Today Lexis is announcing Lexis is launching a significant new platform called Lexis + . I had a call with Jeff Pfeifer, chief product officer at LexisNexis and David Ganote senior director of product strategy at Lexis Nexis. Lexis+ is being positioned as a premium solution which has been in development over the last 18 months. Pfeifer described the release as improving the user experience and delivering insights though integration across all elements of the platform. There are a total of 11 new features which will only be available in Lexis+:
- Updated, Modern User Interface visual styling including a new Experience Dock to navigate to integrated elements of the product
- Practical Guidance content fully integrated in “Search All” experience of Legal Research
- Lexis Practice Advisor application also fully integrated in Lexis+ and all subscribers will have access to at least one module of practical guidance content
- Brief Analysis
- Expanded Search Term Maps, now covering 35 Content Types
- Enhanced Ravel View, including new ‘anchor’ capabilities to better navigate the visual map
- Shepard’s At Risk
- Code Compare
- Lexis Answers, fully redesigned in Lexis+
- Missing & Must Include
- Search Tree
One of the most fascinating aspects of the new platform is rebuild of the Lexis Answers feature. According to Pfeifer the newest version of Lexis Answers was built at Lexis Labs where the team worked with a machine learning technology from Google referred to as BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers). BERT was smart but not smart enough to master the complexities of legal concepts and the idiosyncrasies of legal writing and syntax. According to Pfeifer “Lexis sent BERT to law school.” Lexis was able to train BERT using the Lexis taxonomy and headnotes which had been developed at Lexis decades ago. Yet another example of human machine collaboration.
The Insight Wave. The signature visual identity is called the “insight wave” a net-like swath of color which arcs and turns across the screen. According to Pfeifer, the new image represents the flow and inter-connected-ness of information. This is appropriate since the new platform offers a tighter integration of research, analytics and practical guidance tools.
Voluntary upgrade. I’m going to cut to the chase for my librarian and knowledge management colleagues. Lexis Advance is not being phased out. Subscribers can continue to purchase Lexis Advance or choose to upgrade to Lexis+.
The Dashboard. The main Lexis dashboard includes an “experience dock” on the left side of the screen which allows users to select between legal research, practical guidance or brief analysis.
“What would you like to research today?” hovers over the prominent search bar. The single search feature will search across all Lexis content. Users can enter queries using natural language or Boolean.
Lexis Answers in Lexis+ was developed from the ground up. Today, it answers from questions from caselaw but the
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