AI-Powered Law: LexisNexis CTO Reveals Why Waiting Is Not An Option
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The legal industry, historically cautious about adopting disruptive technologies, is now at an AI-powered tipping point. Focusing on this transformation is LexisNexis Legal & Professional, harnessing artificial intelligence to redefine how lawyers perform their daily work. Their latest innovation, Protégé, a generative and agentic AI-powered legal assistant, aims to deliver efficiency, precision, and personalized legal workflows to firms around the globe.
According to Jeff Reihl, EVP and Chief Technology Officer at LexisNexis Legal & Professional, the push toward AI was a natural evolution for the industry. "The work lawyers do lends itself perfectly to generative AI: drafting documents, conversational search to refine a question, and more," Reihl notes. "AI lends itself extraordinarily well to legal work."
The unique value proposition of LexisNexis lies in its proprietary content and technology infrastructure. LexisNexis utilizes a Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) platform, grounding its large language models (LLMs) in an extensive database of over 160 billion documents, growing daily by 1.6 million new records. This approach ensures the accuracy, relevance, verifiability, and timeliness crucial to legal work.
"A key differentiator for us is our proprietary content," explains Reihl. "We have an unmatched repository—over 160 billion documents and records, with 1.6 million new documents added daily from more than 50,000 sources.' He continues, 'we use a multi-model approach in which we select the best AI model for each legal use case, and a proprietary RAG platform that grounds answers in our repository of legal content for high-quality answers with validated citations. On top of that, we conduct model fine-tuning to ensure high performance of domain-specific, personalized LLMs."
The company works closely with industry leaders like AWS, Microsoft, Anthropic, Mistral, and OpenAI to develop AI models that cater specifically to the legal sector, finely tuned to each use case.
Protégé doesn't just respond to requests, it anticipates lawyers' next moves. "The vision behind Protégé is to personalize the AI experience," says Reihl. "Not every lawyer works the same way. Instead of putting the burden on the end user, Protégé will walk the user through their entire workflow and anticipate what they'll want to do."
Early adopters are already reporting impressive results, according to the company. LexisNexis claims that law firms employing Protégé have seen marked improvements not just in productivity but also in the quality and comprehensiveness of legal research and document drafting. For LexisNexis, the AI advantage goes deeper than efficiency. It aims to reshape the very way lawyers approach their work.
Legal professionals have long hesitated in embracing AI, partly due to early versions that were overly hyped yet underwhelming. LexisNexis tackles these hurdles by emphasizing security, compliance, and ethical AI development with robust human oversight.
As Reihl emphasizes, "Trustworthiness remains a barrier due to security, confidentiality, hallucination, and recency risks in public LLMs—all serious issues for lawyers. We address these issues through our approach to AI development which prioritizes security, highest-quality answers, and performance. Our approach includes enterprise-grade security, compliance, and privacy, as well as a process grounded in responsible AI development that relies on human oversight."
To address issues of ethical and responsible use of AI, LexisNexis Legal & Professional is a part of RELX, and have built their solutions in line with the RELX Responsible AI Principles.
Reihl sends a clear message to firms still hesitant to embrace AI: "Waiting to embrace AI means falling behind because you won't be as effective as your competition or peers who are already using these tools. The time to invest in AI is now."
Indeed, other industries provide cautionary tales. Firms slow to adopt transformative technology often lose competitive ground, as evidenced by Kodak's failure to adapt to digital photography or Blockbuster's dismissal of streaming services.
Other legacy businesses can take lessons from LexisNexis' approach: prioritizing customer needs, adopting a culture of experimentation, and ensuring organizational agility to quickly embrace emerging technologies. Reihl suggests, 'You can start small by experimenting with some use cases and expand as you learn the benefits.'
Looking five years ahead, Reihl envisions a landscape where every lawyer will benefit from a personalized AI assistant akin to Protégé. "Our vision is that every legal professional worldwide will have an AI assistant that is highly personalized to them," he explains. "Autonomous agents will perform work in the background, providing legal professionals with additional information they need even when they are not actively working."
Despite AI's expansive role, Reihl stresses it won't replace the fundamentally human nature of law. "Law is fundamentally a human system, grounded in values, interpretation, and public trust. AI can assist legal professionals, but it won't replace the human responsibility at the heart of justice."
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