Global legal intelligence company vLex today (12 September) released a major upgrade to its AI research assistant Vincent AI, which is now capable of transactional as well as litigation-based tasks. The Autumn ‘24 release triples the number of AI workflows to 12 and adds three new countries to its coverage: France, Portugal, and Brazil.
The first generation of Vincent AI focused on litigation drafting and research, powered by vLex’s global online law library. The Autumn ‘24 release includes new workflow tools for transactional tasks as well as expanded workflows for litigation work.
It’s worth noting that the American Association of Law Libraries named Vincent AI the 2024 New Product of the Year, the first generative AI tool to receive that honour.
“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’s Autumn ‘24 release includes the following workflows:
- Analyze a Contract – 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 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
- 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
The new workflow tools give Vincent AI the ability to review and respond to redline revisions and transactional workflows. They include drafting tools to create memos and arguments from very specific jurisdictions to comparisons around the world.
The new release also includes Prompt Assist, which automatically offers suggestions about which tools to use, or how to phrase prompts for maximum effectiveness.
In addition, 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.
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. During the summer, 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.
Called Vincent in Docket Alarm (or “VIDA”), this integration allows users deep insights into the big data included in the more than 820 million documents in Docket Alarm. These new insights, into custom-query litigation analytics, data-driven biographies of lawyers, analysis of judges, and deep profiles of expert witnesses, use data directly from Docket Alarm.
“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.