Lexis appoints former lawyer as new director of solutions

Danielle McCormick has taken over as UK director of solutions at LexisNexis, we can reveal, filling the position left by Nigel Rae, who as we revealed in June, has joined Lawyers on Demand.

McCormick, who joined Lexis as a professional support lawyer and has spent four and a half years in Lexis PSL, started on 17 September, reporting to director of legal markets for the UK & Ireland, Simon Collin. She was formerly a commercial litigator at Walker Morris and, before that, Thomas Eggar.

In her new role, McCormick will be responsible not just for precedent, forms and drafting as Rae was, but also its AI and machine learning capability. She told Legal IT Insider: “It’s really exciting, especially for someone who has come from practice and suffered from a lack of time but still had to churn out the same volume and quality of work.”

In the UK R&D is being led out of Lexis’ new tech hub in Chancery Lane, which McCormick says is “unrecognisable”. The London tech hub builds on work being done out of tech hubs in the US and China.

LexisNexis solutions include its flagship LexisDraft Microsoft Word toolbar as well as forms and precedents and automation solutions (based on Exari), which include Lexis Bespoke, its automation as a service offering.

As we reveal on the front cover of the Orange Rag, Lexis is beginning to roll out some of its analytics capability developed in the US and will in 2019 launch a language-based analytics capability within Lexis Library.

McCormick says: “It all comes back to making lawyers more efficient and able to stand out from the crowd: we’re upteching the work we do.

“The strategic remit is to make people more efficient either by expanding what we do, such as automating packs of documents so you fill them in once not 26 times, through to deploying machine learning to drill down in to a group of data to deliver insights.

“We’re applying technology to what we see as the most sensible use cases. There are some great examples of really interesting technology out there but it doesn’t do what lawyers want it to do.”

In a theme that we saw in the launch of LexisNexis Analytics in the US, Lexis will be looking at how to broaden the application of technology so that it is applicable across different practice areas. McCormick says: “Most lawyers are taking similar steps along the route, which means the problems are pretty pervasive across practice areas whether that‘s bundles or bibles, litigation or transactional it takes similar technology in terms of slotting the documents together.”

She adds: “Lexis wants to be lawyer-led and its sending a bit of a signal out by putting me – a lawyer, not a techy – in charge. I know what I would have wanted in practice.”