In a field with formulaic text documents galore, it’s no surprise the legal profession is seen as ripe for specialized generative AI tools—and companies have been racing to build them.
One of those companies is LexisNexis, which has been rolling out LLM products to better navigate and draft documents on a research platform already widely used by lawyers. Now LexisNexis is taking those AI offerings further into the personalized legal assistant realm, with the new general availability of a tool called Protégé this week.
The tool can act autonomously to draft fuller legal documents of all kinds and suggest next steps in a legal workflow, while “reviewing its own work and identifying areas where it can improve its own output,” according to the company’s breakdown. Its output is grounded in uploaded documents as well as the research platform’s troves of data.
The rollout is part of a bigger trend in which enterprise companies have been moving from building chatbots and conversational search to AI agents that can automate certain routine tasks.
AI evolution: LexisNexis chief technology officer Jeff Reihl said the company’s foray into generative AI started even before OpenAI’s late 2022 release of ChatGPT pushed the term into the mainstream. The company had been experimenting with GPT-2 and GPT-3 “behind the scenes” to improve navigational tools, Reihl said. But after ChatGPT, the company began exploring more generative tasks beyond just legal research—document and email drafting, for instance.
The company heard feedback from customers that they wanted more of an ability to draft full documents and pull their own data into the mix, and that eventually led to Protégé, Reihl said.
“The big game-changing aspect of Protégé is it really is optimized and customized for individuals,” Reihl said. “It will bring in their legal work product. It’ll expand the generative capabilities. And as part of it, we’ve introduced agentic capabilities, which will help with the workflow.”
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Legal transformation: More than three-quarters of legal professionals told Thomson Reuters in a recent survey that generative AI will have a “high or transformational impact” on their work in the next half-decade. LexisNexis isn’t the only company trying to tap into this potential; Thomson Reuters is offering its own GenAI legal assistant, and startup Harvey reportedly raised $300 million at a $3 billion valuation this month.
LexisNexis has an advantage in the vast troves of data it already has at its disposal. The company also pairs that grounding with human oversight measures.
“We’ve got literally billions of documents in our repository that we can use as grounding,” Reihl said. “Essentially, we have a right platform to make sure the answers are accurate because we know that LLMs have this nasty habit of hallucinating.”
More customization: Now, the legal research giant wants to push further into customization, not only with its clients’ personalized data but across different areas of law.
“It’s going to continue to get more and more personalized,” Reihl said. “It’ll continue to be optimized for different practice areas, and essentially, our vision is a legal assistant for every legal professional out there. So you as an associate, you as an employment lawyer, you as an M&A attorney, you as an internal corporate counsel working with other third-party law firms, we’re going to be…much more customized in the future.”