stated, “and in order that’s what we use as grounding knowledge after we do our AI.”
- Verifiable supply citations. Shepard’s supplies the flexibility to confirm that citations are correct and updated, he stated.
- Steady updates with no information cutoffs. Fitzpatrick famous that GPT-4o had a information cutoff of 2023. “We add 2.5 million paperwork and information to the system each single day from 50,000 totally different sources.”
- This has two features, Fitzpatrick stated: One is transparency again to the authority, so you’ll be able to confirm for your self. The second is understanding what’s occurring contained in the black field – what’s the reasoning and logic.
- Bias mitigation. Gold-standard safety and privateness.
- Safety and privateness. It must be disconnected from the foundational fashions so the information is just not getting used for studying or coaching.
“That is about constructing AI that legal professionals can belief in a courtroom setting,” Fitzpatrick stated.
Protégé on the Heart
Central to that effort is Protégé, the corporate’s AI assistant. By 2028, he stated, Protégé will automate 15-20% of what legal professionals do right now.
However he added that LexisNexis is just not ready till 2028 to ship on that imaginative and prescient. Protégé already automates most of the duties legal professionals routinely carry out, and it’ll proceed so as to add extra capabilities.
“Consider all the various things that all the various kinds of attorneys do, there are tens of hundreds of duties that must be automated,” he stated. “We’re going to proceed to automate totally different duties alongside these workflows, so Protégé will get an increasing number of highly effective over time.”
Protégé is increasing on a number of fronts, Fitzpatrick stated:
- Geographically: It’s already stay within the U.S., U.Ok., Canada, Australia, Hong Kong and New Zealand, with further rollouts coming to South Africa, France, and Austria.
- Throughout merchandise: It has been built-in into Lexis+, Lex Machina, Intelligize, and different instruments.
- Throughout the ecosystem: LexisNexis has added integrations with Microsoft Phrase, Outlook, Groups, and Copilot, in addition to a new connection with Harvey that permits Harvey customers to question Lexis AI straight.
Agentic Workflows Demonstrated
Through the media briefing, Serena Wellen, vp of product administration, demonstrated Protégé’s agentic workflows, which she stated have been designed to extend transparency into the method and provides legal professionals extra management over analysis and drafting.
In a single instance, Wellen confirmed how Protégé can break down a posh question involving an airline’s obligation to an unaccompanied minor into sub-prompts that the consumer can overview and edit earlier than the system delivers outcomes.
“Attorneys can overview each quotation, take away irrelevant ones, and make sure the closing response displays their judgment,” Wellen stated.
She additionally gave a preview of a judicial workflow presently in growth, which permits judges to add case information and obtain draft bench memos or opinions. Judges who’ve examined it, she stated, in contrast the drafts to the work of “a very good legislation clerk” and praised the time financial savings of lowering weeks of labor to minutes.
“A few of them even advised us that some components of the drafts have been extra thorough than what they often noticed.”
Protégé for Basic AI
As famous above, a significant current announcement from LexisNexis was Protégé Basic AI, a safe workspace that lets customers entry well-liked shopper AI fashions reminiscent of GPT-5, Claude Sonnet 4, and OpenAI’s O3 reasoning fashions from inside the LexisNexis atmosphere.
David Ganote, vp of product planning, stated the transfer responds to the truth that two-thirds of legal professionals already use shopper AI instruments reminiscent of ChatGPT or Claude, usually for analysis, brainstorming or drafting.
“However they’re placing privileged knowledge into open fashions that aren’t designed to guard it,” Ganote stated.
Protégé Basic AI, in contrast, provides enterprise-grade safety and incorporates LexisNexis’s Shepard’s quotation agent, which flags unverified or hallucinated citations. It additionally permits customers to toggle clearly between Authorized AI, grounded in Lexis content material, and common AI, higher suited to exploratory or inventive duties.
“There are many issues that common AI does rather well that don’t require authorized authorities,” Ganote stated, pointing to examples reminiscent of explaining ideas to a jury or drafting advertising and marketing content material.
Selective Method to Fashions
Jeff Reihl, government vp and chief know-how officer, stated that the corporate’s growth of brokers isn’t just a PR ploy.
“We don’t construct brokers simply so that you just guys can write about us constructing brokers,” he stated. “Brokers are terribly highly effective know-how and we are going to use these to serve a function for our clients.”
Reihl additionally defined the technique behind the corporate’s selection of AI fashions, saying that it maintains a multimodal technique, selecting the most effective generative AI mannequin for every use case somewhat than chasing the most recent launch.
Though the corporate had early entry to GPT-5, he stated, it had not but been deployed in Lexis merchandise (not less than as of the press briefing).
“As of proper now, the efficiency is just not higher, so we gained’t use it,” Reihl stated. “We don’t put a brand new mannequin into our product simply because it’s the newest and biggest.”
LexisNexis has direct partnerships with Anthropic, OpenAI, AWS, Microsoft, and Mistral, giving it early entry to fashions and enter into their growth roadmaps.
Aggressive Panorama
Because the briefing concluded, Fitzpatrick was requested in regards to the broader aggressive panorama, and whether or not Microsoft or Google may ultimately come to dominate authorized AI. He argued that LexisNexis’ mixture of authoritative content material, safe AI, and workflow integration provides it an edge.
“It’s numerous work to attempt to pull collectively the gathering of property that we now have,” he stated. “You possibly can give someone a billion {dollars} and so they wouldn’t be capable to do it.”
He additionally gave an replace on the partnership between LexisNexis and Harvey, which partly concerned the co-development of AI workflows for legal professionals. I requested him if there had been replace on that since I spoke to him in July for my podcast.
“It’s advanced since we talked about it,” he replied. “It’s actually coming collectively.”
He stated clients have been testing it and they’re constructing on the suggestions from these clients. “Actually, actually superb suggestions on it, so we’re very excited.”
Fitzpatrick closed the briefing expressing confidence in LexisNexis’s persevering with management in growing AI for legal professionals.
“There’s numerous room for folks to innovate round this stuff, however I do suppose that main gamers like LexisNexis which have the content material … do have a bonus.
“From a know-how standpoint, it’s actually exhausting to take care of a aggressive benefit if it’s simply know-how. And in order that’s why we attempt to take our content material, embed it in our know-how options, after which embed these know-how options into the workflows of our clients.”
