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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 HubContinue 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 HubContinue 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…

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Thomson Reuters  Has announced the release of Claims Explorer, a new generative AI skill available in Westlaw Precision with CoCounsel. The new feature  enables  lawyers to enter facts in to the tool and retrieve applicable claims or counterclaims.

This new generative AI feature simplifies claims research, when lawyers are filing a lawsuit, defending a lawsuit, or advising clients on potential liability..

 Mike Dahn, head of Westlaw Product Management, Thomson Reuters explained the unique value proposition of the product in the press release. “Finding claims with traditional research methods can be difficult and time consuming.  Even experienced lawyers can miss applicable Continue Reading Thomson Reuters Launches Claims Explorer Skill in Westlaw Precision with CoCounsel

I am looking forward to reconnecting with my colleagues in Chicago this Saturday at the American Association Law Libraries Meeting and Conference.

Facilitator, Writing Agendas and Scholarship Portfolios: From Ideation to Publication  AALL Annual Meeting & Conference Chicago,Il.  July 20, 2024 
Moderator, Unleashing Innovation: A Rollercoaster Ride to Implement, Plan, and Fund Your GenAI…

Will Generative AI awaken the need for serious focus legal research education?

The introduction of Generative AI to the practice of law has been anything but smooth. First there was the unfortunate case of Mr. Schwartz who used Chat GPT-3 to write a brief complete with hallucinated cases which he submitted to a federal  court in New York. Judge castell of the Southern District of New York noted that the attorneys had “abandoned their responsibilities.” More recently there have been the controversies related to a Stanford Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) team study criticizing the quality of the Lexis and WL generative AI products. The study was so roundly criticized that it was revised and reissued. The HAI study’s conclusions regarding the Westlaw Precision AI and Lexis+  AI products requires a nuanced understanding of the HAI benchmarking definitions.  The HAI studies flag a wide range of issues including some which appear to be subjective. Problems noted range from a “true hallucination” to a factual error e.g. name of a judge, to the length of responses. Everyone agrees that legal generative AI products require serious benchmarking studies, but Stanford fumbled the ball.

Selling any new legal technology to law firms is hard. Selling generative AI products to law firms appears to be moving at a glacial pace and this post will explore some of the obstacles to adoption of GAI in legal. There are probably more stakeholders in the mix than I have seen for any prior technology. Most noticeable is the presence of the General Counsel/Ethics Officer who in many firms is waving cautionary flags. Then there are clients who are sending conflicting signals limiting, requiring or banning use of GAI products on their matters.  Add to this stew of ambiguity, the proliferation of judges rules restricting or establishing requirements regarding not only the use of generative AI but AI products in general. (AI is probably in  90% of the products the average lawyer uses including their smartphone).

Why are law firms are holding off generative AI adoption for legal research?

Read the full post on Legal TechHubContinue Reading Generative AI Risk in Legal Research: Is the Fault in the Technology or in Ourselves? Answer is Both