Gupta identified seven transitions in the practice of law required for a sustainable future. Many of the trends are well established, some are in their infancy or still speculative.

Here are the 7 transitions:

1. Moving from memory and intuition to data enhanced judgment. Lawyers have embraced analytics and AI to  improve insights and service delivery.
2. Moving from precedents to predictions. AI can’t work without clean data.  Firms can you AI to clean up, normalize and connect internal and external data for insights.
3. Moving from silos to interdisciplinary teams. Interdisciplinary not only means multiple practice groups working together but engaging the talents of non lawyer business professionals for client facing work.
4. Moving from income to outcomes as a unit of value. Here we are back at the billable hour debate And the challenge of defining other ways to measure value.
5. Moving from services to experiences. This requires the right balance of human and technology to make client experience more memorable by focusing on what they care about. Thinking in terms of topics and industries rather than practice groups.
6. Empathy is no longer a soft skill but becomes a hard skill By every partner period to emphasize the point she quoted the fictitious ad man Don Draper of “Mad Men” “the day you sign your client is the day you start losing your client.” Lawyers must move from problem solving to problem finding In order to anticipate the next risks the client will face.
7. Move from partnership to private equity ownership.  Not clear from her talk that private equity offerings by law firms have been successful, but it is likely that AI  will Change the business model. Law firms will continue to explore innovation and spin off products and subsidiaries and offer subscription-based services.

The bottom line is that law firm survival will require transformation, imagination and innovation.

The recap underscored for me how important law librarians and knowledge managers have been in introducing law firms to analytics, AI research,  horizon scanning and commercial data sources which are now being integrated with internal knowledge sources. All these initiatives are now part of the foundational infrastructure on which to build a sustainable law firm.

Ireland described the launch as putting power directly into lawyers  hands, “from selecting the model to guiding how it behaves in agentic workflows, all within a single, private environment. Our goal is to support legal professionals with a personalized AI assistant that enables uninterrupted workflows and access to the full range of LexisNexis AI capabilities in one secure place.”

 
Protégé General AI responses are generated from open-web sources,  new use cases include:
Use General AI as an idea springboard, Conduct Deep Research, Draft communications intended for both legal and non-legal audiences,Enrich legal work with real-world context and
Break down high-complexity problems.

 
 Protégé enables lawyers to “conduct a wider range of tasks including Advanced Reasoning and Deep Research for high-complexity legal issues or simple topic exploration, everyday tasks, brainstorming, and conversational responses to legal questions.”  Protégé General AI lets users choose the latest models, including Claude Sonnet 4 from Anthropic and GPT-5, GPT-4o, and o3 from OpenAI.
  
Protégé General AI is purpose-built for legal professionals with the highest levels of privacy and flexibility, going beyond what general-purpose AI tools can provide. Key differentiators include:
Security and Privacy by Design: The fully encrypted Lexis+ AI environment ensures data privacy protections that far exceed what consumer-grade AI tools offer.
Flexible Model Choice: Users can choose the AI model that best fits each task or use case.
A Shepard’s® Citation Agent: The advanced citation agent proactively checks any included legal sources for further human review.
Powerful Deep Research: Legal professionals can uncover comprehensive insights on any topic.
Integrated General and Legal AI: By securely combining Protégé General AI and Protégé Legal AI in one solution, Lexis+ AI, legal professionals can solve more problems faster.
User and Org-level Control: Users can easily toggle Protégé General AI on or off, and firms can turn off General AI for users entirely to meet firm or regulatory policies.
  
“Trust and privacy are the foundation of legal work. Safeguarding sensitive client information is paramount, and lawyers need confidence that their data remains private and protected,” said Jeff Pfeifer, Chief Product Officer, LexisNexis Legal & Professional. “Protégé Legal AI and General AI are designed with the rigorous privacy guardrails legal professionals require to work securely and responsibly, ensuring that client information is never exposed to foundational models and remains fully within their control.”
 
Lexis+ AI users now have the choice to either explore with Protégé General AI and select their preferred model or work with authoritative Protégé Legal AI. Each option provides distinct advantages:
Protégé General AI:
Claude Sonnet 4 (Natural Fluency): The latest model from Anthropic, it provides thoughtful and well-structured responses to support everyday tasks, communication, and brainstorming.
GPT-5 (Unified Reasoning): The latest model from OpenAI, it combines strong general knowledge and domain knowledge with reasoning and non-reasoning capabilities. LexisNexis is among the first to integrate this model through its direct collaboration with OpenAI.
GPT-4o (General Exploration): Excels at everyday tasks like general exploration, brainstorming, drafting, and integrating web-based information into real-time conversations.
OpenAI o3 (Advanced Reasoning): Optimizes tasks like Deep Research, strategic decision-making, intricate problem solving, specialized workflows and nuanced understanding. 
 

Protégé Legal AI:
Multiple legal-tuned models: Includes Claude 3.7, Claude 4, GPT-4o, GPT-4.1, fine-tuned GPT-4o-mini, and fine-tuned Mistral where the best model handles the specific use case. 
Authoritative responses with validated citations: Grounded in trusted LexisNexis legal content and metadata and organizations’ internal documents and validated through Shepard’s®.

Expanded agentic workflows: Built on the proprietary LexisNexis agentic AI framework and leveraging agentic AI capabilities integrated in the company’s global technology platform since 2024, agentic workflows represent a significant advancement in how legal professionals interact with AI. For example, the new AI Guided Research Workflow is a structured step-by-step process between both agents and humans, allowing the user to guide AI behavior in real time for deepened transparency and trust.
An Orchestrator Agent breaks down complex or lengthy legal queries into manageable tasks and coordinates multiple agents working together.
A Legal Research Agent lets the user refine or redirect AI behavior throughout its tailored research processes.
A Reflection Agent reviews and strengthens the final response.
 
According to the press release approximately 200 law firms, corporate legal departments, and law schools are participating in the Protégé General AI U.S. Customer Preview Program to provide their expertise, insights, and feedback. The preview begins in Q3 with general availability expected later this year.
 
To learn more about Protégé: www.lexisnexis.com/protege and Protégé in Lexis+ AI: www.lexisnexis.com/ai.

CoCounsel Legal is designed to “help professionals move beyond prompting and start delegating.”  The agentic guided workflows are built TR’s existing AI assistant and enhanced with advanced reasoning models, TR’s deep reservoir of Westlaw and Practical Law legal content and an army of domain experts at TR.  “ CoCounsel Legal is a next-generation AI product that brings together legal research, essential workflow automation, intelligent document search and AI-powered legal assistance within one unified enterprise wide solution.”

At launch Co Counsel Legal offers workflows for transactional, litigation and regulatory analysis. The headliner here is that TR is building a single workflow that allows lawyers to transition seamlessly through an entire project without the interruption launching new applications and products. And the product responds like a an intelligent teammate that an attorney can interact with. The attorney gives assignments and the agent gives feedback, guidance and results.

What Does This Relaunch of CoCounsel Legal Mean for Subscribers?

Since CoCounsel has evolved several times of the past few years I ask TR to provide some background on the scope and market position of the product. Here is the response:

 To keep pace with the rapid evolution of AI, we’re introducing a revised commercial model that ensures clients benefit from cutting-edge advancements as they emerge. CoCounsel Legal will be offered through multi-year subscriptions with modestly increased annual fees. These subscriptions include continual upgrade releases at no additional cost, delivering ongoing innovation and value. Here’s how the structure now works:

• CoCounsel Legal is the primary offering and includes:
  • The functionality/capabilities from CoCounsel Core
  • CoCounsel Drafting
  • Deep Research
  • Agentic workflows
  • Integrations with Westlaw Advantage, Practical Law Dynamic Tool Set, Microsoft 365, and DMS systems
  • CoCounsel Essentials is the new name for the foundational offering (formerly CoCounsel Core), and it is included as part of CoCounsel Legal or can be sold separately or with just Westlaw or Practical Law.
  • In market at launch, CoCounsel Legal is the flagship solution.

Deep Research (or Westlaw Talks Back)

For several years I have been musing of a future in which research products will provide conversational suggestions not just prompts. Deep Research provides an actual research plan for the attorney. Today Deep Research is part of the latest and according to Dahn the last version of Westlaw and is branded as Westlaw Advantage.

According Dahn Deep Research “is the legal industry’s first professional-grade agentic AI research capability.”  It is the first product that I know of where a lawyer can hand-off a research assignment and get not only an answer, but the reasoning behind and sources to support the answer.    Results are grounded in Westlaw and Practical Law content which minimize the risk of hallucination. Dahn pointed out that even this powerful research tool includes a written caution for lawyers to always read sources and verify results.

Deep Research can:

• Generate multi-step research plans

• Trace its logic with transparent reasoning

• Deliver structured, Westlaw and Practical Law citation-backed reports

I will be writing a separate post to explore the many new features of Westlaw Advantage.

Guided Workflows

CoCounsel Legal now offers an expanding library of guided multi-step workflows which are driven by agentic AI and leverage the substantive and practical expertise in both Westlaw and Practical Law.

Several CoCounsel guided workflows were launched in July. Soon-to-be-launched workflows include:

 • Draft a Privacy Policy

• Draft an Employee Policy

• Draft a complaint

• Draft discovery request

• Draft discovery response

• Deposition transcript review

Under the hood, “these workflows embed legal content, apply structured reasoning, and provide human oversight.”  “This is where AI starts to feel less like a tool and more like a teammate,” said David Wong, Chief Product Officer at Thomson Reuters. “Guided workflows transform how professionals’ approach complex legal work, moving beyond simple prompting to sophisticated, multi-step task execution— and that’s a huge leap forward in what legal AI can deliver.”

Agentic AI vs Assistive AI

 TR provided the following information on how they define and distinguish agentic and assistive AI. Here is the response:

• An AI assistant responds to prompts and performs single-step tasks, requiring user input at each stage.
• An AI agent can plan, reason, and act independently within a workflow. It does not just respond, it executes.

AI Agents: First They use advanced reasoning models, supported by an AI assistant that can help orchestrate work. Second, they have access to tools, and they can use these tools to complete tasks.  Third, they can adapt and respond to new information, changing course as needed to achieve their outcomes.  Fourth, as a result of these capabilities, agentic AI systems can complete complex, multi-step assignments.

Knowledge Search – Uncovering and exploiting law firm knowledge

On July 9, TR announced CoCounsel Knowledge Search which promises to revolutionize how organizations access internal knowledge. It can deliver a “unified search experience” by accessing content from across sources such as HighQ, iManage, NetDocuments, SharePoint and OneDrive. Having worked in law firms and seen firsthand the gnarly, unweeded garden of internal repositories – I assume there is some back-end prep required for this integration. If Knowledge Search is working as promised  – it has Nirvanic possibilities. It is an important piece of TR’s agentic AI in CoCounsel Legal.

Embedded Training

One of the key unarticulated benefits of CoCounsel Legal and Deep Research is that these features provide embedded guidance to associates as they are drafting documents and conducting research. No matter how much energy library and professional development teams put into training – they can’t provide “on the spot training” for every assignment.  As Agents grow more pervasive and more powerful a key training message will be to remind associates to “check the agent’s work and read every source!”

Here are some links to additional information:

• For more details about Deep Research in CoCounsel
• For more details about our recently launched CoCounsel guided workflows and Library of prompts, skills and workflow  

• For updates from our President, Legal Professionals
• For updates from our President, Corporates
• For more on Knowledge Search in CoCounsel 

This past July Lexis completed the acquisition of Henchman, a Belgium based legal tech company that enriches the data from the DMS for faster document drafting. 

Over the past decade many large law firms opted to implement the Lexis LSA solution which offered the unique taxonomy, tagging and algorithms from their corporate intelligence product Intelligize to tame the DMS precedent collection. As a fan of LSA I wanted to find out what would happen to the LSA product following the Lexis acquisition of Henchman. Was LSA about to be sunset? Would there be a marriage of LSA and Henchman and most important …Would it be a happy one? I am happy to report – after talking to Jeff Pfeifer, Chief Product Officer, Canda, Ireland, US and USA – I am feeling optimistic.

Read the full article on LegalTech Hub

Lexis Search Advantage has been in the market for over a decade. It included solutions for both transactional and litigation documents. Both LSA and Henchmen work by analyzing the contents of a firm’s DMS. Let’s be honest, DMS’s like many things in life are subject to the 80/20 rule. Eighty percent of the documents in a DMS are not valuable precedent or even final documents. DMSs are loaded with document fragments, redundant documents with variant names and the  ultimate dross – fax cover sheets, lunch menus, March Madness Bracket Sheets…..  In my prior experience with LSA, KM experts with curation expertise were required to develop vetting rules to winnow down the DMS collection to identify a smaller subset of high value DMS documents  to be ingested by LSA. Was the same thing true for the new Henchman based solution?

I asked Pheifer to explain the roadmap for both LSA and Henchman.  The firs thing he pointed out is that Henchman has been rebranded as Lexis Create DMS.

Henchman was developed as a tool for active drafting and within the Lexis suite of product will enable lawyers to access exemplars from within the firm’s DMS from within Microsoft Word during the drafting process. The ultimate goal is to marry the two products together and deliver the benefits of both Henchman and LSA within the drafting process.

Current LSA Subscribers – Here’s the bottom line. You will be able to to continue LSA for the foreseeable future. There are no plans to sunset LSA. LSA subscribers will not be pressured to migrate to a new platform. However, the Intelligize classifiers are scheduled to integrated in to Lexis Create DMS in January 2025.

Here is where I see the challenge. There are two kinds of firms.  Firms with KM teams who have curated documents and firms without KM teams. The benefits of Lexis Create DMS will be more immediately available to firms that have already created curated DMS collection of valuable precedents. Today Lexis Create DMS is not a magic bullet that can easily crawl a DMS of 30 million documents and product a good outcome.

The fims with a mature KM environment, which can point  LCDMS at a specific DMS folder where the best templates exemplars and  model  clauses have been curated will have a “plug and play” type implementation.

Firms without a curated repository of documents can not use Henchman alone to solve the curation problem outlined above.  Currently firms without a preexisting precedent folder have to find ways of limiting the number of documents ingested by LC-DMS. For example, they only ingest the most recent 5 years. Once the LSA features including the Intelligize classifiers are added to LC DMS it will be easier for firms to optimize the quality and relevance of the documents going into the system.

Here is the Ultimate Marriage of LSA and Henchman. The LSA indexing will be used to help firms reuse valuable documents as grounding data for generative AI document drafting. Benefits of document organization and classification from LSA along with the benefits of Clause identification at the point of drafting from Henchmen.

What’s Next?

Lexis + AI. In January Henchman will become part of Lexis + AI. Firms that don’t have their own curated transactional dataset can leverage Henchman  using  publicly available data that is available within Lexis + Ai to generate drafts. Intelligize classifiers will be incorporated in to Lexis Create DMS in January and will be available both in Word and Lexis +AI for generative AI drafting.

Plans for Litigation Documents and Drafting.  Pfeifer noted that Lexis has amassed  a collection of 32 million litigation documents including briefs, pleading motions and complaints. In addition, they have built a rules based classification system which can identify 130 litigation types with high levels of accuracy. All of this intelligence will be integrated into Lexis Create DMS.

These same litigation documents are currently used in the Lexis +AI  argument drafting tool in Lexis + AI. In 2025 firms will be able to use Lexis Create DMS  with both Henchman LSA features for drafting litigation documents. In addition, litigation groups can use their own documents as grounding data for a GAI drafting experience.

All of these new drafting capabilities can be customized at the firm and personal level using Lexis Create and Lexis Protégé.

• Lexis Create is product capability for use in MS Word or Outlook. So ability for bring in DMS samples and asking word to create a draft.
• Protégé is an ai assistant capability that is presented within the context of the specific Lexis Nexis product (e.g. Lexis +AI or Intelligize)

Cracking the Grounding Data Challenge. Most firms are grappling with creating a custom repository of  grounding data which can be used to create Gen AI answers Protégé will help firms address this challenge.

Next evolution of Lexis+AI. Lexis AI solutions currently are offered in 5 countries outside the US. This  will be expanded to 8  additional countries in Europe, AsiaPac and and South Africa. The next launch will be for Austria.

New Protégé  Capabilities will include  high value task expansion  including surveys, document comparison,  and building internal  databases.

APIs. Pfeifer also highlighter that customer can enhance all of their GAI projects by accessing  Lexis data via APIs. This of course requires a special license.

.Generative AI adoption in marketplace.  I asked Pfeifer if law firms were getting more comfortable with GAI adoption. Pfeifer noted that Gen AI adoption rates in law firms with 50 or fewer attorneys is  “off the charts.”  Small firms have  embraced  GAI adoption much more quickly than large firms. Smaller firms also experience the benefits of GAI efficiencies immediately. But he also noted that large firm adoption is picking up as firms become more comfortable with security review issues and embrace the products from a limited number of  trusted vendors.

Interative chat features will allow researchers  query VitalLaw content  and then generate executive summaries, create checklists, identify key points, and simplify complex legal terminology.

Current VitalLaw subscribers will have the option to purchase an upgrade for the new AI

functionality.

 Ken Crutchfield, Vice President & General Manager of Legal Markets at Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory U.S. said: “VitalLaw® AI harnesses Wolters Kluwer’s practical and value-first approach to AI. Our platform not only helps legal professionals locate and chat with the right information, but also extends that workflow by creating first drafts, compliance checklists or other key deliverables. The extended workflow increases attorney productivity and can help create better client deliverables.”

VitalLaw AI offers the following workflow enhancements:

• Interactive Document Summarization: Upon completion of a search, customers can chat directly with VitalLaw content to generate executive summaries, create checklists, identify key points, and simplify complex legal terminology for communication with other important stakeholders.

• 360 Feedback: The “editor-in the-loop” provides answers to commonly asked questions that have been pre-vetted by a Wolters Kluwer expert for accuracy. Outputs and user feedback are reviewed to enhance answers.

• Simple and Safe: Customers will have a safe and familiar experience that provides AI-generated answers while identifying other related questions people ask without compromising an organization’s data.

Earlier this year, Wolters Kluwer unveiled the company’s dedicated AI center. The site centralizes the company’s latest AI-insights, research, and AI-driven information solutions in one accessible location, catering to professionals across critical sectors such as health, financial services, legal, ESG, risk, regulatory, and compliance.

 Ed Walters, Chief Strategy Officer of vLex  is on fire is describing the new release. ”The autumn ‘24 release of Vincent AI is the biggest yet. Vincent is now a platform for all kinds of work dash transactional, litigation, contract or research period the AI is only as good as the data it is built on and the global data set of vLex is the best in the world – that is why the Vincent platform is so popular.”

The platform offers, new usability features, new workflows and new jurisdictions. Features include The feature which blew me away was VIDA an AI enabled Docket search. Additional new features include multi-turn conversation, prompt assistance, and review of entire folders  branded as “Collections” because it can analyze entire collections of  documents.

As the only Generative AI enabled international legal research platform, the new features allow

in-house and firm lawyers “to track and compare the law of many nations at once, to scan the horizon for new legal developments, and to draft legal documents for a global workforce, all in a single platform.”

“Because it is powered by one of the world’s largest libraries of structured legal data, Vincent AI has offered some of the most powerful AI workflow tools in the world,” said vLex CEO Lluís Faus. “The Autumn ‘24 release includes those workflow tools and more, and in more countries. Really, Vincent AI has evolved to become an AI platform, hosting many different tools for drafting, planning, analysis, and research,” he added.

New Workflow Tools for Transactions, Analysis, and Litigation

vLex is adding new tools to Vincent AI all the time, but the Autumn ‘24 release already includes the following workflows:

• Analyze a Contract – instantly identify non-market provisions, harmonize definitions, spot risks, create closing checklists, catalog post-closing obligations, and flag client-hostile language
• Explore a Collection – extract key facts, create timelines, and analyze entire folders of litigation or transactional documents, including from firm DMS systems
• Ask a Research Question – create a research memo to answer legal questions in 13 countries, with direct citations and links to verified sources, including Fastcase’s Cert citator in the United States
• Analyze a Deposition – summarize, extract key facts, identify follow-up questions and objections, and build timelines
• Build an Argument – research and draft winning arguments for or against propositions, based on precedent in specific jurisdictions
• Compare Law in Different Jurisdictions – scan the horizon, or compare governing law across different states in the United States, or between different countries
• 50-State Survey – For U.S. work, compare the law of all 50 states and the federal government with a single, plain-language search, and get table results, with editorial support, in minutes
• Find Related Authorities – upload a document to find related authorities from vLex, including primary and secondary materials
• Analyze a Complaint (or Analyse Pleadings in the UK) –extract claims, facts, and timelines, create questionnaires, itemize available defenses
• Redline Analysis – review redlines to summarize changes, assess their likely impact, and develop a negotiation strategy
• Compare Documents – upload multiple documents to identify differences in table format

New Countries

vLex had already used Vincent AI to index and analyze the law of the United States, United Kingdom, Ireland, Spain, the European Union, Mexico, Chile, Colombia, New Zealand and Singapore. With this release, Vincent will also have native legal workflows in French and Portuguese, with the addition of the law of France, Portugal, and Brazil.

New Abilities Beyond Workflow Tools

Multi-turn conversation features, empowering users to conduct deeper analysis or ask follow-up questions, just like a conversation with a research assistant.

Prompt Assist, automatically offers suggestions about which tools to use, or how to phrase prompts for maximum effectiveness.

Collections: Multi-document analysis Instead of analyzing single documents, users can now work on multi-document libraries, called Collections. Legal teams can create many different kinds of Collections, such as playbooks, in-house KM resources, brief banks, or style guides. They can be made available to a single user, or to entire teams.

Collections support both Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) tasks, such as asking questions to synthesize knowledge about the entire collection, as well batch processing workflows such as document extraction.

Vincent AI in Docket Alarm (VIDA)

This release brings the first deep integrations of Vincent AI into the extensive Docket Alarm collection of state and federal dockets, as well as the complaints, answers, briefs and pleadings in those dockets. VIDA provides users with deep insights into the big data included in the more than 820 million  Docket Alarm documents. Use cases include:custom-query into litigation analytics, data-driven biographies of lawyers, analysis of judges, and deep profiles of expert witnesses, using data directly from Docket Alarm.

New APIs. For more than a decade, law firms, litigation finance companies, and corporate legal departments have used Docket Alarm to track, research, and analyze litigation data. The vLex team developed new APIs to access the Docket Alarm data at scale. In this release, Vincent AI can access those APIs to search Docket Alarm using AI similar to the way Vincent AI searches the world’s law from vLex.

vLex Labs “The Autumn ‘24 release includes lots of new workflow tools, but this new version of Vincent AI goes way beyond just new skills,” said vLex Global Head of Product Robin Chesterman. “Vincent AI is now a platform. Law firms are co-developing their own AI applications with vLex Labs. They are uploading Collections and working on them as a team, getting query support along the way with Prompt Assist. And they can do this work across languages and geographic boundaries, seamlessly,” he added.

“And I’d like to remind people that, even though we’re already on the third major update, Vincent AI isn’t yet a year old,” Chesterman added. “We’re already testing some amazing applications that we’ll add to Vincent AI shortly – maybe in Winter ‘24.”

About vLex

vLex is a global legal intelligence platform that provides legal professionals with access to the most extensive collection of legal and regulatory information worldwide, all on one award-winning and unique platform. After its April 2023 merger with Fastcase, vLex now includes the Fastcase, Docket Alarm and NextChapter brands. Trusted by more than two million lawyers, researchers, government departments, and law schools worldwide, vLex offers comprehensive and intuitive access to the law in more than 200 jurisdictions through an intelligent, AI-powered legal research platform.

Recognized by the American Association of Law Libraries as the 2024 New Product of the Year and the Legaltech Breakthrough Awards for three years in a row 2021-23, vLex is a leader in legal AI and global intelligence. The merger with Fastcase has furthered vLex’s commitment to developing AI-driven solutions for the world’s legal industry and delivering the world’s largest global law library of over one billion legal documents on a single platform, to enable legal professionals to work smarter and find relevant insights faster. For more information about vLex, visit www.vlex.com.

Follow vLex via:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/vlex

X: https://x.com/vlex

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@vlex_tv

Customer-driven innovation is core to the company’s product development…” As with other recent releases, LexisNexis is taking a customer-first approach to the  evolution of its generative AI technology. LexisNexis is teaming up with leading Am Law 100 firms as part of the US Commercial Preview program to leverage continuous user  feedback.

Protégé builds on Lexis+ AI technology and market leadership. Lexis+ AI is commercially available in the US, US law schools, Canada, the UK, France, and Australia. Lexis+ AI is the only major legal generative AI solution available in 100 percent of US law schools.

Watch the slick Protege video here.

The press release states that “Protégé will continuously learn, improve, and anticipate new ways to support users based on personalization choices set by the user and/or their

organization. It will proactively provide insights and analytics leveraging LexisNexis’ industry-leading legal tools,

“Our customers are at the forefront of co-developing legal generative AI technology with us by testing, providing feedback, and adopting Lexis+ AI.” said Sean Fitzpatrick, CEO of LexisNexis North America, UK and Ireland. “Customers guide our vision. They are ready to progress from a Legal AI Assistant built for everyone, to the next phase – a Legal AI Assistant uniquely customized and tailored for each individual legal professional.”

Protégé Personalization choices are controlled by the user or their organization – creating a set of choices to optimize the user’s generative AI experience. Protégé will support legal professionals in making informed decisions faster, generating outstanding work quality, and freeing up time to focus on efforts that drive economic value for their clients and organizations:

• Protégé is dedicated to understanding each user’s legal work needs, continuously learning and improving, and anticipating new ways to support them. Last month, LexisNexis acquired Henchman, a Belgium-based company, to catalyze its shift to personalized generative AI. Henchman’s advanced technology provides deeper access to law firms’ internal work product. Its technology enriches data from law firms’ Document Management Systems (DMS), enabling users to quickly mine internal repositories and extract and interact with key insights. Integrating Henchman DMS technology with trusted LexisNexis content using its proprietary Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) 2.0 platform improves answer quality and accelerates personalized generative AI.
• Protégé personalization capabilities fuel a wide set of new AI-enabled tasks. Protégé knows specifics about each user like workflow preferences, daily task requirements, firm standards, teamwork and communication styles, legal areas of specialization, and past work product. It proactively suggests subscribed LexisNexis products to provide insights and analytics. Protégé will become increasingly versatile, flexible, and useful as new technologies are incorporated like voice and multi-media processing.
• Protégé is ubiquitous across the LexisNexis AI-powered ecosystem––from the company’s portfolio of products to Microsoft 365 integration for Microsoft Word, Outlook, Teams, and Copilot. Protégé seamlessly works alongside the user, whether in a LexisNexis solution or third-party application like Microsoft, to reduce application switching time, accelerate efficiency, and meet the user where they work.
• Protégé’s core framework integrates safety, security, and Privacy by Design principles. This ensures that interactions are backed by state-of-the-art security and privacy technology to keep data and user information highly secure.

In Q3 and Q4 2024, the Protégé personalization journey begins for users with functionality that:

• Knows my work and leverages my own work product – provides searchable internal firm data combined with AI for deep insights, enables batch upload capabilities and performs AI tasks, and analyzes my documents and provides contextual recommendations.
• Knows my workflow and meets me where I work – integrates across LexisNexis solutions and Microsoft 365 and provides Shepard’s® insights within conversations.
• Knows my tasks and supports a wide range of new use cases – supports daily task organization, client meeting deliverables, and deposition preparation. Protégé builds timelines, conducts AI code compare, initiates statutory horizon scanning, enables document upload and analysis, drafts full documents, and conducts intelligent legal research.
• Knows me and supports complex conversations – provides personalized responses based on user profiles and past behaviors, engages in sophisticated dialogue with clarifying questions and recommendations, and gives responses informed by subscribed LexisNexis products.
• Knows how to harness innovative, new technology to uniquely support me (2025) – includes answering prompts by voice, multimedia processing across text, image, video and audio, and news horizon scanning to identify breaking opportunities and risks.

For more information on LexisNexis Protégé Legal AI Assistant, visit http://www.lexisnexis.com/protege. For more information on Lexis+ AI, visit www.lexisnexis.com/ai.

I don’t need to remind anybody that the “death of the law librarian” has been repeatedly predicted over the past 20 years.  Many law firm administrators and legal tech writers mistakenly believed that as print libraries shrank and morphed into digital resources, there would be no need for information professionals. Of course, this prediction made no sense to me because law firms are in an information business and their clients’ interests live and die by the quality of the legal, business, trade, legislative and scientific information at their fingertips.  Law librarians’ information management skills were never tethered to print, and became even more important in a digital world which introduced new challenges related to information, quality, as well as the increasing volume, velocity and variability of unstructured data. Library and KM Directors upscaled their staffs and seized the opportunity to generate strategic business and legal insights through the integration of internal and external data.  Zach Warren, eTechnology & Innovation Insights, Thomson Reuters Institute, provided a fascinating overview of a recent Thomson Reuters Staffing Survey which reported a remarkable spike in the demand for library and KM professionals. Before I dive into that I want to highlight another surprising development

The CIA wants you!

I have been going to AALL meetings for about 40 years and I can’t ever remember a time when any employer set up a booth in the exhibit area of the conference in order to recruit law librarians.  Even more stunning was the nature of this employer – The Central Intelligence Agency! Now the CIA knows a lot about research and it is really a testament to the special skill set offered by librarians that they came to the Conference to track down the real experts. The recruiting literature states that the CIA has created its first new directorate in 50 years. The Directorate of Digital Innovation. The DDI is looking to fill its team with “forward thinking digitally savvy professionals…’shapers’ and ‘connectors’ who will lead, inspire and turn ideas into action.”

Read full article on Legal Tech Hub

The Thomsons Reuters Staffing Survey – Demand for Librarians and KM Professionals has Spiked

Thomson Reuters sponsored a day long preconference workshop “Unleashing Innovation: A Rollercoaster Ride to Implement, Plan and uind your GenAI Toolkit” in conjunction with the AALL Annual Conference & Meeting. Zach Warren, of the Thomson Reuters Institute delivered some pretty stunning data on the  increased demand for law librarians and knowledge professionals.

Thomson Reuters Institute’s “Staffing Ratio Survey”  reports that in the  past  year, there have been some major shifts in law firm staffing trends. In the recent past here have been several consistent trends, including declines in the ratio of total support staff to lawyers.  According to the report, “law firms, on average, had 81 support staff full-time equivalents (FTEs) for every 1 lawyer in 2023, compared to 95 support staff FTEs for every 1 lawyer in 2017.” From 2017 to 2022, the ratio of support staff to lawyers of several support staff function areas were in decline. Library and research roles had declined on average 2.3% each year from 2017 to 2022. The trend was confirmed in an additional metric cost per lawyer, which measures the total compensation of each functional area  or department and divides that by the number of lawyers at a firm, showing the cost of that specific function area, per lawyer.

Support staff costs per lawyer have increased very consistently while the ratio of support-staff-to-lawyers has declined. This illustrated that law firms are increasing investment in higher paid staff with more specialized expertise. During the same period law firms have been reducing Full Time Equivalent (FTE) headcount with lower-level skills.

The survey indicates that “Since 2017, library & research roles have largely followed the overall trend seen among total support staff, as one of the four major function areas experiencing declines in the ratio of staff-to-lawyer headcount.”

In 2023 library and research staff ratios broke with the overall trend and spiked upwards.  Library and Research staff roles grew by 5.3% in terms of their ratio to lawyer headcount (FTEs per lawyer). Library & Research MGMT roles increased by 19.1% and knowledge Management roles increased by 31.8% in their cost per lawyer. The cost per lawyer for all library and KM staff  increased by 12.9%,

This dramatically exceeded growth in all other functional areas.  Warren underscored that it was rare for the TR Institute to report a staff ratio reversal of this kind in  prior years. In other words, a decline once started, has rarely reversed. The only dramatic decline in library staffing was for library clerks which saw a FTEs-per-lawyer ratio decline in 2023. 

Warren provided additional insights into library job growth between 2022 and 2023 based on market segment. The cost per lawyer for law library and KM staff  in the overall market increased almost 13%. In ALM 100 law firms, there was a 6.9% increase in ALM 200 firms there was a 15 .2% increase and midsize firms there was a spectacular increase of 19.7 percent.

What are the drivers of the resurgence of Librarians and KM professional staffing?

The TR staffing report identifies changes in the mix of functional roles within the department.  The report breaks down staff into four broad categories: legal research, library & research management, knowledge management, and library clerks.

 In 2023 there was an small decline in legal research staff FTEs but a dramatic increase in knowledge management and library and research management roles. Reductions as a proportion of total library & research FTEs and library clerks was also noted. Knowledge management increased 26.3% FTEs-per-lawyer, and 31.8% cost-per-lawyer. Knowledge management roles now represent 18.2% of total library & research FTEs, up from 14.3% in the previous year.

The Report states that “Overall, no other function area saw a greater shift in role proportions than library & research, meaning that, in some way, this function area clearly has undergone the greatest shake up over the last year compared to any other function area.” However, the report cautions, that they do not expect this level of annual growth to continue every year.

“That being said, the changes in direction and the magnitude of cost increases within knowledge management and library & research management roles are significant. These changes in 2023 echo the broader support staff trend that has law firms investing in roles that are highly specialized and not easily automatable. Instead, we believe that firms will continue to focus on hiring specialized roles that can utilize advanced knowledge management and research management systems.”

The report rightly notes that “the growth in knowledge management and library & research management roles is in preparation for increased use of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) tools. As firms get their data in order, they start to gather and clean the training data that they will soon be using with AI workflows. The elevated cost-per-lawyer growth that comes from these advancements is already evident as firms’ research tools require a more sophisticated set of skills to fully be utilized.”

How can Librarians ride the transformative waves  caused by Generative AI, which are heading towards law firms?

Warren also reviewed some possible scenarios regarding the impact of Generative AI on the legal profession. TR’s strategy group has developed a scenarios of three overlapping waves which are likely to hit the legal profession. These scenarios predict that there will be a dramatic transformation of the legal profession within the next 10 years.

“Wave One” is defined as the optimized law firm. There will be pressure from corporate clients to use AI, but efficiency gains will focus on support staff and there will be a gradual reduction in the headcount for associates and paralegals..

“Wave Two” predicts an industry in flux. This will bring deeper reengineering in law firms resulting in a lower lawyer headcount. GC’s will source in-work from law firms and Alternative Legal Service Providers. Large firms will productize routine work. AI will give smaller firms an opportunity to compete up-market..

“Wave Three” is the “Robo lawyer” stage of evolution. There will be a complete overhaul in law firm service delivery and pricing models and niche data will become law firm differentiators. There will be an explosion of self-service law and entrants.

My Take on the Future  If we look at the core skills of law librarians and knowledge managers these skills align well with the ongoing transformation of the legal profession.  Streamlining, productizing and creating self service offerings for clients will still rely on the strengths of information professionals including: Information quality control, information design and usability, user experience and training.

The Robo lawyer phase, if it comes, will have far reaching effects across both legal and business support staffing in law firms and information professionals will have to continue to adapt and provide strategic insights which will help their firms navigate the oncoming waves of change.

Lexis+ AI offers conversational search, insightful summarization, intelligent legal drafting, and document upload and analysis capabilities in a seamless user experience. The new features highlighted in the press release were developed based on customer feedback.

In a live briefing during the conference, Serena Wellen, VP of Product Management emphasized the “human in the loop” aspect of LN’s AI development strategy in order to assure that responses are accurate, not hallucinated, responsive to the researchers intent, complete, authentic and composed using an appropriate “tone.” She also noted that Lexis + AI can now respond to up to 10 conversational “turns.” She claims that Lexis + AI is two times faster than their nearest competitor. I love these kinds of comparisons but I can’t wait for some 3 party market studies to verify the speed of various GAI product responses when performing similar tasks.

Here are the new features included in the press release:

Legal research and drafting enhancements include:

• Lexis+ AI Headnotes – Uses advanced AI technology to provide comprehensive headnote coverage for every case across the entire collection, allowing users to quickly grasp key points of law and easily locate similar cases, ensuring no critical legal insights are missed.
• Shepardize Uploaded Documents – Users can run the renowned Shepard’s® citation service directly within their uploaded documents using the AI assistant. This provides access to the full Brief Analysis report, identifying weaknesses in opposing arguments and strengthening their case.
• Shepard’s Treatment Summaries – Enables users to quickly determine if a case is relevant with at-a-glance summaries and seamlessly access the full Shepard’s report.
• Legal News Integration – Direct access to premium legal news content is now integrated into the AI assistant, complementing existing legal research capabilities for comprehensive legal analysis in one solution.

Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) enhancements now include:

• Integration of advanced Shepard’s^® Knowledge Graph to the proprietary LexisNexis RAG platform (GraphRAG) – Users can harness the power of highly accurate Shepard’s^® case law relationship information to deliver more authoritative, complete and final AI-generated responses.
• Shepard’s ^® Knowledge Graph is a sophisticated data organization framework that allows users to:
  • Precisely identify the most relevant data from extensive Lexis legal sources.
  • Receive complete answers based on connections between related opinions, legal taxonomies, and additional metadata that enhance the quality and context of responses.
  • Accurately verifiy citations, case connections and legal concepts as validated by the Shepard’s^® Citations Service.
  • Reduce research time and improve confidence and trust through measurably better answer quality.

Large Language Models added as part of our multi-model approach include:

• Claude 3 models by Anthropic, hosted on Amazon Bedrock from Amazon Web Services (AWS)
• GPT-4o, hosted on Microsoft Azure OpenAI
• Fine-tuned Mistral 7B, an open-source model, hosted on LexisNexis-managed servers within AWS

“At LexisNexis, customers are at the heart of our continuous generative AI development,” said Sean Fitzpatrick, CEO of LexisNexis North America, UK, and Ireland. “We are rapidly introducing customer-driven enhancements as part of our ongoing commitment to improve the user experience and deliver the most value for our customers.”

“We are committed to a diverse and wide set of large language models in the legal space—and the speed at which we investigate new models, experiment with them and deploy them is unmatched,” said Jeff Pfeifer, Chief Product Officer, Canada, Ireland, UK and USA, LexisNexis Legal & Professional. “We are focused on delivering the highest-quality answers to our customers with unparalleled speed and driving trusted results in areas that customers have indicated are their top priorities.”

LexisNexis is responsibly developing legal AI solutions with human oversight. LexisNexis, part of RELX, follows the RELX Responsible AI Principles, considering the real-world impact of its solutions on people and taking action to prevent the creation or reinforcement of unfair bias.

These enhancements are available to customers on Lexis+ AI. For more information, visit www.lexisnexis.com/ai.

LexisNexis^® Legal & Professional,  has  announced that  it has completed its acquisition of Henchman, a legal tech company that enriches data from Document Management Systems (DMS) for faster document drafting. Belgium-based Henchman has 170+ legal and corporate customers globally including top U.S. and European law firms and companies.

The Henchman acquisition was previously announced on June 3, 2024. Law firm DMS’s are an untamed wilderness of latent knowledge and insight. Henchman is designed to extract insights from these important data repositories.  According to the press release LexisNexis will combine this technology with its own AI technology, trusted content, and drafting guidance to deliver new, personalized generative AI drafting solutions in products including Lexis+ AI™ and Lexis^® Create.

“LexisNexis and Henchman share a vision of transforming legal work with personalized AI solutions,” said Mike Walsh, CEO LexisNexis Legal & Professional. “Together, our teams will make it easier and faster for customers to deliver high-quality legal work using generative AI that is grounded in both their internal firm data and LexisNexis content and tools. Customers asked for this capability, and we are delighted to answer. The acquisition will provide exciting new ways for customers to create value for their clients, as well as their organizations, using legal AI specifically tailored to their needs.”

Lexis+ AI is continually improving with hundreds of thousands of rated answer samples by LexisNexis legal subject matter experts used for model tuning. LexisNexis employs over 2,000 technologists, data scientists, and subject matter experts to develop, test, and validate its solutions and deliver comprehensive, authoritative information.

To learn about Henchman and LexisNexis’ ongoing development and be among the first to learn about new personalized generative AI drafting capabilities, visit www.lexisnexis.com/henchman-DMS.

For more information on Lexis+ AI and our generative AI resources for legal professionals, visit www.lexisnexis.com/ai.