The past week has seen a number of significant generative AI product launches and announcements, here are the ones you need to be aware of.
Thomson Reuters on 15 November announced the debut of generative AI within its legal research platform Westlaw, which is available now to customers in the United States, leveraging its acquisition of Casetext earlier this year. The US-headquartered company also announced that it will be leveraging Casetext CoCounsel to launch an AI assistant that will be an interface across Thomson Reuters products.
Thomson Reuters says that CoCounsel will be fully integrated within Westlaw Precision, Practical Law Dynamic Tool Set, Document Intelligence, and HighQ, and will continue to be available on the CoCounsel application.
“Thomson Reuters is redefining the way legal work is done by delivering a generative AI-based toolkit to enable attorneys to quickly gather deeper insights and deliver a better work product,” said David Wong, chief product officer at Thomson Reuters. “AI-Assisted Research on Westlaw Precision and CoCounsel Core provide the most comprehensive set of generative AI skills that attorneys can use across their research and workflow.”
“Thomson Reuters is well positioned to deliver high-quality AI results because it has the largest, most up-to-date, and trustworthy legal research system in the world,” said Andrew Bedigian, counsel at Larson LLP. “The fact that AI-Assisted Research relies exclusively on Thomson Reuters vetted database should provide lawyers with confidence that the answer AI-Assisted Research is generating in response to attorney questions is going to be well supported.”
LexisNexis Legal & Professional on 14 November announced the launch of two new generative AI services: Lexis Snapshot summaries, plus new gen AI capability within its Lexis Create document drafting tool.
Snapshot summarises complaint filings for civil cases across the U.S. Federal District Court. It provides insights including the nature of the case, plaintiff and defendant information, alleged harm, and requested remedies.
Lexis Create, meanwhile, now integrates directly with generative AI platform Lexis+ AI, meaning that users can leverage gen AI to help them with drafting documents in Microsoft Word.
“We’ve seen unprecedented demand for Lexis+ AI, and early usage results reinforce how transformative LexisNexis generative AI technology is for our customers’ work,” said Sean Fitzpatrick, CEO of LexisNexis North America, UK, and Ireland. “We’re rapidly introducing generative AI capabilities across our entire legal product portfolio to accelerate our customers’ success and to deliver significant productivity, work quality, and value gains for their firms and institutions.”
Greg Lambert, chief knowledge services officer at Jackson Walker said: “I have found the ability to prompt the legal research tool with a common language query to be extremely useful and the results have been very good. It gives me a great place to start.”
To date, Lexis+ AI has been developed with commercial preview users from a number of global law firms, corporate legal departments, U.S. small law firms, and U.S. courts, however Lexis said this week that it plans to expand its commercial preview program to legal professionals in Canada, the UK, France, and Australia in 2024.
In a further significant development, law school librarians and legal technology professors at all U.S. American Bar Association (ABA) accredited law schools will have access to Lexis+ AI.
Contract automation provider Ontra this week announced the integration of OpenAI’s GPT-4 into its AI engine, Ontra Synapse. Synapse automates critical legal workflows for private markets firms. It combines industry-specific data with technology and human expertise.
“Private markets firms are highly sophisticated and highly regulated. They demand responsible technology that evolves quickly and just works,” sai Eric Hawkins, Ontra’s SVP of Engineering. “Over the last several years, Ontra has developed proprietary AI models suited to a number of private markets legal applications. In the past year, we have been really impressed by OpenAI’s pace of innovation and the rate at which their models are improving. Building on GPT-4 with Ontra Synapse accelerates our ability to cover the breadth of legal contracts, freeing us up to focus our proprietary AI efforts on things like suggestions and recommendations that are only possible by building on our extensive repository of private markets data.”
Leading legal automation platform Josef has officially launched gen AI compliance platform Josef Q after a six month proof of concept.
The POC has involved the likes of Orrick, Wilson Sonsini’s SixFifty, Gunderson Dettmer, NYU and Cornell, and in-house teams at global corporates like Bupa, Ferring Pharmaceuticals, Axel Springer, esports company Fnatic, and London fintech Liberis.
Sam Flynn, COO and co-founder of Josef, says: “There is so much confusion out there. This proof of concept is unique, enabling Josef and our partners to learn from one another in an open environment.
“We’ve spent six months learning how this transformative technology can actually deliver value today. The biggest opportunity that GenAI can help with? Clients and business don’t engage with complex but important legal and compliance content. This causes all sorts of problems, like junior lawyers spending up to 20% of their day answering FAQs, or businesses failing to comply with important regulations.”
Global insurance giant Bupa’s first GenAI tool on Josef Q helps the marketing team understand regulatory requirements for health insurance advertising. Claire Nuske, head of legal operations, says that the tool won’t just save time because the legal team no longer has to answer FAQs. “It will also help ensure a smoother and more timely review process [for marketing materials]. This will help get us on the same page early on and help reduce the number of reviews a particular campaign needs to go through,” she said.
And not gen AI but AI news of note, US legal prediction platform Pre/Dicta this week launched new capabilities, enabling legal teams to predict case outcomes across multiple types of motions and quantify case timelines.
Pre/Dicta’s proprietary algorithms use artificial intelligence to uncover judicial patterns. We’re told that its predictions are 85% accurate for motions to dismiss across all 94 U.S. federal district courts. The newly released augmented capabilities provide insights into additional motions through AI data-profiling. These include the most consequential motions: summary judgment, class certification, and venue transfer. The platform contextualizes its motion analysis, comparing that with the judge’s decisions, as well as other judges within the same circuit and those with analogous biographical profiles.
Pre/Dicta founder and former litigator Dan Rabinowitz said: “In the modern legal landscape, understanding the myriad of factors that influence judicial decision-making, and enabling AI to surface critical insights from billions of patterns, is a crucial advantage in any case.”