LexisNexis Legal & Professional today (11 January) announced the launch of the UK and Canadian commercial preview of Lexis+ AI, a generative AI solution designed to help lawyers with legal research, drafting, and summarisation. It follows the launch in the United States in May last year of Lexis+ AI, which became generally available in October.
During this opening preview period, participating firms will collaborate in testing and provide feedback. The firms involved that have given consent to be named include Eversheds Sutherland, Macfarlanes, Pinsent Masons and CMS. For others, LexisNexis is launching an AI Insider Programme to access content such as webinars, surveys and “sneak previews” of updates.
Lexis+ AI is presented as an AI Assistant icon next to Legal Research, Practical Guidance, and the Legal News Hub. With AI Assistant, users can conduct research of LexisNexis’ repository of legislation and case law asking natural language questions, and LexisNexis has built in prompt suggestions.
Searches return answers with citable sources, which on the face of it doesn’t appear vastly different to a Lexis+ search, however Lexis+ AI interprets the source material as opposed to just return the source, adding explanations.
During a demo of Lexis+ AI, chief product officer Jeff Pfeifer said of the prompts: “The legal community is going on a journey to create and deliver prompts and we offer a set of tutorials to help lawyers understand with the use of large language models the prompts that are appropriate and can give you highly qualified structured answers. We give feedback and guidance in the product on how to strengthen your request.”
You can use Lexis+ AI to draft clauses, legal documents and emails and summarise case law, which will summarise not only the text but the reasoning behind the case. Users can also upload their own documents for summarisation or to run queries against, and LexisNexis’ director of product development, Karen Waldron, who conducted the demonstration, said: “The US said they want to be able to upload and summarise documents or run queries against them and you can do that here. They are encrypted, never ingested, and not used to the train the model. All the user sessions are private to that user. You can drag and drop documents, for example if you have a third party document you might want to compare it to your standard terms. You can say ‘compare the liability provisions and summarise the key differences’ and it describes the differences.”
Pfeiffer emphasised that there are humans in the loop at all times to improve the content. Lexis+ AI is underpinned by Athropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s GPT 4 and Pfeifer also stressed that they have used privacy by design standards.
During the demonstration, Legal IT Insider asked Pfeifer what the uptake has been like of Lexis+ AI in the United States and it is interesting to note that he said: “The uptake has been substantial, we’ve had many firms adopting and using the product, in fact it has been the fastest adoption of a product that we have ever had as a business. That’s across all market segments; large law, small and in-house, but most notably small law firms in particular seem to be very focused on using it to improve their work efficiency.”
In a statement to coincide with this launch, Rachel Broquard, service excellence partner at Eversheds Sutherland (International) said: “We are supporting the research and development of generative AI across the industry. LexisNexis is a key content provider, so its roadmap will be closely watched as many firms’ on-ramp to generative AI-based research.”
Being a trial firm for big tech betas and previews has become a source of fierce competition and in a sign of the times, Luke Powell, managing partner at Macfarlanes said: “This latest initiative solidifies our position as a firm of the future. Our generative AI strategy provides innovative ways of tackling clients’ most complex issues.” Macfarlanes is one of the law firms that has partnered with Harvey AI.
To join the Lexis+ AI Insider program, visit lexisnexis.co.uk/ai-insider/sign- up.html