Today LexisNexis  is officially launching Lexis+ and  announcing  the retirement of the Lexis Advance  and Lexis Practice Advisor brands. Lexis+ is the new premium platform and the legacy platform Lexis Advance will now be known as Lexis.  Lexis Practice Advisor will be known as  Practical Guidance in the United States and Canada.

“We are proud to introduce Lexis+, which delivers a more intuitive and powerful user experience for legal professionals,” said Sean Fitzpatrick, CEO, LexisNexis North America. “In today’s challenging business climate, attorneys need to rely on technologies that make them more effective, efficient and informed practitioners. Lexis+ is a bold step in our long-term strategy to develop legal solutions that improve attorney productivity, workflows and their ability to deliver timely and strategic counsel.”

Lexis + is more than a rebrand. It is a completely new platform which I described in detail in  a July post. Here are the key features.

  • Brief Analysis: Extracts citations and legal concepts, recommends other relevant cases and briefs, identifies relevant passages and takes users directly to them, and showcases their Shepard’s treatment – all within a unique dashboard.
  • Practical Guidance: Fully integrated practical guidance experience, with practice notes, checklists, annotated forms, drafting tools and industry insights from thousands of leading practitioners easily accessible from its home page and within legal research results.
  • Lexis Answers®: Responds to natural language search queries with the best, most relevant answer, taking users directly to its location within the document. Completely redesigned with the latest machine learning capabilities, Lexis Answers offers expanded and more relevant answers across wider question categories and automatic jurisdiction detection.
  • Shepard’s At Risk: Alerts attorneys to cases that are at risk of being overruled because the opinions they cite have been negatively treated.
  • Code Compare: Quickly identify changes in the law or legislative intent by comparing two versions of a statute section side-by-side, including current, future and archival versions dating back to the early 1990s.
  • Legislative Outlook: Predicts the passage of pending bills at the federal and state level.
  • More powerful search capabilities that give practitioners more control over the user experience, including:
    • Search Tree: Graphically depicts Boolean searches and highlights the impact of each keyword on search results, enabling users to refine searches for the best results.
    • Missing and Must Include: Forces natural language searches to include specific keywords, like Google.
    • Search Term Maps: Visually depicts clusters of search terms within search results and documents across 35 major content types for fast, easy navigation, trend identification and direct access to relevant information.
    • Ravel View: Data visualization technology illuminates key relationships between cases found in text-based search results. Improved offering features new map anchoring capabilities and display improvements.

Jeff Pfeifer, Chief Product Officer at LexisNexis North America  is quoted in the press release. “Lexis+ was designed for the ways that attorneys work, with deeply integrated product components, cutting-edge technologies and modern design elements that put the LexisNexis applications, content and data that attorneys need right at their fingertips. Regardless of where or how a user starts a research or task, they will be guided to the information that best addresses their legal question,”

I spoke with Pfeifer  about the launch and future developments at LexisNexis. In a recent interview with Joe Patrice of Above the Law Pheifer  Pfeifer said that the pandemic had actually helped with the development of Lexis+. Pheifer elaborated that lawyers seemed to be much more willing to engage and provide feedback on product features in recent months. He also noted a dramatic decline in lawyers use of printing and emailing features accompanied by a strong embrace of shared folders and other collaborative tools. “We have reset priorities based on the new hybrid work environment. Future product developments will focus on collaboration tools.”  Pfeifer also observed that  since many courts have pivoted quickly to amend court rules and are now allowing things like remote access and video depositions, Lexis is going to focus on tools which respond to this transformation of the courts and litigation.

Over the coming months, LexisNexis will continue to add new features, content and product integrations to Lexis+, including analytics from Lex Machina, news from Law360 and additional enhancements to the Practical Guidance offering.

For more information on Lexis+ features and pricing, please visit www.lexisnexis.com/en-us/home.page.