vLex, which has been growing globally as a legal research rival to Thomson Reuters and LexisNexis, has unveiled a range of transactional genAI tools available with its expanded assistant Vincent AI (see AL TV Walk Through below). It’s a convergence strategy that will enable it to compete more with the Big Two, as well as other fast-growing legal genAI companies, which offer a similar mix of disputes and transactional skills all in one platform.
Among the more deal-related skills are contract analysis, redlining, and compare multiple documents. And also seen during the walk through are other aspects that will soon come online such as M&A due diligence.
Below is an AL TV Product Walk Through with Ed Walters, CSO, where we cover some of the key new things Vincent AI can do. Press play to watch inside the page.
Why does this matter?
Simply put, there is a type of ‘genAI skills convergence’ going on within the legal tech market, from vLex to TR and Lexis, to Harvey, Callidus, Paxton and more – with each trying to offer very broad capabilities across multiple practice areas.
The legal AI war is therefore moving into a phase where multiple companies are seeking to take market share not just in one segment or two, but across a wide range of ‘skills’ areas – all at once.
Some of the things vLex can now do include (or will once they become fully available)
- ‘Analyze a Contract – instantly identify non-market provisions, harmonize definitions, spot risks, create closing checklists, catalog post-closing obligations, and flag client-hostile language
- Redline Analysis – review redlines to summarize changes, assess their likely impact, and develop a negotiation strategy
- Compare Documents – upload multiple documents to identify differences in table format.’
- Explore a Collection – extract key facts, create timelines, and analyze entire folders of litigation or transactional documents, including from firm DMS systems
- Ask a Research Question – create a research memo to answer legal questions in 13 countries, with direct citations and links to verified sources, including Fastcase’s Cert citator in the United States
- Analyze a Deposition – summarize, extract key facts, identify follow-up questions and objections, and build timelines
- Build an Argument – research and draft winning arguments for or against propositions, based on precedent in specific jurisdictions
- Compare Law in Different Jurisdictions – scan the horizon, or compare governing law across different states in the United States, or between different countries
- 50-State Survey – For U.S. work, compare the law of all 50 states and the federal government with a single, plain-language search, and get table results, with editorial support, in minutes
- Find Related Authorities – upload a document to find related authorities from vLex, including primary and secondary materials
- Analyze a Complaint (or Analyse Pleadings in the UK) –extract claims, facts, and timelines, create questionnaires, itemize available defenses
The company said that in addition, instead of analyzing single documents, users can now work on multi-document libraries, called Collections. Legal teams can create many different kinds of Collections, such as playbooks, in-house KM resources, brief banks, or style guides. They can be made available to a single user, or to entire teams.
Collections support both Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) tasks, such as asking questions to synthesize knowledge about the entire collection, as well batch processing workflows such as document extraction.
This release also brings the first deep integrations of Vincent AI into the extensive Docket Alarm collection of state and federal dockets, as well as the complaints, answers, briefs and pleadings in those dockets.
For more than a decade, law firms, litigation finance companies, and corporate legal departments have used Docket Alarm to track, research, and analyze litigation data. During the summer, the vLex team developed new APIs to access the Docket Alarm data at scale. In this release, Vincent AI can access those APIs to search Docket Alarm using AI similar to the way Vincent AI searches the world’s law from vLex, they said.
vLex CEO Lluís Faus, concluded: ‘Because it is powered by one of the world’s largest libraries of structured legal data, Vincent AI has offered some of the most powerful AI workflow tools in the world. The Autumn ‘24 release includes those workflow tools and more, and in more countries. Really, Vincent AI has evolved to become an AI platform, hosting many different tools for drafting, planning, analysis, and research.’
—
All in all, a lot is going on here, and as mentioned above, this genAI skills convergence battle is only just getting started.
–
(Advert)
Legal Innovators UK Conference
If this subject is of interest, then come along to the Legal Innovators UK conference in London, Nov 6 and 7.
For more information please see here.
And to get your tickets now, please see here.