The battle for an edge in the legal genAI wars just got personal, with LexisNexis announcing today the Protégé Legal AI Assistant as part of its ‘third generation’ Lexis+ AI capability.
In a nutshell Lexis is seeking to win the hearts and minds of lawyers by offering them deep customisation based on their personal use of Lexis+ AI. It’s being released as part of Lexis’s US Commercial Preview program.
As the company stated, it hopes that: ‘Protégé marks a substantial leap forward in personalized generative AI that will transform legal work, with personalization choices controlled by the customer.’ Henchman, the KM-to-drafting intelligence legal AI company it recently bought, is also playing a key role in this.
Thomson Reuters will also very shortly make their own announcement with a different angle, and there will be plenty of other announcements from legal tech companies this week as ILTACon unfolds. But, they are all trying to do the same thing: cement their genAI product(s) as the one lawyers most naturally reach for each day.
This legal genAI war is also still in its early stages and we can expect lots of ongoing R&D to turn into new features very rapidly across the legal tech market. In fact, the market may not have seen such a frenetic drive for product development for many years.
So, what does it do? This site has not seen a demo yet, but Lexis said via several bullet points, that:
- ‘Protégé is dedicated to understanding each user’s legal work needs, continuously learning and improving, and anticipating new ways to support them.
- LexisNexis acquired Henchman, a Belgium-based company, to catalyze its shift to personalized generative AI. Henchman’s advanced technology provides deeper access to law firms’ internal work product. Its technology enriches data from law firms’ DMS, enabling users to quickly mine internal repositories and extract and interact with key insights.
- Integrating Henchman DMS technology with trusted LexisNexis content using its proprietary Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) 2.0 platform improves answer quality and accelerates personalized generative AI.
- And in Q3 and Q4 2024, the Protégé personalization journey begins for users with functionality that: Knows your work and leverages your own work product – provides searchable internal firm data combined with AI for deep insights, enables batch upload capabilities and performs AI tasks, and analyzes my documents and provides contextual recommendations.
- Integrates across LexisNexis solutions and Microsoft 365 and provides Shepard’s insights within conversations.
- Protégé builds timelines, conducts AI code compare, initiates statutory horizon scanning, enables document upload and analysis, drafts full documents, and conducts intelligent legal research.
- Engages in sophisticated dialogue with clarifying questions and recommendations, and gives responses informed by subscribed LexisNexis products.
- Includes answering prompts by voice, multimedia processing across text, image, video and audio, and news horizon scanning to identify breaking opportunities and risks.’
Sean Fitzpatrick, CEO of LexisNexis North America, UK and Ireland, said: ‘Customers guide our vision. They are ready to progress from a Legal AI Assistant built for everyone, to the next phase – a Legal AI Assistant uniquely customized and tailored for each individual legal professional.’
So, there you go. There’s a lot to digest in terms of what it does. But, the key takeaway is that Lexis wants their genAI interface to be highly user-friendly so that you will want to keep going back to it, driven by the fact it learns from you – and can tap into everything you do, from your DMS and own work product, to all of the company’s other offerings, to the Microsoft suite.
They didn’t really go into accuracy as a subject, but highlighted their RAG 2.0 and that this is the third generation of their genAI platform – i.e. it should be more accurate than earlier versions. But, there’s only one way to find out.
Either way, it’s a strong statement of intent from Lexis that they are very serious about the ongoing legal genAI war and their strategic message to win lawyers’ engagement is all about personalization.