The Wednesday ILTA sessions kicked off with a Keynote from Reena SenGupta, Founder of RSGI Limited. The topic “Helping the Legal Industry to Create a Sustainable Future” bravely tackled the topic AI’s impact on the transformation of law firms.

Reena SenGupta, ILTA Keynote

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.

LexisNexis® Legal & Professional has  announced the U.S. customer preview of Protégé™ Protege General AI which compliments the functionality of Protégé Legal AI which launched in August 2024. Lexis will be demonstrating this new  suite of tools this week at the Annual ILTACON conference in National Harbor, Md.
 
The launch gives lawyers increased control and the ability to  personalize  the agentic AI capabilities with Protégé. Perhaps the most powerful new functionality is the ability to quickly pivot from Protégé General AI to Protégé Legal AI or to search simultaneously on both datasets.
 
It also promises secure access to general-purpose AI models from multiple providers within the Lexis+ AI workflow solution.  Sean Fitzpatrick, CEO of LexisNexis North America, UK, &

Continue Reading LexisNexis Introduces Protégé General AI:  Choose Your Own General AI Model in a Secure Environment

Today Thomson Reuters announced the launch of CoCounsel Legal which features both Deep Research and agentic workflows.  I attended a recent press briefing where Raghu Ramanathan, president of Legal Professionals, Laura Clayton McDonnnell, President of Corporate Business Rawia Ashraf,  Head of Product, CoCounsel Transactional and GCO, and Mike Dahn Head of Product Management Westlaw demonstrated a raft of new capabilities that resets the bar for AI enabled legal workflows.

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?

Continue Reading Co Counsel Legal with Agentic AI and Deep Research: Is It a Tool or Is it a Teammate?

As someone who worked in the KM trenches for years, I have repeatedly watched legal tech companies promise to tame the wild west of documents residing in law firm Document Management Systems (DMS). Over the years I implemented or worked with a variety of KM solutions from Lexis, West and smaller software companies.  Recently the dominant DMS providers iManage and Netdocs have launched AI enabled drafting solutions

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

Continue Reading The Evolution of Document Drafting: A Conversation with Jeff Pfeifer about LSA, Henchman and Lexis Generative AI Solutions

Today Wolters Kluwer is entering the Generative AI race with the launch of new generative AI (GenAI) functionality for VitalLaw. VitalLaw is the company’s comprehensive legal research platform which covers 25 practice areas including tax, securities, privacy, and labor and employment. VitalLaw AI is available across all VitalLaw practice areas.

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

Continue Reading Wolters Kluwer Enters the Gen AI Market with the Launch of VitalLaw AI

vLex  (Fastcase) is releasing a major upgrade to Vincent AI. This new release increases the number of workflows from 4 to 12. This includes expansion of both litigation and transactional tools and the addition of AI tools for additional jurisdictions including France Portugal and Brazil. vLex is the first generative AI platform to receive the American Association of Law Libraries New Product of the Year Award.

 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

Continue Reading vLex Vincent AI Upgrade: 12 Skills, 12 Countries + the EU, Transactional Skills and VIDA AI for Dockets

LexisNexis® Legal & Professional, has  announced the US Commercial Preview program for LexisNexis® Protégé™ Legal AI Assistant. Protégé is  the third-generation of Lexis+ AI and according to the press release “marks a substantial leap forward in personalized generative AI that will transform legal work, with personalization choices controlled by the customer.  This development is closely ties to the recent acquisition of Henchman, which enables the mining of internal Document Management Systems repositories to extract data and generate insights.

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

Continue Reading LexisNexis Announces Commercial Preview of Protégé Personalized AI Assistant

The American Association of Law libraries, Annual Meeting & Conference brought several harbingers of good news on the job market for law librarians and knowledge management professionals.

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

Continue Reading GAI Driving a Hot Job Market for Library and KM Professionals

LexisNexis® Legal & Professional,  announced over a dozen new Lexis+ AI  features during the American Association of Law Libraries Meeting & Conference this week.

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:

Continue Reading LexisNexis Enhances Lexis+ AI with New Features, AI Models, and Graphing

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.