In a pair of AI announcements this week, LexisNexis said that it has significantly enhanced the speed and capabilities of its Lexis+ AI legal AI Assistant, and also that it has launched the commercial preview of Nexis+ AI within its Nexis news and business information research service. LexisNexis first released Lexis+ AI for general availability […]
A new tool from the litigation analytics company Lex Machina, which is owned by LexisNexis, allows attorneys to view visual maps of a party’s litigation history in order to help illuminate the party’s relationships and litigation trends that might not otherwise be obvious but that could be a factor in crafting a litigation strategy or […]
The AI-driven legal drafting tool Clearbrief has entered into a partnership with legal research company LexisNexis Legal & Professional that provides its customers who are also Lexis subscribers with access to legal content and citations on Lexis while drafting documents within the Clearbrief add-in for Microsoft Word. With this new integration, Lexis subscribers can now […]
Look over this list of my blog posts that were most popular this year, and there is no doubt about the topic that most captivated the legal industry. Of my 40 most-read posts of 2023, 30 directly involved generative AI and others implicated it.
Of course, there is a chicken-or-egg aspect to this. Were so many of my most-read stories about AI because that was what most interested my readers, or was it simply because I wrote so much this year about the topic?
Seven of the most popular stories related to Casetext’s launch of its generative AI product CoCounsel last March, its subsequent acquisition by Thomson Reuters in June, and Thomson Reuters’ subsequent roll-out of generative AI in Westlaw.
Similarly, five of the top stories involved LexisNexis’s launch of its generative AI product, Lexis+ AI, starting with its initial release in May to its release for general availability in October.
Four stories about the generative AI legal startup Harvey made my top-stories list, starting from its initial fundraise last November to its firmwide deployment within Allen & Overy in February to its Series A raise in April to a quirky story about a second legal AI startup also called Harvey.
Two popular stories were about GPT taking the bar exam: one in March when GPT passed the bar exam, and the second in November when it passed the legal ethics exam.
My most popular story of all this year, by a long measure, was about the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeal’s proposed rule on appellants’ use of AI to create filings. I do not know why that was so popular, but its views far exceeded any other of my posts this year. A related story on the most popular list was about the sanctions imposed on lawyers in New York who cited “bogus” cases in their brief.
Representative of the interest in generative AI this year were the two stories that made my list about the law firm Gunderson Dettmer’s development of its own “homegrown” generative AI, ChatGD. The original story I wrote in August about ChatGD’s launch was my 12th most-read story, while a followup I published just last week quickly rose to be the 13th most read.
Among other popular stories on my blog this year:
But I go back to where I started. The dominant story in legal technology this year was generative AI — not so much for what it is already doing in legal, but more for what it might do down the road.
Here’s the list of my 40 most-read posts.
1. In First for A U.S. Appeals Court, 5th U.S. Circuit Court Considers Rule Requiring Lawyers to Certify they Did Not Rely on AI to Create Filings (Nov. 29, 2023).
2. Harvey AI Raises $21M In A Series A Round Led By Sequoia (April 26, 2023).
3. New GPT-Based Chat App from LawDroid Is A Lawyer’s ‘Copilot’ for Research, Drafting, Brainstorming and More (Jan. 25, 2023).
4. LexisNexis Enters the Generative AI Fray with Limited Release of New Lexis+ AI, Using GPT and other LLMs (May 4, 2023).
5. Law Students Are Reluctant To Use ChatGPT, Survey Finds. The Question Is, Why? (June 7, 2023).
6. As Allen & Overy Deploys GPT-based Legal App Harvey Firmwide, Founders Say Other Firms Will Soon Follow (Feb. 17, 2023).
7. I Am Deeply Saddened To Report The Death Of Monica Bay: Friend, Mentor and Role Model to So Many in Legal Tech (Oct. 29, 2023).
8. Thomson Reuters Previews Its Plans for Generative AI, Announces Integration with Microsoft 365 Copilot (May 23, 2023).
9. In Major Legal Tech Deal, vLex and Fastcase Merge, Creating A Global Legal Research Company, Backed By Oakley Capital and Bain Capital (April 4, 2023).
10. Casetext Launches Co-Counsel, Its OpenAI-Based ‘Legal Assistant’ To Help Lawyers Search Data, Review Documents, Draft Memos, Analyze Contracts and More (March 1, 2023).
11. Ironclad’s AI Contract Redlining Tool ‘AI Assist’ Comes Out Of Beta, New Using GPT-4 (April 11, 2023).
12. Gunderson Dettmer Launches ChatGD; First U.S.-Based Firm To Develop Proprietary Internal Generative AI App (Aug. 9, 2023).
13. Four Months After Launching Its ‘Homegrown’ GenAI Tool, Law Firm Gunderson Dettmer Reports On Results So Far, New Features, And A Surprise on Cost (Dec. 20, 2023).
14. In Case of ‘Real Lawyers Against A Robot Lawyer,’ Federal Court Dismisses Law Firm’s Suit Against DoNotPay for Unauthorized Law Practice (Nov. 21, 2023).
15. As Thomson Reuters Explains Its Acquisition of Casetext, Some Investors Seem Uncertain (June 27, 2023).
16. LexisNexis Rolls Out Lexis+ AI for General Availability, Promising Hallucination-Free Answers to Legal Questions (Oct. 25, 2023).
17. The Rumors Were True: Thomson Reuters Acquires Casetext for $650M Cash (June 26, 2023).
18. An Interview with Casetext CEO Jake Heller on His Company’s Acquisition By Thomson Reuters (June 28, 2023).
19. GPT Takes the Bar Exam Again; This Time It Scores Among Top 10% of Test Takers (March 14, 2023).
20. Survey Released Today Finds That 40% Of Legal Professionals Use Or Plan To Use Generative AI (Aug. 21, 2023).
21. Contracts Company Ironclad Taps Into GPT-3 For Instant Document Redlining Based On A Company’s Playbook (Feb. 1, 2023).
22. Major Thomson Reuters News: Westlaw Gets Generative AI Research Plus Integration with Casetext CoCounsel; Gen AI Coming Soon to Practical Law (Nov. 15, 2023).
23. Thomson Reuters Spins Off Elite As Independent Company Now Owned By Asset Manager TPG (April 4, 2023).
24. In A $1B E-Discovery Acquisition Double-Play, Reveal Acquires Both Logikcull and IPRO (Aug. 29, 2023).
25. DISCO Cofounder Kiwi Camara Steps Down As CEO; Board Member Scott Hill Is Named Interim Leader (Sept. 11, 2023).
26. Breaking: LexisNexis Announces Preview Launch of Lexis Connect, AI-Powered Matter Management within Microsoft Teams (May 11, 2023).
27. 12 Thoughts on Promises and Challenges of AI in Legal after Yesterday’s AI Summit at Harvard Law School (Sept. 20, 2023).
28. The Strange Case of the Two Legal AI Companies Named Harvey, and their Coincidental Connection to Winston (March 28, 2023).
29. Court Imposes Sanctions On Lawyers Who Filed Bogus Cases After Relying On ChatGPT For Legal Research (June 22, 2023).
30. Bessemer Venture Partners Acquires Majority Stake in Legal Practice Management Company Litify (Feb. 9, 2023).
31. Generative AI, Having Already Passed the Bar Exam, Now Passes the Legal Ethics Exam (Nov. 16, 2023).
32. There’s A New Top-Level Domain for Lawyers: ‘.esq’ (May 9, 2023).
33. Clio Goes All Out with Major Product Announcements, Including A Personal Injury Add-On, E-Filing, and (Of Course) Generative AI (Oct. 9, 2023).
34. Stealth Legal AI Startup Harvey Raises $5M in Round Led By OpenAI (Nov. 23, 2022).
35. Citing ‘Political Challenges,’ ABA Innovation Center Cancels Op-Ed Advocating Regulatory Reform; In An Exclusive, We Have the Piece They Wouldn’t Publish (Aug. 3, 2023).
36. LexisNexis Lays Out More Details On Its Collaboration with Microsoft to Roll Out Generative AI Products (Aug. 2, 2023).
37. LexisNexis Unveils Two New Generative AI Products (Nov. 14, 2023).
38. The Good and the Bad of Solo Practice, Per Clio’s Latest Legal Trends Report for Solos (April 18, 2023).
39. Thomson Reuters Teases Generative AI Updates to Westlaw Precision Coming Nov. 15 (Nov. 1, 2023).
40. Zuva Launches Free AI-Powered Contracts Review Tool (March 9, 2023).
In October, LexisNexis released its generative AI research tool, Lexis+ AI, for general availability for U.S. customers, along with limited release in law schools to select faculty, librarians and students. Now, the company is further expanding access to the tool, making it available to 100,000 second- and third-year law students starting in the spring semester, with some getting access as soon as this week.
Lexis+ AI uses large language models (LLMs) to answer legal research questions, summarize legal issues, and generate legal document drafts. LexisNexis says the product delivers trusted results with “hallucination-free” linked legal citations, combining the power of generative AI with proprietary LexisNexis search technology, Shepard’s Citations functionality, and authoritative content.
LexisNexis says it used its earlier limited roll-out in law schools to test the application in the law school environment. Feedback from that testing was incorporated into the product and rollout plans, it says.
Each year for the past three years, the LexisNexis African Ancestry Network LexisNexis Rule of Law Foundation Fellowship has awarded fellowships to promising law students to participate in research projects related to eliminating racism in the legal system. This year, 15 students received fellowships of $10,000 each to spend nine months working in teams to research one of five “cluster projects” that the fellowship program targeted for the potential to make a meaningful impact.
The students – all from law schools that are members of the Historically Black Colleges and Universities Law School Consortium – recently published the findings of their research in the publication, Advancing and Impacting Equity in the Legal System, and on today’s LawNext, we are joined by two of those students to share more details about their work:
Also joining the show today is Adonica Black, director of global diversity and inclusion at LexisNexis, who helped coordinate the fellowship program.
In previous episodes of this podcast, we interviewed students who took part in this program in 2021 and 2022. Here are those episodes:
This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.
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Just three weeks after introducing its generative AI legal research product Lexis+ AI, LexisNexis is keeping the momentum going, today introducing two more products that use generative AI.
One, Lexis Snapshot, provides AI-generated summaries in alerts of new case filings. The other, Lexis Create with Lexis+ AI, brings generative AI drafting assistance to the Lexis Create add-in for Microsoft Word.
Lexis Snapshot is designed for customers of the company’s Courtlink service, and specifically for those who use the service to receive alerts of new case filings that match their specified criteria.
With Lexis Snapshot, alerts will now include AI-generated summaries of newly filed complaints. These summaries can help recipients assess whether to read the complaint in more detail.
Summaries include the nature of the case, plaintiff and defendant, alleged harm, and requested remedies.
Although the product covers only federal civil cases, LexisNexis plans to eventually expand it to state cases.
There is no limit on the length of complaint the product can summarize.
Current Courtlink subscribers get free access to Lexis Snapshot through the end of this year
LexisNexis introduced Lexis Create to the U.S. market in August. Now, with the addition of Lexis+ AI, Lexis Create users get access to generative AI functions directly while drafting a document in Microsoft Word.
The product brings three generative AI functions to Word:
LexisNexis said it will add more tasks over time, including “smart redlining” to show how a document has changed over several versions, and clause benchmarking, to benchmark draft clauses against resources such as Practical Guidance.
In a demonstration yesterday for the media, Jeff Pfeifer, chief product officer, LexisNexis North America, UK and Ireland, showed a hypothetical use case involving an employment discrimination matter.
He started by asking the AI a legal question, “What is burden shifting under Title VII?” In less than a minute, the AI returned an answer in the form of a one-paragraph summary and links to supporting resources.
This appears in a panel on the right of the screen, as the user works in Word on the left side.
Pfeifer next asked the AI to draft a letter to his client describing the burden-shifting framework. In moments, the AI generated a draft in Word.
In another example, Pfeifer used the AI to draft a contract clause – in this case, a subscription of shares clause.
Both of these new products are commercially available as of today.
During the briefing, Pfeifer also gave an update on the deployment of Lexis+ AI since its recent launch.
Never before has the company seen the same degree of interest from customers in a product launch, he said. The speed of purchase has been faster than for any other product in the company’s history.
In surveying early customers, he said they lauded its ease of use, time savings, trustworthiness, and usefulness.
While the product initially launched only in the U.S., he said that it will expand in 2024 to four additional countries: Australia, Canada, France and the U.K.
Also, after testing of the product by a core group of law school faculty, LexisNexis is now expanding access at U.S. law schools to librarians, legal research and writing faculty, and legal technology professors.
Last May, LexisNexis first revealed plans to launch Lexis+ AI, a new product that would use large language models to answer legal research questions, summarize legal issues, and generate legal document drafts. At the time, it limited availability to a select group of Am Law 50 firms that had agreed to participate in a commercial preview.
Today, LexisNexis is lifting that limit and making Lexis+ AI generally available for U.S. customers. The product, it says, delivers trusted results with “hallucination-free” linked legal citations, combining the power of generative AI with proprietary LexisNexis search technology, Shepard’s Citations functionality, and authoritative content.
Before releasing the product, LexisNexis expanded that commercial preview and testing to include not just Am Law firms, but also corporate legal departments, small law firms, and U.S. courts. That testing led to a number of refinements to the product, Jeff Pfeifer, chief product officer for LexisNexis in Canada, Ireland, the U.K. and the U.S., said during a preview Monday for members of the media.
LexisNexis did not provide me or other members of the media with an opportunity to test the new product before today’s release. It claims that the product is “multiple times faster than any other legal generative AI solution available today.”
It also says:
“Lexis+ AI is the only legal generative AI solution with citations linked in its responses, providing trusted legal results backed by verifiable authority. It minimizes the risk of invented content, or hallucinations, and checks all citations against Shepard’s to ensure citation validation. The solution also offers users the ability to input specific citations to verify accuracy and flag when a citation might be wrong. Customers can give instant feedback within the product to continually improve product performance, content relevance, and overall product accuracy.”
Inline citations in vLex.
I asked a spokesperson to clarify this, as my understanding is that it is not correct that this is the only legal generative AI product with citations linked inline in its responses. For one, the new Vincent AI from vLex does that, as I wrote when it launched last week.
The spokesperson responded:
“While we do not comment on specific third-party announcements and this specific product is labeled as a product in beta, our claim relates to our focus on placement of citations with answer components from our Lexis+ AI large language model service.
“From public source materials, the authority in the referenced product is not inline with specific legal concepts or holdings. Lexis+ AI both lists citations inline in response, provides additional citation references and key Shepard’s indicators.”
My understanding is otherwise, in that the vLex product does contain citations directly inline in its answers. (See screencap.) That said, whether Lexis or vLex or someone else was first to offer this is not really important in the scheme of things.
An inline citation in Lexis+ AI.
What is important is what Lexis+ AI can do. As it becomes generally available today, it is launching with the ability to perform four core tasks:
All of this has the capability to draw on a set of LexisNexis research materials that includes primary law, secondary sources, practical guidance, constitutions and court rules, and select federal agency decisions. The exact content depends on the user’s subscription, as is further discussed below.
LexisNexis has repeatedly emphasized the security of Lexis+ AI. Any uploaded documents are automatically purged at the end of each session or after 10 minutes of inactivity, and users can manually purge documents at any time and manage or delete their prompt conversation history.
Upload documents to summarize or ask questions of them.
Pfeifer said that the company will be continuing to add new tasks to Lexis+ AI in the coming weeks and months.
The company also says that the product’s accuracy is continually improving with hundreds of thousands of rated answer samples by LexisNexis legal subject matter experts used for model tuning. The company says it employs over 2,000 technologists, data scientists, and subject matter experts to develop, test, and validate its products.
With regard to the AI models behind this product, LexisNexis says it is using a flexible, multi-model approach that prioritizes the best model for each legal use case. At this point, it is working with two of the major LLMs — Anthropic’s Claude 2, hosted on Amazon Bedrock from Amazon Web Services (AWS), and OpenAI’s GPT-4 and ChatGPT, hosted on Microsoft Azure.
To help guide users in making the best use of this technology, the product includes guided experiences to help lead customers through its use and training in prompt engineering to help users get the best results.
As with other LexisNexis products, the answer to what it costs is, “It depends.” In this case, it depends on which tasks the customer wants to purchase and which types of content it wants to have access to.
In an effort to make it affordable to smaller firms, Pfeifer said they will be able to purchase either the conversation search module or the draft and summarize modules at set prices.
In a statement provided by the company, Sean Fitzpatrick, CEO of LexisNexis North America, UK, and Ireland, said, “Lexis+ AI gives legal professionals a significant competitive advantage by driving improved speed, productivity, and work quality gains for law firms and their clients.”
It is important to note — and Pfeifer made this point explicitly — that Lexis+ AI is a complement to, not a replacement for, traditional legal research tools. As Fitzpatrick’s quote says, it can help speed specific research tasks and enhance productivity.
That said, it is amazing how far we’ve come in so little time in developing legal-specific tools using generative AI. What Lexis has built here is impressive, not just for what it can do, but also for what it does not do, such as hallucinate or expose your data.
We are still in the early innings here, and there are multiple teams in this game. I, for one, will be closely watching how this product develops and is adopted, and how the other players respond.
A new international survey of lawyers, law students and consumers finds that nearly half believe generative AI will have a significant or transformative impact on the practice of law.
Conducted by LexisNexis and released this morning at ILTACON, the annual conference of the International Legal Technology Association, the survey polled 7,950 lawyers, law students and consumers in the U.S., U.K., Canada and France about their overall awareness of generative AI and their perspectives on its potential impact on the practice of law.
(Compare this to the generative AI survey released yesterday at ILTACON by Everlaw, in partnership with the Association of Certified E-Discovery Specialists (ACEDS) and the International Legal Technology Association.)
Almost half of respondents (47%), believe generative AI will have a significant or transformative impact on the practice of law. Another 45% believe generative AI will have some impact, while only about 7% believe generative AI will have no impact.
Among corporate counsel, the survey finds, there is an overall expectation that the law firms that represent them will adopt AI technology. Sixty percent of corporate counsel expect law firms to use cutting-edge technology such as generative AI tools, and just 10% disagree with that.
Among law firms, 52% believe their corporate counsel clients will expect them to use generative AI tools, while only 17% disagree.
Broken down by countries, 67% of U.S. corporate counsel, followed by 61% of French counsel, 59% of U.K. counsel, and 53% of Canadian counsel, expect their law firms to adopt generative AI tools.
How will these tools be used? Lawyers in the survey see the highest potential for generative AI to be in assisting them in research (65%). Other leading uses, lawyers say, are for drafting documents (56%), document analysis (44%), and email writing (35%).
Overall, the survey results show high awareness of generative AI, with 89% of legal professionals having heard of generative AI tools. For consumers, awareness is lower (61%).
Most lawyers have at least some concerns about the ethical implications of generative AI. A third of lawyers say they have significant or fundamental concerns about the ethical implications.
Consumers who responded to the survey largely use generative AI for researching legal topics (60%). Many would consider using AI for legal assistance to create a will (40%), set up a business (37%), and develop a rental agreement (39%).
The survey was conducted across 7,950 people, including 3,752 lawyers, 1,239 law students, and 2,959 consumers in the US, UK, France, and Canada between March and July 2023.
LexisNexis is providing new details today on its collaboration with Microsoft to offer legal professionals AI-powered products and capabilities directly within the Microsoft 365 ecosystem that is typically the center of their workflows.
In a briefing yesterday, Jeff Pfeifer, chief product officer, Canada, UK and USA, at LexisNexis, revealed new information about the products being developed through the LexisNexis-Microsoft collaboration, all of which are focused on integrating generative AI capabilities into the legal product ecosystem that is centered in Microsoft products.
While some of today’s news builds on previous announcements, LexisNexis also announced new products coming down the pike. Specifically, the company announced four ways in which it is collaborating with Microsoft:
Lexis+ gets Azure OpenAI. In May, LexisNexis announced the launch of Lexis+ AI, a product that uses large language models (LLMs) to answer legal research questions, summarize legal issues, and generate drafts of documents such as demand letters or client emails. Now, LexisNexis is rolling out the Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service to customers of Lexis+.
“We are leveraging the OpenAI for Azure infrastructure to be able to support specific workflow tasks in research, some of which are already deployed,” Pfeifer told me. “Lexis+, for example, is now leveraging OpenAI for Azure infrastructure to power improved suggested searches to our clients.”
Lexis Connect gets launch date. In May, LexisNexis announced the preview launch of Lexis Connect, a legal intake and matter management product that works within Microsoft Teams and uses conversational AI assistants to help deliver answers more quickly. Now, the company says that Lexis Connect will be commercially available in the third quarter of this year, with generative AI capabilities added by year end.
Lexis Create launches in U.S. Released earlier this year in the UK, Lexis Create (pictured above) is today being officially released to the U.S. market. Lexis Create is an “intelligent” document drafting solution built into Microsoft Word. Within Word, users have direct access to LexisNexis content including Practical Guidance, Market Standards, Shepard’s Citations, AI-powered clause intelligence, and other tools. While the product is available now, extractive and generative AI enhancements will be added during the remainder of the year.
“The Create experience that exists today primarily focuses on proofreading capabilities, bringing Lexis+ content to the point of workflow, and a series of drafting enablers that assist the lawyer in drafting,” Pfeifer said. “But it does not yet currently have generative AI drafting capabilities in the solution. With what we’re announcing today, it will introduce those capabilities to Lexis Create and bring the drafting capabilities that you saw in the launch of Lexis+ AI back in May directly to the point of workflow activity in Word and Outlook.”
Lexis announces Create Plugin for Microsoft 365 Copilot. When Microsoft 365 Copilot launches next year, this plugin will bring LexisNexis legal data, citations and analytics into Copilot to be used with its generative AI functionality to draft, edit and validate documents within Microsoft Word.
“Copilot brings a set of additional guided task activity capabilities,” Pfeifer said, “so one could, for example, be instructed to look at additional information or be assigned workflow tasks that follow along a prescribed set of activities.”
For law firms and legal departments that want to take advantage of these new capabilities, Pfeifer emphasized that they will need Microsoft Office versions from 2019 or later, so firms that are planning upgrade schedules may want to take that into account. “Most of the benefits that are available from the newer generation of solutions, including generative AI and Copilot capabilities, all require later generations of Microsoft solutions,” Pfeifer said.
Pfeifer said that he believes it is important for LexisNexis to refine these products by providing preview access to customers. So, while they mostly will not be introduced commercially until later this year, LexisNexis is making them available selectively to customers on a preview basis so that they can suggest additional ways of developing or refining the products.
As I previously reported, one of those preview customers is Microsoft’s Corporate, External and Legal Affairs (CELA) department, which signed on as the first preview customer to test and help further develop Lexis Connect. Since then, several other legal departments have signed on as preview customers.
In customer testing so far of the Lexis+ AI product, Pfeifer said that he has seen greater involvement of more senior partners and decision makers that would be typical for a product rollout. “I think that’s reflective of general interest and understanding about what’s occurring in the space and what’s happening in the space,” he said.
He said that after LexisNexis announced its AI Insider program earlier this year, more than 1,000 firms signed up the first week and more than 8,000 have joined to date.
“A major purpose of this announcement between LexisNexis and Microsoft is to confirm the collaboration in this development along a specific set of target dates so that customers can understand, if they’re making decisions to upgrade basic things like Office or other product elements within their infrastructure, that they’ll see a well-developed ecosystem of capabilities from LexisNexis that are designed to align with the investments that they’re making more broadly in Microsoft products,” Pfeifer said.
Launched in 1993 and acquired by LexisNexis in 2004, Interaction is one of the most established client relationship management (CRM) products in the legal market. An on-premises product designed for large law firms, InterAction is used by three-quarters of the Am Law 100 and three-quarters of the largest firms globally, according to LexisNexis.
Now, in a move to make the software available to mid- and smaller-sized law firms, LexisNexis is releasing InterAction+, a cloud-based product that unites many of the features of the legacy version with a more-modern user experience and mobile connectivity, as well as unique integrations with LexisNexis content relevant to business development and relationship management.
And even though the product is cloud-based, LexisNexis is giving customers the choice of where to host their contact data — either in the cloud on LexisNexis’s data servers or in a hybrid cloud using their own data centers.
LexisNexis will continue to develop and support the on-premises version of InterAction. In addition, existing customers can add the cloud component with minimal effort on their part, LexisNexis says.
During a preview demonstration of InterAction+ last week, Aaron Pierce, vice president of product management at LexisNexis, and Namit Pandey, group product manager for InterAction, told me that they believe small and mid-sized firms are an underserved market for CRM software.
“We see a lot of firms that are managing contacts just through Outlook or managing contacts through spreadsheets or more traditional CRM solutions that are not as legal-focused as we can be with InterAction+,” Pierce said. “So we really wanted to bring all the great things that we love about InterAction to the cloud-hosted solution and be able to bring this to a brand new market.”
One notable feature of InterAction+ is its integration with Context, LexisNexis’ litigation analytics product. The integration can be used in business development activities to see litigation data on clients, prospects, and other firms.
Company analytics in InterAction+ are drawn from Context analytics in LexisNexis.
For example, when a contact is at a company, the user can see the company’s litigation history via Context, including the kinds of cases it is most often involved with and the courts where it most often litigates.
These basic company analytics are available to InterAction+ subscribers at no extra charge. If the subscriber also has a Context subscription, then the subscriber could continue to drill down more deeply into the company’s litigation record on Context.
InterAction+ users will have the same log-on credentials as for other LexisNexis products, so access to the Context integration and planned future integrations will all be via a single sign-on.
That connectivity to LexisNexis is also useful when adding a company to InterAction+. Via the Lexis+ research database, a user can verify the correct name of the company, ensuring consistency throughout the CRM, and then automatically pull company information to fill key fields in the contact form.
The product also features a home page dashboard (see featured image above) that provides a quick overview of connections that an attorney, marketer, or business development professional might want to focus on, including those where the connections are weak, at risk, or have had low levels of engagement.
The dashboard might show, for example, that the user has had no meaningful recent activity with 78% of the user’s connections, and it will suggest the top-three that the user should pay attention to (based on the connections for whom the longest time has elapsed since any contact).
Other features include:
Over the coming months, LexisNexis says, it will continue to add new features and content integrations to InterAction+, including news and company information from LexisNexis Legal News and LexisNexis Dossier.
The product is launching globally, with a focus on the United States, the European Union and Australia as its three cloud hosting locations.
Pierce said the product could be used by firms of almost any size, but that he thinks the sweet spot is firms of 20-200 lawyers.
Pricing will be based on a per-seat subscription. He was not able to say the exact price, but did say that it will be set at a level to be affordable to firms in the target market.
Although the product does not have any native lead-tracking capabilities, Pierce said that an API will allow it to integrate with third-party marketing and email products such as HubSpot or MailChimp.
When LexisNexis launched its Lexis+ premium legal research service in 2020, the service included Brief Analysis, its answer to a line of products pioneered by legal research company Casetext with its CARA brief analysis tool and followed by companies such as Thomson Reuters and Bloomberg Law. Last year, LexisNexis expanded that to add Judicial Brief Analysis, a tool that enabled users to analyze up to six briefs at a time and receive a report comparing all case law, arguments, citations and quotes.
While those document analysis tools have been focused on the litigation side of legal practice, LexisNexis is today unveiling a document analysis tool designed for transactional attorneys, to help them research, negotiate and close transactional agreements.
Called Lexis+ Agreement Analysis, the product uses AI to extract and recommend alternate clauses from a repository of 6.7 million clauses found in public EDGAR filings and another 300,000 from LexisNexis’s own Practical Guidance documents. Attorneys can compare language for the most highly negotiated clauses in a document, and leverage drafting guidance and insights from Practical Guidance and supporting data points from Market Standards, to come up with the right clauses for their transaction.
As it launches today, the product supports only M&A transactions, including merger, stock purchase and asset purchase agreements. Future releases will add other transaction types.
Access to the product requires a subscription to Lexis+ as well as access to M&A content within Practical Guidance.
“Transactional attorneys spend a significant amount of time analyzing clause language in large, complex documents to produce the most favorable terms and ensure they haven’t overlooked anything,” Sean Fitzpatrick, CEO of LexisNexis North America, UK and Ireland, said in a statement announcing the product. “Agreement Analysis extracts and delivers on-point alternative clause language from seven million clauses and presents them along with drafting insights and guidance in a way that saves time and improves attorney knowledge and efficiency.”
In advance of today’s announcement, I was given a demonstration of the product by Victoria Gerard, senior product manager for Practical Guidance, and LoriLee Garritty, product marketing manager.
“Agreement Analysis is a tool that reduces the manual research tasks that are inherent in the negotiation and finalization of transactional agreements,” Gerard told me.
In its analysis of documents, the tool is designed to focus on identifying “high value” clauses — the clauses that are most often heavily negotiated between parties to a deal based on its analysis of the 7 million SEC and Practical Guidance documents. “Our large language model parses all of that and is able to very quickly return what we consider to be meaningful alternative clause language.”
The goal, she said, is to enable lawyers, after they review a contract, “to walk away with some confidence that they found all those places where opposing counsel might have snuck some language in, or places that they really need to edit in order to make sure that they represent the interests fo their client in the transaction.”
The dashboard shows a summary of the analysis of the document and a breakdown of the clauses.
Within Lexis+, a user accesses the tool from the same Document Analysis tab one would use to access Brief Analysis. When the user uploads an agreement, the tool encrypts and analyzes it, parsing the agreement’s clauses and then displaying a summary of the analysis and a breakdown of the clauses that match alternative language options or drafting notes.
Users can modify these initial results by adding and modifying details about the deal, such as the deal type, the deal size, or even whether the suggestions should favor the buyer or seller.
It also shows specifically the number of alternate clauses available and their sources, and provides links to related Practical Guidance content and tools, including Market Standards and a State Law Comparison Tool.
The document analysis tab shows alternative clauses relevant to those within the source document.
From the dashboard summary, the user can move to the Document Analysis tab, which shows an outline of the document’s clauses. The user can expand or close each clause section to see alternative language from other agreements or related Practical Guidance articles. Alternative provisions are displayed to the right of the clause outline, including key metadata associated with each alternative clause.
The user can open a window to edit the original clause while comparing it to other clauses.
The right panel includes a button, Compare & Edit, which opens an editable version of the clause from the uploaded agreement above displays of alternative clauses. The user can either type changes to the clause or simply click copy to use one of the alternatives.
Interestingly, this edit window does not make changes to the original document. If the user decides to use these edits to a specific clause, the user would have to copy and paste from the edit window to the document in Microsoft Word. It was designed this way intentionally, Gerard told me, so that the software did not make any changes to the underlying document.
It also does not show redlines. While an early prototype did, Gerard said, they made the interface a mess of highlights and strike-throughs, because the clauses being compared come from many different authors and agreements. While LexisNexis opted to omit redlines from this initial release, she said that a future version will have something that addresses this need in a more “elegant” way.
In my demonstration, the initial summary page showed that Document Analysis had found a total of 751 alternate cluses from 375 SEC agreements. I asked Gerard how a user could be expected to plod through that many matches. Turns out, they don’t have to.
Rather, Document Analysis never suggests more than 10 or 15 SEC recommendations, she said. The goal is to present a selection of clauses that are semantically relevant but different enough from each other to present the user with a range of options that reflect the lay of the land of how others have negotiated similar language.
The user can see the source documents from which the recommendations were drawn.
Another tab within Document Analysis, Source Documents, enables the user to see the full agreements from which the recommendations were drawn, together with metadata about each deal, such as its dollar size, industry, and the parties involved.
A final tab shows links to related tools and resources.
A final tab shows links to related tools and resources, including drafting checklists, Market Standards data, and Practical Guidance resource kits. The resources shown on this tab will always be specific to the type of document the user has uploaded, Gerard said.
Gerard said that Agreement Analysis is a product that can be used by any legal professional who actively drafts, reviews or negotiates transactional agreements, including lawyers in law firms of any size and in corporate legal departments. The tool can also be used by knowledge management and research professionals who support transactional attorneys.
A new product out today from the legal department management platform LexisNexis CounselLink could change the paradigm for how legal departments pay outside counsel, enabling law firms to receive payments within two days of initial invoice approval, while allowing corporations up to 90 days to more thoroughly review, process and fund the invoices.
CounselLink today is introducing a new version of CounselLink FastTrack, a service that expedites payments to outside counsel while allowing corporations to bolster their balance sheet by holding funds longer.
The service uses an outside bank partner, City National Bank, that pays law firms’ invoices within two days of when they are initially approved after a first-pass review, while allowing corporations up t0 90 days to fund the payment while they review and process the invoice.
While CounselLink previously offered a version of this service on an individual invoice basis, today’s release allows corporations and their firms to set it up for all invoices as part of their ongoing relationship.
FastTrack is modeled on supply chain financing in other industries, but is a first for the legal industry, Dan Ruderman, director, strategic alliances, at LexisNexis, told me during a briefing last week.
The service costs the corporation nothing. In fact, CounselLink says it actually saves them money by eliminating vendor invoice inquiries and refocusing accounts payable teams on higher-value tasks. Corporations can also earn interest from retained funds and earn credits from CounselLink that can be applied to CounselLink subscriptions or other services.
The law firms that choose to enroll in the program pay a small service fee, in return for which they can receive payments within two business days of invoice approval. This has the potential to improve firms’ cashflow, unlock working capital, and eliminate invoice inquiries, while preserving the firm’s existing banking relationships.
The service fee is calculated as a percentage of the invoice amount, but it is not a set percentage across the board. Rather, the bank will set the fee based on the credit worthiness of the corporation and the length of time it will hold the money. On an invoice of $15,000, the fee would be roughly $450, Ruderman said.
Part of that fee goes to the bank, part to CounselLink, and part back to the corporate customer in the form of a credit that can be applied against CounselLink services.
FastTrack is intended to address problems faced by both corporate counsel and law firms, Ruderman said. For corporate counsel, they are often in a squeeze between wanting to take the time to carefully review invoices while feeling pressure from their internal financial division to keep cash flowing and spending on budget.
For outside firms, they can see their payments locked up in corporate legal for months, sometimes creating large gaps between when the service is rendered and when the payment is received.
“Now the law department can say, we know you want to get paid quickly and we know that we’re a bottleneck in that process, so we’re going to set this up and if you choose to opt into it, you can get paid right away,” Ruderman said.
“At the same time, the general counsel can turn to the CFO and say, I understand that the longer we hold on to cash, the less we have to borrow. To that end, I’ve put all my firms on a fast pay program where we can hold on to our money for a few extra months.”
What happens in those cases when the invoice review finds an issue and the law firm has already been paid?
Ruderman said the initial review will catch many issues, because it includes both automated review using CounselLink’s rules engine and an initial review by the client. But if there is a dispute later about the payment, the company and the firm would work it out either separately or in a subsequent invoice.
Fasttrack will be available to CounselLink customers beginning May 18. There is no cost to enroll.
Featured image by Mohamed Hassan from Pixabay.
LexisNexis today announced the preview launch of Lexis Connect, a legal intake and matter management product that works within Microsoft Teams and uses conversational AI assistants to help deliver answers more quickly.
The product is being developed in partnership with Microsoft, and Microsoft’s Corporate, External and Legal Affairs (CELA) department has signed on as the first preview customer to test and help further develop the product.
LexisNexis is looking for another five or six legal departments to join the commercial preview for free. Anyone interested can get a demonstration at the CLOC Global Institute next week in Las Vegas.
The problem Lexis Connect tackles is that of intake and management of requests from within a corporation to the legal department.
In a briefing this afternoon for the media, Serena Wellen, senior director of product management, said LexisNexis chose to develop the product within teams because that is where the majority of corporate counsel already work and because Microsoft has an established reputation for security and reliability. 
During today’s briefing, Muthuraman KasiViswanathan, lead product manager, demonstrated the key features of Lexis Connect. They include:
Beyond that Lexis+ AI integration, several other aspects of the product are still being developed. Among them are analytics, Outlook integration, and support for multiple legal teams.
I asked Wellen whether this product would someday supplant CounselLink, another LexisNexis product that also provides matter management for corporate legal departments. She said no, and that the two products complement each other, with CounselLink providing more powerful tools for outside counsel and spend management, while Connect is more focused on management and triage of internal requests.
During the briefing, Microsoft’s Jason Barnwell, general manager for digital transformation within CELA, said this is exactly the kind of product legal departments need to help them keep up with growing demand for their services and to get more visibility into the work that is being done within the department.
With legal technology companies of all ilks rapidly moving to develop products that incorporate the new generation of generative AI typified by ChatGPT, it was only a matter of time before one of the legal research giants would enter the fray.
Today, LexisNexis is announcing the launch of Lexis+ AI, a new product that uses large language models (LLMs), including GPT-4, to answer legal research questions, summarize legal issues, and generate drafts of documents such as demand letters or client emails.
Lexis+ AI is “a tool that will transform legal workflows,” said Jeff Pfeifer, chief product officer for LexisNexis in Canada, Ireland, the U.K. and the U.S., said during a preview yesterday for members of the media. “Our solution is designed to leverage the latest in generative AI technology with trusted insights from LexisNexis.”
Meanwhile, the other legal research giant, Thomson Reuters, owner of Westlaw, said this week that it plans to invest some $100 million a year in artificial intelligence, and that it will start incorporating generative AI into its flagship products in the second half of this year.
For now, LexisNexis will limit availability of Lexis+ AI to a select group of Am Law 50 firms that will participate in a commercial preview. They include Baker McKenzie, Reed Smith, and Foley & Lardner. General availability will likely come later this summer, Pfeifer said.
“We believe our customers will tell us when it’s ready to go to wider commercial release,” he said.
LexisNexis is also offering an “AI Insider Program” by which other legal professionals can sign up for early access to product information, sneak previews, exclusive webinars, live roundtables, and insight surveys.
Once Lexis+ AI becomes commercially available, it will be sold as a standalone product, not as part of a subscription to any other LexisNexis product. Pfeifer did not provide pricing details.
During yesterday’s media briefing, Pfeifer emphasized that AI is nothing new to LexisNexis — that it has an established record of using AI in its products to help surface insights and optimize results. As examples, he pointed to products such as Lexis Answers, Lexis Brief Analysis, and Lexis Fact & Issue Finder.
But while these products all use extractive AI — AI that helps extract or find relevant results from within a set of data — Lexis+ AI uses generative AI to create new content from existing data.
As of now, the three main use cases for Lexis+ AI are conversational search, summarization, and drafting.
The Lexis+ AI interface will look familiar to anyone who has used ChatGPT, with a space on the left for entering and seeing the prompts or questions you have entered and the center of the screen displaying the “conversation” of your prompts and its responses. There are also links along the far-left side to standard Lexis+ resources for legal research, brief analysis, litigation analytics, practice guidance and legal news.
Although members of the media were not given the chance to test the product, Pfeifer demonstrated by asking a question about calculating time periods in litigation under New York law. Lexis+ AI quickly delivered an answer, together with embedded citation links for related statutes, case opinions and practice guidance content.
The user is able to explore those underlying authorities by clicking any item to be taken to the source content. Even as the user explores the source content, a Lexis+ AI Assistant remains visible on the page and available for the user to any any legal question.
Pfeifer then asked Lexis+ AI to draft a cease-and-desist letter to a third-party that is infringing trademarks owned by Apple. Again, the tool quickly parses the query and drafts the letter, and again, it provides embedded links to related content, including practical guidance on drafting cease-and-desist letters.
Showing the conversational nature of the interaction between the user and Lexis+ AI, Pfeifer then asked it to make the the cease-and-desist letter more aggressive. It quickly generated a new draft with a more aggressive tone and more aggressive demands. Pfeifer then asked it to show the changes it made to make the letter more aggressive, and it quickly presented a summary of the changes it made.
“The user can engage in a continuous dialogue with the service,” Pfeifer explained. “So if the answer that’s generated is not exactly on point, the user can refine the question and ask for clarification in a way that our model interprets and then again provides clarification in a next answer.”
A key question for any generative AI product in legal is whether it is prone to hallucinate — to provide answers that it has made up from whole cloth.
Pfeifer said that the risk of hallucination is minimal with Lexis+ AI because it leverages trusted and authoritative content directly from LexisNexis.
“Lexis+ AI excels at providing the most accurate answers to legal inquiries because it leverages global authoritative content from LexisNexis throughout its development, as customers would expect. Proprietary search technology integration with our model allows us to improve the model responses and integrate trusted content from Lexis+.”
He said that LexisNexis will be working with customers to evaluate and refine the accuracy and quality of the answers Lexis+ AI delivers. He added, however, that in some use cases, such as for drafting, the output is only a starting point, not a final production document. It still needs to be reviewed by a lawyer or legal professional and edited and tailored to the client and matter.
Also, he said, human legal experts are always in the loop to help continuously improve the performance of the AI model.
Lexis+ AI does not use any single LLM but picks and chooses from among the leading models based on which LexisNexis has found to perform best for a given task, Pfeifer said. LexisNexis has found that models vary significantly in their performance depending on the use case.
“Unique to our approach is that we are actually deploying multiple models in our solution. Our testing has confirmed that different models perform better in different use case scenarios.”
Pfeifer said that the product has been developed with an emphasis on privacy and security, so that any individual user’s activity and interactions are completely private to that user.
“Our generative AI is a private model not shared with third parties,” Pfeifer said. “This means that user sessions are always secure.”
Further, he said, the deployment of Lexis+ AI is guided by the Responsible Artificial Intelligence Principles of RELX, the parent company of LexisNexis.
The LLMs that Lexis+ AI uses are based exclusively on content that LexisNexis owns or has a proprietary interest in. Over time, Pfeifer said, LexisNexis will be looking to expand the information it uses by partnering with third-party content providers.
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