LexisNexis® Legal & Professional is  announcing new document analysis tools  for transactional lawyers. space. The feature which is called “Agreement Analysis,” will streamline the manual tasks that accompany researching, negotiating, and finalizing transactional agreements.  The product currently supports M&A transactions, including merger, stock purchase and asset purchase agreements, with more transactions coming in future releases.

Agreement Analysis uses AI to extract and recommend alternate clause language from seven million clauses publicly filed in SEC EDGAR documents, and from Practical Guidance sample clauses, templates and agreements. The feature allows a lawyer to drag and drop their document into the Agreement Analysis tool. The tools focuses on “highly negotiated clauses” and quickly compares and offers alternate language for clauses in their document. Lawyers have direct access to the drafting guidance and insights from  Lexis Practical Guidance and benchmarking data points from their Market Standards tool.

Lexis Nexis Agreement Analysis Dashboard

Continue Reading LexisNexis Adds Extractive AI Deal Analysis Tool to Lexis+

LexisNexis® Legal & Professional, is announcing the launch of Lexis+® AI, a generative AI platform designed to transform legal work. According to the press release “Lexis+ AI is built and trained on the largest repository of accurate and exclusive legal content, leveraging an extensive collection of documents and records to provide customers with trusted, comprehensive legal results with unmatched speed and precision and backed by verifiable, citable authority.”  Lexis is not yet announcing the release of the product to the public. They are offering potential users an opportunity to learn about or participate in in the testing and development of the product. It is anticipated that the product will launch in the fall of 2023 and will be marketed as an “add-on” to Lexis+.

“We’re thrilled to bring this transformative technology to customers,” said Mike Walsh, CEO of LexisNexis Legal & Professional. “The Lexis+ AI platform provides first-of-its-kind tools for lawyers to dramatically improve the speed, quality, and effectiveness of their practice and business.”

New Lexis+ AI Features

The Lexis+ AI technology offers conversational search, summarization, and intelligent legal drafting capabilities.

Conversational search Is yet another step toward simplifying the legal research process. Lexis had previously launched several solutions to simply research including Lexis Answers, Lexis Brief Analyzer and Fact and Issue Finder. “Conversational search simplifies the complex and time-consuming legal research journey, providing a search experience for diverse legal questions with citations, facilitating lawyers’ ability to complete research effectively and efficiently. “Continue Reading Lexis+ AI Launches with Two Customer Initiatives: Commercial Preview and AI Insider Programs

At the dawn of the digital information age, I learned an exotic research tradecraft “Selective Dissemination of Information” (SDI). Platforms such as Dialog and Orbit contained dozens of databases which included abstracts and descriptors for scientific and business articles and reports. Curated topical updates could be harvested by using a set of complex commands and

LegalOn Technologies (“LegalOn”) a leading legal technology company from Japan,  has announced its expansion into the United States and  the appointment of Daniel Lewis as US CEO. Daniel Lewis is well known in the U.S. legal tech community as the co-Founder of Ravel Law (later acquired by LexisNexis). Ravel Law completely reimagined the delivery of caselaw research results and was the first platform to offer Judge’s “Precedential Behavior Analysis.”

According to the press release “LegalOn has built the world’s leading AI contract review solution for in-house teams and law firms. The company has over 3,000  law firm and law department customers, a team of 400 employees, $101m in recent funding. LegalOn was founded in 2017 by two corporate lawyers and the company is backed by leading investors

Nozomu Tsunoda, CEO is quoted in the press release: “We have over 3,000 customers, a team of 400 employees, $101m in recent fundraising, and now we’ve added an experienced executive, Daniel Lewis, to lead our US expansion.”

Daniel Lewis and Nozomu Tsunoda of LegalOn Technologies

Lewis joins LegalOn as US CEO after five years at LexisNexis leading practical guidance businesses serving 100k+ attorneys. He previously founded and led Ravel Law, a legal analytics software company. “One of the biggest challenges that general counsel and in-house teams face is providing timely review on urgent, high-volume contracts like NDAs and purchase agreements,” says Daniel Lewis, US CEO.

I recently interviewed Lewis and JP Biard, the Head of Global Strategy. Lewis  described how the drag and drop feature provides complete contract analysis in  lightning speed. The product provides clause by clause analysis and guidance. Another unique feature is that the product supports “point of view” analysis meaning that it provides guidance based on the position of the party. There are currently over 60 Japanese agreements supported. LegalOn is in the process of building up the U.S. corpus of contracts it will support by using Natural
Continue Reading Daniel Lewis Co-Founder of Ravel Law Joins LegalOn Technologies

Today  Lex Machina and LexisNexis announced the official release of a new topical area of analytics — Internet Law. This new federal practice area  includes data for any case with one or more claims brought under one of the following federal statutes: (i) the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), (ii) the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), or (iii) the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) which includes the Stored Communications Act (SCA). It is an important area of law in which transparency and understanding provide a crucial edge. The new
Continue Reading Lex Machina Launches Legal Analytics for New Practice Area: Internet Law

Lex Machina and LexisNexis announced today that it has officially released a Chapter 11 Bankruptcy Module, which provides Legal Analytics for over 115,000 Chapter 11 proceedings. It’s been a long time coming. Ever since they launched their Bankruptcy Appeals  Analytics  in 2017, customers have be wondering when Chapter 11 analytics would launch. Hooray! That day is here.

Excellent timing given the fragile state of the economy. Recessions has historically been a boon for Bankruptcy and Finance practices. The Chapter 11 Bankruptcy Module includes the entire docket in any bankruptcy proceeding filed after 2009 in a United States Bankruptcy Court under Chapter 11 of the Bankruptcy Code. Like other Lex Machina modules, the Chapter 11 Bankruptcy Module provides insights into judges, courts, debtors, creditors, creditor committees, and trustees involved in Chapter 11 proceedings over the last 13 years.

The Chapter 11 Bankruptcy Module incorporates special features such as filters for cases involving business debtors, voluntary petitions, and confirmed plans. It also incorporates an extensive collection of practice bankruptcy specific document tags to filter
Continue Reading Lex Machina Launches Bankruptcy Chapter 11 Module.

 Courtroom Insight today announced a collaboration with LexisNexis® Legal & Professional.  LN will enable customers who have both Courtroom Insight and LexisNexis to automatically access select Lexis Context Analytics and Lexis+ information about expert witnesses and judges. The new data will appear with  within the Courtroom Insight Knowledge Management platform profiles of judges

Earlier  this week,  LexisNexis Legal & Professional     unveiled the upcoming availability of Lexis+ Fact & Issue Finder, at  the American Association of Law Libraries conference . This new feature enables litigators to identify caselaw relevant to the specific  facts and  issues of their client’s case. The new offering covers six litigation practice areas – Personal Injury, Labor & Employment, Insurance, Real Estate, Intellectual Property, and Business & Commercial – with additional practice areas planned.

I met with Jeff Pfeifer, LexisNexis Chief Product Officer during the Conference  to get an overview of the  Lexis+ Fact and Issue Finder.  Pfeifer  alluded to a “abyss of information” which practically paralyses an associate faced with so much precedent and so many research tools.  The Fact & Issue Finder is focused on helping lawyers locate the most factually relevant cases quickly.  According to Pfeifer the product grew out of an attempt to completely deconstruct the research process. The developers used feedback from more than 1,000 customer interactions in order to understand the research experience and address specific pain points. One important goal is to eliminate the “fractured” research process by delivering a set of unified results in a single dashboard.

Fact & Issue Finder is designed from the ground up to mimic the exact processes that legal professionals perform when researching
Continue Reading Associates Flailing in the “Abyss of Information” – Lexis+ Fact and Issue Finder Promises Relief  

Today Lexis is releasing the 2022  CounselLink  Enterprise Management Trends Report. When it was established in 2013 the report included six key metrics. In recognition of the increasingly global legal market, the study now includes a  seventh metric which covers hourly billing rates for Partners in countries located outside the US. The insights in this year’s trends report are based on data derived from more than $49 billion in legal spending covering more than 350,000 time keepers in more than 1.2 million matters.
Key takeaways
  • 2021 was a block buster year for M&A legal fees. The median partner rate was $878 an hour… A 6.1% increase over the prior year median.
  • Law firms continue to increase hourly rates and in-house legal departments are paying them. 2021 partner rates increased 3.4% over 2020.
  • Alternative for your arrangements are increasing but not disrupting the market. Only 14.8% of matters had even a portion of their billing rate set at some thing other than hourly. Only 9.6%

Continue Reading Lexis 2022 CounselLink Report: Partner Rates and Panel Consolidation Continue to Rise