Lexis Launches Protégé – Its GenAI Agentic Assistant

It’s a double whammy today for LexisNexis. After earlier launching Create+, they’re now rolling out Protégé, ‘a personalized AI assistant that intelligently powers productivity’ and which has agentic capabilities.

For now, it’s available in the US, but as with all other products it will roll out more widely eventually.

Jeff Pfeifer, Chief Product Officer, LexisNexis North America and UK, noted that this was a big deal for the company. ‘[This] marks a step change in our legal AI functionality, whether legal professionals are using their own internal data or LexisNexis trusted resources,’ he said and then teasingly added: ‘Expect more role- and task-based agentic AI-assisted workflows from LexisNexis.’

All well and good, and indeed it does sound exciting. So what is it? (And you can now see more here.)

Well, think of it as a fuller development of what several companies have been trying to do since genAI arrived, namely to provide an all-singing, all-dancing ‘legal AI assistant’, that will sit on your desktop, integrate with your work product, with Word, with legal research data, and more, and then add in all the typical LLM-based legal AI skills we have come to expect, from drafting, to now…….(drum roll.…) also adding the use of agents to carry out a series of tasks as part of a workflow.

And perhaps it’s this agentic bit that will get the most attention – and understandably so.

As the company explained: ‘[With the ] agentic AI capabilities, Protégé can autonomously complete tasks based on user goals, including reviewing its own work and identifying areas where it can improve its own output. For the customer, this means simplified AI use, accelerated productivity, and enhanced value.’

And in terms of the skills list, they include:

• ‘Draft full, tailored transactional documents, as well as litigation motions, briefs, and complaints, and check its own work before turning them over to human legal professionals for final review. Documents can be further edited directly in Lexis+ AI or exported to Microsoft Word.

• Suggest legal workflow actions based on the type of documents uploaded (e.g., Draft a Legal Memo, Summarize, Draft an Argument) and dynamically generate follow-up prompts that are personalized to the lawyer’s workflow.

• Provide prompt assistance, proactively suggesting refinements to queries to help the user accomplish their goals efficiently.

• Allow users to securely upload and save tens of thousands of legal documents to Protégé Vault. On each Vault, users can perform numerous AI tasks to summarize, draft, research, and more.

• Draft deposition questions based on fact patterns, descriptions of witnesses, and other relevant information.

• Draft discovery documents, including Interrogatories, Request for Production of Documents, and Request for Admissions.

• Generate a graphical timeline of events from uploaded documents.

• Ask questions of or summarize large, complex documents of up to 1 million characters or approximately 300 pages—a 250% increase over previous processing limits.

• Enable users to upload transactional documents and conduct streamlined, systematic analyses with speed and accuracy.

• Review an uploaded motion or argument and find similar motions and arguments in the LexisNexis system to help the user refine their argument, find stronger authority, and identify potential weaknesses.

• Link quotes in litigation filings back to source documentation to confirm accuracy.’


And here is what Scott Liska, Vice President, Strategic Accounts, at Amazon Web Services, thinks after working with LexisNexis on this.

‘[The] rapid pace of AI innovation demands secure, private, and reliable cloud infrastructure, as well as building block services like Amazon Bedrock. We are proud to partner closely with LexisNexis Legal & Professional to enable the swift development and delivery of Protégé,’ he said – and that reminds us all once again of the flipside of AI: data centres and hosting, which is a massively growing business – just see all the announcements in the US recently (and with the UK trying to follow in the same way).

Is this a big deal?

Yes.

Why? Because although we have had assistants with convergent genAI skillsets before, this is the first time that Lexis has rolled out a ‘live’ agent for people to play with and set on real legal work product.

Will the workflows they’ve suggested make a cataclysmic difference, e.g. ‘Draft a Legal Memo, Summarize, Draft an Argument?’ Not on their own. But, it all adds to the overall efficiency and productivity gains that legal AI is now bringing to the sector.

It’s eating up non-billable work, and by the looks of it taking a solid step into the fringes of billable work as well.

There will be more on this that’s for sure – as well as no doubt robust responses from its competitors. People have said 2025 will be the year of agentic AI in the law….and they’re not wrong.