LexisNexis® Legal & Professional has announced the U.S. customer preview of Protégé™ Protege General AI which compliments the functionality of Protégé Legal AI which launched in August 2024. Lexis will be demonstrating this new suite of tools this week at the Annual ILTACON conference in National Harbor, Md.
The launch gives lawyers increased control and the ability to personalize the agentic AI capabilities with Protégé. Perhaps the most powerful new functionality is the ability to quickly pivot from Protégé General AI to Protégé Legal AI or to search simultaneously on both datasets.
It also promises secure access to general-purpose AI models from multiple providers within the Lexis+ AI workflow solution. Sean Fitzpatrick, CEO of LexisNexis North America, UK, & Continue Reading LexisNexis Introduces Protégé General AI: Choose Your Own General AI Model in a Secure Environment
Co Counsel Legal with Agentic AI and Deep Research: Is It a Tool or Is it a Teammate?
Today Thomson Reuters announced the launch of CoCounsel Legal which features both Deep Research and agentic workflows. I attended a recent press briefing where Raghu Ramanathan, president of Legal Professionals, Laura Clayton McDonnnell, President of Corporate Business Rawia Ashraf, Head of Product, CoCounsel Transactional and GCO, and Mike Dahn Head of Product Management Westlaw demonstrated a raft of new capabilities that resets the bar for AI enabled legal workflows.
CoCounsel Legal is designed to “help professionals move beyond prompting and start delegating.” The agentic guided workflows are built TR’s existing AI assistant and enhanced with advanced reasoning models, TR’s deep reservoir of Westlaw and Practical Law legal content and an army of domain experts at TR. “ CoCounsel Legal is a next-generation AI product that brings together legal research, essential workflow automation, intelligent document search and AI-powered legal assistance within one unified enterprise wide solution.”
At launch Co Counsel Legal offers workflows for transactional, litigation and regulatory analysis. The headliner here is that TR is building a single workflow that allows lawyers to transition seamlessly through an entire project without the interruption launching new applications and products. And the product responds like a an intelligent teammate that an attorney can interact with. The attorney gives assignments and the agent gives feedback, guidance and results.
What Does This Relaunch of CoCounsel Legal Mean for Subscribers?Continue Reading Co Counsel Legal with Agentic AI and Deep Research: Is It a Tool or Is it a Teammate?
LexisNexis Enhances Lexis+ AI with New Features, AI Models, and Graphing
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
Generative AI Risk in Legal Research: Is the Fault in the Technology or in Ourselves? Answer is Both
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
TR Announces New Vision for Generative AI Assistant Called “CoCounsel” with Slick Video and New AI Survey
Today Thomson Reuters is announcing a new Generative AI vision. Central to this vision is a new Generative AI Assistant branded as CoCounsel. There was no press conference and no demo to provide context or a Q&A around this announcement. Here is a link to the press release so you can read it for yourself.
Lex Machina Launches “Litigation Footprint” With Deep Insights into Company and Industry Litigation Trends
Today Lex Machina, a LexisNexis company, is releasing a new tool for competitive insights called “Litigation Footprint.” Lex Machina now includes litigation analytics from over 27 million cases filed in 94 federal district courts and over 1,300 state courts in 34 states and the District of Columbia. The Litigation Footprint enhancement was developed in response to customer demand for deeper party level analysis tools.
Since its launch in 2010 as a platform for analyzing IP litigation, Lex Machina has continuously raised the bar for the legal analytics market. The Lex Machina platform combines natural language processing, machine learning, human curation, data normalization and extensive tagging of data elements to improve precision and granularity of research results and reporting.
.Litigation Footprint focuses on the litigation histories of corporate entities in order to enable lawyers to quickly get a high level overview of a party’s litigation footprint across the United States.Continue Reading Lex Machina Launches “Litigation Footprint” With Deep Insights into Company and Industry Litigation Trends
Nominate Your Favorite Products for AALL’s Product of the Year Award
The American Association of Law Libraries is seeking nominations for the 2024 Product of the year award. Both members and vendors can submit nominations.
This award honors new commercial information products that enhance or improve existing law library services or procedures or innovative products which improve access to legal information, the legal research process, or procedures for technical processing of library materials.
A “new” product is defined as one which has been in the library-related marketplace for two years or less. New products may include, but are not limited to, computer hardware and/or software, educational or bibliographic material, or other products or devices that aid or improve library workflow, research, or intellectual access. Products that have been reintroduced in a new format or with substantial changes are eligible.
The world before and after Generative AI If you are scratching your head and trying to Continue Reading Nominate Your Favorite Products for AALL’s Product of the Year Award
Standing on the threshold of change: 2023 in review (A somewhat irreverent review of the AI hysteria That Swept Through the Legal Industry)
I have lived through legal technology revolutions before. The conversion of legal research from print to online moved though law firms like slow rolling train. Lexis, the first commercial online legal research product launched in 1970. Many firms did not fully embrace online research and abandon print until the pandemic drove the profession to remote work, nearly 50 years later. Analytics in legal research provided dramatic new insights into the behavior of judges, courts, attorneys and clients. It took less than ten years following the launch of Lex Machina in 2013 for legal analytics to move from esoteric to essential. The promise of, if not the practice with Generative AI swept like a wildfire through the legal information market. When ChatGPT launched it took only five days to reach a million users and by January 2023 (2 months later) it had a 100 million users. Enter the “hype cycle.”
While OpenAi dominated the commercial market, Casetext, which had early access to GTP 4 dominated legal industry news headlines in 2023. Read the full post at Legal Tech HubContinue Reading Standing on the threshold of change: 2023 in review (A somewhat irreverent review of the AI hysteria That Swept Through the Legal Industry)
AI and the Future of Law Libraries : Opportunity or Armageddon
Once Again We Must Ask –What business are we in?
Over the years when speaking to library and knowledge management audiences, I have often invoked the importance of knowing what business we are in.
,I became a librarian because “I loved books.” Yet on the day when I started my first law library job, a hulking piece of equipment was rolled through the door of the Pace University Law Library. This was an omen, like a comet across the night sky, my career path would pivot in unforeseeable directions. The Lexis DeLuxe research terminal was the size of a washing machine, and it connected to Mead Data Central computers in Ohio via a dial-up modem. This “state of the art” equipment provided access to Ohio statutes and cases. Within 10 years the Lexis and Westlaw WALT terminals would shrink, the World Wide Web would be born and the stacks of books would be compressed into bits of data accessible on everyone’s desktop.
I love the “Black & Decker marketing strategy that recognized that their customers “don’t want a drill they want a half-inch hole in a board.” And librarians who thought lawyers and law firm administrators only needed books became flotsam in a surging tide of technology. Librarians and knowledge managers need to be aligned with what lawyers really need and that they have the unique expertise to deliver: information that gives them a competitive edge, new clients, happy clients, predictive and actionable insights , efficient workflow, and tools that make their lives easier. (Read the full post at Legal Tech Hub)
Seizing the Technology of the DayContinue Reading AI and the Future of Law Libraries : Opportunity or Armageddon
The 2023 Start/Stop Survey: CoCounsel Best New Product, Analytics Segment Shakeout.
As the 2024 budget planning season ramps up, we all look to both internal and external intelligence to support renewal, cancellation and acquisition decisions.
In August many of my readers participated in the annual Start/Stop survey which was open during the month of August 2023. I partnered with Harbor to conduct the survey and present the results On Thursday, September 14, 2023, at the third annual Legal Information + Knowledge Services Conference (LINKS)— a full day of virtual thought leadership conference.
As in the past, this survey was intended to gather feedback on both products and projects which readers started or stopped during the past year or plan to start or stop in the near future. For this years survey I added new questions related to the emergence of generative AI. Thirty-tree organizations participated in the survey (93% were law firms)
Some overall trends – Generative AI trending up. Analytics Market Shaking out.
Generative AI although legal publishers have been embedding and utilizing AI in their products for decades, the emergence of large language models (LLMs) has captured the market in a rather feverish way. There are firms out on the bleeding edge, but most are holding back and struggling to create an AI policy and select from the ever expanding galaxy of products. Vendors are plunging ahead with AI offerings.
The most dramatic “shape shifting” market event was Thomson Reuters acquisition of Casetext, less than a year after the launch of WESTLAW Precision. The move was clearly designed to catapult TR over competitors, who are developing muti-modallarge language models based AI products internally.Continue Reading The 2023 Start/Stop Survey: CoCounsel Best New Product, Analytics Segment Shakeout.