LexisNexis champions AI’s move into the courtroom – News

The image of law firms as dark-paneled offices lined with dusty old books is being shattered by the arrival of a new associate: artificial intelligence. The legal profession has been among the first to adopt generative AI for its potential to help with the voluminous research, drafting and review often required in preparing to argue a case.

A recent Thomson Reuters Corp. survey found that 80% of legal professionals believe AI will have a high or transformational impact on their work within the next five years. The study also found that about three-quarters of law firms are already using AI for document review, legal research and summarization.

LexisNexis, a division of RELX Inc., crossed the line several years ago by embedding generative and agentic AI directly into the workflows its clients use every day. It’s part of a shift from print-based research to an integrated digital platform, according to Sean Fitzpatrick (pictured), chief executive of LexisNexis Legal & Professional for North America, the U.K. and Ireland.

“When I joined LexisNexis 20 years ago, about half our revenue was still print,” Fitzpatrick said in an interview with News. “Over time, we moved from being a research provider to an integrated ecosystem, and now to an ecosystem where information, analytics, decision tools and workflows are all powered by AI.”

Billons of documents

At the heart of the shift is Lexis+ AI, a platform that combines LexisNexis’s base of more than 138 billion documents and records with an AI assistant named Protégé to answer complex questions, summarize documents, generate drafts and provide data-driven litigation insights.

Introduced two years ago, Lexis+ AI is the fastest-growing product in the company’s history. “Customers are adopting it at an incredible pace,” Fitzpatrick said.

Initial results from a small pool of law firms justify their enthusiasm. A Forrester Consulting study commissioned by LexisNexis earlier this year found that five large law firms deploying Lexis+ AI achieved an average 344% return on investment over three years, with a payback period of less than six months.

Senior associates and partners saved up to 2.5 hours per week on routine drafting and research tasks, while junior associates recovered between 15% and 35% of previously non-billable hours. Research staff also benefited, saving each staffer an average of 225 hours per year.

Cautious approach

LexisNexis recognized the potential alignment between large language models and the nuts and bolts of legal work when ChatGPT debuted three years ago. It was also wary about the risk of hallucinations, which continue to abound in legal settings. Rather than building a general-purpose chatbot, the company focused on purpose-built legal applications grounded in its proprietary content.

The fine-tuning process benefited from years of work the company had already done to tag content with metadata. The system uses multiple foundation models, matching each to a task.

“We’ve taken all kinds of queries and tested them against different models, so we know which are good at drafting, which are better at summarization and so on,” Fitzpatrick said. “Depending on the query, we direct it to the model that’s appropriate to handle that question.”

Attribution is central. Every AI-generated answer links back to primary sources, allowing attorneys to verify cases, citations and quotations. Protégé autonomously breaks complex requests into multiple steps, such as research, outlining, drafting and proofreading, and executes them while exposing its reasoning to the user. Lawyers can see how decisions are made, intervene when needed and be accountable for the final product.

Creative windfall

Generative AI has also had some unexpected benefits. Lawyers have found it a tireless companion in generating questions for depositions. “They can spend their time going through and analyzing questions as opposed to thinking them up,” Fitzpatrick said. “I can’t say I expected it to spur creativity, but that certainly was the outcome we got.”

LexisNexis has been careful not to pressure notoriously conservative law firms to redesign their practices around AI. Instead, it has focused on automating discrete steps within existing workflows, allowing attorneys to work more efficiently without sacrificing time-tested practices.

Has there been some resistance? “Oh, yeah, for sure,” Fitzpatrick said. “Most people have accepted it, but there have been concerns about negative outcomes like hallucinations.”

There are also concerns across the industry about how the apprenticeship model that dominates the legal profession will adapt to technology that renders some existing entry-level jobs obsolete.

“The model can now do the work of first-, second- and third-year associates,” Fitzpatrick said. “No one that I’m aware of has come up with a great solution for how to redesign the apprenticeship model, but these are smart folks who have survived lots of changes over the years.”

Ultimately, he believes most legal firms will come on board. “Some have delayed, and some have jumped in early,” he said. “I think the ones that jumped in early are glad they did.”

Photo: LexisNexis/YouTube