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Today LexisNexis is announcing that their soon to be launched AI powered solutions will be integrated into Microsoft 365. The product integrations include– Lexis+®, Lexis ® Connect, Lexis ® Create, and Lexis ® Create Plugin with Microsoft 365 Copilot. Both companies are committed to providing legal professionals with “intelligent, AI-powered tools, enhanced capabilities, and more efficient, guided workflow experiences”  inside the suite of Microsoft products where they currently work: Microsoft Outlook, Word, and Teams.  Back in May Lexis announced two AI initiatives a commercial preview and the AI Insider Program as well as plans for incorporating generative AI into their product. Lexis announced its commitment to launching GPT enabled solutions with the Microsoft Azure Open AI Service which has already been rolled out to customers via Lexis+.

I recall Lexis as having a long history of integrations with Microsoft products. According to Jeff Pfeifer, LexisNexis Chief Product Officer Canada, UK and USA. “The company began working closely with Microsoft in the 1990s when we acquired the Jurisoft product line. These products were among the first legal market tools that delivered bespoke formatting tools integrated with Word. These solutions later evolved to become Lexis for Microsoft Office and later still, Lexis Create. Lexis Create is our first solution built entirely for the Microsoft 365 platform, a key technology enabler for delivery of generative AI in Word, Outlook and Teams. Our customers can expect integration of generative AI capabilities in Lexis Create in Q3 of this year and in Lexis Connect in Q4.”

Jeff Reihl, CTO of LexisNexis Legal & Professional is quoted in the press release “Microsoft and LexisNexis have a long history of collaboration, and we’re excited about how our Microsoft-integrated products will help improve the lives and work product of legal professionals. Lexis Connect, Create and Copilot truly embody our strategy of creating a fully integrated ecosystem, inserting world-class legal data, content and technologies directly into attorney workflows. To enhance this, we’re incorporating professional-grade generative AI capabilities into our current and future products to elevate legal work and help lawyers be more efficient at their jobs.”

LexisNexis Products Integrated with Microsoft include:

  • Lexis+: Azure OpenAI Service has been rolled out to customers via Lexis+.

Continue Reading LexisNexis Announces Integration with Microsoft 365 Copilot/Generative AI Solutions

Today  LexisNexis® Legal & Professional  is announcing the launch of InterAction+™, a new cloud-based legal CRM that  integrates the workflow around law firm contacts into Outlook and leverages the firms existing Lexis subscriptions to deliver business intelligence into the CRM experience. The new interface add new features, including a modern user experience, cloud infrastructure, and exclusive content from LexisNexis® to help lawyers manage relationships and identify opportunities and at-risk clients.

Integration with Lexis Content. If you have spend the past 3 years building custom API’s to link litigation data with InterAction contacts, you might want to sit down. InterAction+ now offers an “out of the box” solution which will deliver business intelligence insights from their Context analytics tool. Context provides analytics on litigation events involving clients or prospects which  provides  data on litigation events involving clients or prospects which can be filter and analyze data by firm, practice area, and jurisdiction..Continue Reading Lexis Launches InterAction+ with Outlook and Analytics Integrations, New Dashboard and Security Options

NetDocuments, a native cloud Document Management System is jumping into the Generative AI market for Legal with is announcement of ndMAX. The company plans a suite of generative AI-powered products designed to streamline the entire legal workflow based on practice group needs.

According to the press release ndMAX “enables law firms and legal teams to securely and responsibly apply cutting-edge AI to their own documents and data in order to extract business intelligence and generate novel content.”

Continue Reading NetDocuments Announces “Responsible AI” for Legal with ndMAX and PatternBuilderMax

My prior post suggested that librarians are the logical candidates for the emerging role of “Prompt Engineer.” Anthropic which recently released an AI enabled tool called Claude agrees with me and they are searching for a Prompt Engineer/Librarian.

In the job posting, Anthropic describes itself as an “AI safety and research company that’s working…

On July 6th Wolters Kluwer and Above the Law released a survey Generative AI in the Law: Where Could This All Be Headed? The survey queried lawyers and other business professionals in the legal industry to assess the expected impact of Generative AI on the Legal Profession. It seems that every day there is a survey or a webinar offering to answer the big question – can AI replace lawyers and other allied legal business professionals? It is a kind of anticipatory l marketing – lets just plant a flag on “Planet AI.”

The long term impact of Generative AI may well be profound, but today there is no consensus on how soon or how dramatically it will impact the practice of law. The survey respondents suggests a pessimistic future for law librarians and knowledge professionals. I have heard it all before. For the past 20 years the end of law librarians was immanent and yet for those 20 years we have been at the forefront of introducing new technologies that eliminated some traditional work and made room for us to climb the value ladder…. analytics, insights, APIs….New roles in support of Generative AI testing are already obvious.

Librarians Invented Prompt Engineering One of the key challenges to using Generative AI is learning how to construct the right query to generate the best result. Well law libraries are already “prompt” experts. Their skills reach back to the early days of “dot command” platforms that practically required a programming language to extract research results. Prompt Engineering sounds a lot less demanding than the technologies we mastered in the past.

The Chief Query Officer In 2013, I predicted the rise of a role I called “The Chief Query Officer” writing that “In a Big Data world, advantage will be  gained by asking better questions….In a Big Data world, every firm will be striving to be one question ahead of the competition……..And it will need to be the right question!” Librarians have mastered the “art of the Query.”.. step aside…

Key Findings of The Wolters Kluwer ATL Survey:

Continue Reading Another AI Survey– Another Cliché about the End of Librarians — But I See the Rise of The Chief Query Officer!

This coming Sunday I will participating in a panel at the American Association of Law Libraries Meeting and Conference in Boston. “Exploring the Opportunities & Risks of Generative AI” is sponsored by Wolters Kluwer. Ken Crutchfield, of Wolters Kluwer will moderate the panel which includes Vishal Agnihotri , of Alston & Bird and Courtney Toiaivao…

Thomson Reuters’  deal to purchase  Casetext has driven the legal tech hype cycle to a fever pitch. Don’t get me wrong. I am a big fan of Casetext. I have been an admirer for over a decade. More than once, I have watched them not just beat the market, but redirect the market and invent whole new categories of legal research products. I have spent a lot of time over the past few years musing about innovation,  new product categories and market advantage.

When Casetext created the “brief analysis” tool CARA, it was three years before even one of the largest legal information companies launched a brief analyzer and it was four years before all three,; Thomson Reuters, LexisNexis and Bloomberg Law, had a brief analyzer on the market.

Note: vLex (Fastcase) launched the Vincent “brief checker” in the international market in 2018., two years after the launch of CARA. The above graphic was focused on the U. S. market.

Similarly, with Compose, Casetext introduced “parallel search” and a new category of concept searching was born. Or as Casetext co-founder Pablo Arredondo likes to exclaim “parallel search freed lawyers from the prison of the keyword.” This time The market responded in less than two years. LexisNexis launched “Fact and issue Finder” which leveraged extractive AI technology built on a highly tailored version of Google’s BERT to present insights to researchers.   Westlaw responded with Westlaw Precision built with a large editorial team to help with machine learning. The response time in the market is growing shorter.

Industry Insiders’ Perspectives I have spoken to several legal tech industry insiders and the consensus seems to be that within 6  to 12 months, Thomson Reuters’ competitors Lexis, Bloomberg Law, and vLex (formerly Fastcase)  are likely to have developed capabilities which can compete with CoCounsel. No one is starting from scratch. According to Ed Walters, Chief Strategy Officer at vLex, “we already have global AI products in the labs. We don’t release vaporware, but these products are coming no matter who owns Casetext.”Continue Reading Thomson Reuters $650M Bet on Casetext CoCounsel. Did They Buy Market Dominance or Just Time?

In the oddest of “odd couplings” Casetext which just celebrated their 10th anniversary is being acquired by Thomson Reuters. for more than $650M. Congrats to Casetext Co-Founders Jake Heller, Pablo Arredondo and Laura Safdie.

Here is the press release from Thomson Reuters.

TORONTO, June 26, 2023 –Thomson Reuters Corporation (“Thomson Reuters”) (NYSE / TSX: TRI)…

Today ECFX announced that they had raised $7M in funding to expand their court notice management platform. Investors include Growth Street Partners, The Legal Tech Fund. Cove Fund as well as other investors. ECFX was founded in 2019 by attorneys Dan O’Day and Nelson Quintero. Their system is designed to streamline and automate the processing, distribution and internal filing of state and federal ECF notices received by law firms and in -house counsel offices. The system is designed to reduce risk of missed deadlines as well as repetitive administrative work associated with court notices. I routinely harp on the importance of vendors providing ROI tools. ECFX offers a free ROI calculator on their website to help customers and potential customers calculate the potential savings associated with streamlining the court notice workflow.

Here is the full press release:Continue Reading ECFX Court Alerts Platform Raises $7M

Even lawyers who have been the most ardent print advocates have loosened their grip on their favorite treatises and deskbooks. The pandemic-enforced remote work environment drove most print holdouts to online resources. In 2023 many law firm libraries are completely digital while others have shifted significant amounts of their budgets from print to digital.

Although the large enterprise platforms such as Lexis, Westlaw and Bloomberg Law represent a significant portion of most budgets, library directors and knowledge managers also manage dozens and sometimes hundreds of other digital licenses. There has been a proliferation of specialty products targeting specific practice areas or workflows from topics as diverse as credit default swaps, social media monitoring, and predictive litigation analytics. The acquisition and management of these specialty products involves a different kind of licensing analysis, even though many issues may be similar to the large platform licensing issues.

If you are new to the world of digital resource licensing, this checklist will highlight some of the key issues to address when reviewing a license. The first thing you need to understand is that most license agreements are one-sided in favor of the vendor. All the liabilities and risks are on the purchaser. That is why it is so important for you to understand the risks and opportunities associated with digital licensing.

The ground rules. If you are new to your organization, there are several issues that should be addressed in advance. Identify the standard practices and procedures in your firm for procurement, contract review, and security review.

Work with your procurement team. If your firm has a procurement team, you should still be involved in the licensing process. The procurement team needs to understand how the product will be used and who will need to have access. If there is no procurement team, there may be a designated contract attorney who reviews the contracts for the law firm. Develop a collaborative relationship with those professionals. They can be important allies in the process.

Security. Determine if your firm has a specific security review process for vendors. Security compliance can be a complete deal killer. Many firms now require vendors to answer security compliance questionnaires and to disclose their security standards in advance of any trial or contract. Security issues should be addressed in advance of the licensing process. Confirm that the vendor is willing to provide security documentation.

Common Licensing Issues. Below are a sampling of licensing issues that should be considered for all types of digital licenses but are particularly important when assessing a niche product with a limited license. Read the full post at LegalTech HubContinue Reading Checklist for the Negotiation of Digital Subscriptions – Budget Control and Risk Management Strategies