LexisNexis Embraces Anthropic Claude Cowork Legal Plugin

It was the plugin that triggered a thousand LinkedIn posts, and now – along with many others who are doing something similar – LexisNexis has announced the integration of Anthropic’s legal plugin into its Protégé genAI suite. This will enhance ‘hundreds of existing AI and agentic AI legal workflow capabilities’ that are already available.

One law firm user, who they quote, said: ‘[It] will take me from prompt to finished work product much faster and better visually than I can do it. It’s like going from driving a horse and buggy to driving a Maserati. I could not have imagined it being this powerful.’

The plugin, which stems from Anthropic’s expansion of Claude Cowork, has been evaluated ‘since before its market release’, they said.

OK, but what can you do with it? Well, quite a lot:

‘The integration enables Protégé users to automate finished, verifiable legal work product in multiple ready-to-use formats with their work grounded accurately in the company’s vast 200-billion document repository – with four million new documents added daily – of essential, unique, constantly updated, Shepardized, and linked legal content. The integration leverages the Legal Plugin all within the Protégé world-class, private, secure, and trusted technology environment.’

Sean Fitzpatrick, CEO Global Legal, LexisNexis Legal & Professional, commented: ‘We are excited to put this in customers’ hands, enabling new, interactive, and intuitive ways to generate ready-to-use, fully formatted legal work that we believe customers will not want to be without.’

And here’s a list of things you can do:

• ‘Synchronize outputs across multiple documents, presentations, and spreadsheets to create a unified, formatted, and branded set of legal materials. Users can create final, fully formatted Word documents, coupled with high-level client presentations and detailed spreadsheets, which have received very favourable customer feedback.
• Automatically complete tasks like ‘check a data protection agreement’ against the LexisNexis repository of up-to-date, authoritative compliance regulations; ‘check a contract’ against a LexisNexis checklist; or ‘generate a research-style briefing’ on a specific legal question or topic.
• Soon, users will be able to accomplish even more. For example, LexisNexis is developing the ability for a user to enter “I want to generate a 50-state survey” in Protégé’s single conversational prompt box. From this single prompt, legal professionals can automatically generate a coordinated set of deliverables, including a polished Word memo, a client-ready presentation, and a tracking spreadsheet that requires minimal editing and remains consistent across formats.
• Protégé will continue to integrate additional Anthropic skills as they are released to the market within the platform’s easy-to-use prompt box.’

Is this a big deal?

Well, it’s not like any of the major legal tech companies have a choice here. The ‘state of the art’ has leapt forwards this year and everyone has to get onboard. That is why you will have seen about a dozen announcements recently about working with Anthropic in a variety of ways, whether in relation to plugins or more broadly about Claude Cowork in general.

Does it make a big difference? It depends if you really use it. But, it could. As you can see above – (and it’s strongly recommend to listen to the AL interview with Yannic Kilcher at DeepJudge on all of this to get the full picture) – it produces a much broader and encompassing way of getting things done. By combining data, workflows, agentic capabilities, LLM language understanding, templates, format guides, large-scale prompts, and more, all in one integrated package, you really can perform a lot in one go.

That in turn – and we should not forget why we are doing all of this – creates better efficiency savings. In short, it crushes ‘the busy work’, and provides the lawyer with what they need so they can focus on more advanced needs.

As another user, who is quoted, explained ‘it’s helpful that Protégé minimizes the number of choices by integrating these experiences into one solution’.

More about Protégé here.

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