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Today vLex  is announcing a suite of AI tools in its research assistant platform Vincent AI. Since the merger with Fastcase in 2023, vLex has offered the “world’s most comprehensive AI legal research platform.”  vLex has launched an invitation-only beta which includes a suite of large language model (LLM) tools. The beta will be offered to additional users in the coming months.

This announcement ratchets up the already feverish competition taking place in the legal research market. Thomson Reuters recently purchased Casetext CoCounsel for 650 Million and is expected to launch an integration with Westlaw Precision before the end of the year. LexisNexis is testing AI tools with customers and Bloomberg Law has made AI tools available in an Innovation Studio. All are expected to launch LLM enabled AI tools in the near future. I anticipate that we are in for a year (or maybe a decade) of leapfrogging AI technology launches. .

“AI tools are only as good as the data they rely on,” said vLex CEO Lluís Faus, “and the vLex law library is one of the largest collections of structured law on the planet, including leading expert commentary. That leads to unprecedented insights for legal tasks. For legal LLMs, this release is a major improvement. It is as big as the jump from ChatGPT to GPT4. The results are astonishing.”Continue Reading vLex Launches First Global AI Legal Assistant: Vincent AI for Research and Drafting

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Legal Tech Mergers continue despite the uncertain economy. The recent acquisitions of Fastcase and Casetext inspired me to “take the temperature” of legal information marketplace. Thomson Reuters acquisition of Casetext for the breathtaking $650M was completed on August 17, 2023

The Survey I gave information professionals the opportunity to provide feedback on legal information mergers…

LexisNexis Legal & Regulatory  has released the results of its International Legal Generative AI Survey. The survey asked 7,950 lawyers, law students, and consumers across the U.S., U.K., Canada, and France about their overall awareness, its anticipated impact on the practice of law, use of generative AI, and expectations of adoption.

“Our survey confirms what we hear from customers all over the world every day, that they are excited about the potential of generative AI to help improve their productivity, efficiency, and overall business and practice of law,” said Mike Walsh, CEO of LexisNexis Legal & Professional. “Customer-driven innovation is core to the approach we take with product development, and LexisNexis is excited that our Lexis+ AI platform safely and securely provides critical generative AI tools to help legal professionals excel in their jobs.”

It is clear from the survey that relatively few lawyers have used Generative AI and I have to assume that even fewer have used it for their actual legal work. The market has become painfully aware of the “hallucinated cases” that can be generated using open source GPT Chat for legal research. Lexis Nexis will soon launch Lexis+ AI. All of its competitors (Thomson Reuters, Bloomberg Law, Wolters Kluwer, vLex) are laser focused on developing or launching Generative AI products that can not only drive efficiency but also address lawyers legitimate concerns regarding the ethics and security of these products.Continue Reading LexisNexis International Legal Generative AI Survey – In House Counsel  Expectations Will Drive Law Firm Adoption

Today Fastcase and Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft are announcing a partnership which will enhance the content available to “Cadwalader Cabinet” subscribers. The “Cadwalader Cabinet “is an integrated legal research and intelligence service for financial services lawyers and compliance professionals. It provides news, workflow tools and a collection of over 250,000 documents. It was created over …

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+:

  1. Updated, Modern User Interface visual styling including a new Experience Dock to navigate to integrated elements of the product​
  2. Practical Guidance content fully integrated in “Search All​” experience of Legal Research
  3. Lexis Practice Advisor application also fully integrated in Lexis+ and all subscribers will have access to at least one module of practical guidance content
  4. Brief Analysis
  5. Expanded Search Term Maps, now covering 35 Content Types
  6. ​Enhanced Ravel View, including new ‘anchor’ capabilities to better navigate the visual map
  7. Shepard’s At Risk
  8. Code Compare
  9. Lexis Answers, fully redesigned in Lexis+
  10. Missing & Must Include​
  11. 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
Continue Reading Lexis Rides the “Insight Wave:” Launches  Lexis+ with New Look, Brief Analyzer, AI Search, Codes Compare and Loads of New Features

Today Fastcase and Ross Intelligence are announcing a content, research and development partnership which the founders expect to drive innovation for both companies. Fastcase which is celebrating its 20th anniversary has excently expanded beyond its primary law focus into analytics, legal news and secondary source publishing and alliances. Ross which made headlines with its A.I. search engine for legal research has recently launched its law school program and begun building alliances with bar associations and with Clio practice management software.

I interviewed Ed Walters CEO and Co- Founder of Fastcase about this new alliance. Walters describes this alliance in terms of a major market shift in the legal research and technology space. “In the 1990s the main way market dominance was building gigantic silos of data” epitomized by the Lexis and Westlaw platforms. According to Walters “The future will be owned by small, nimble companies that have inter-operable parts. The Fastcase-Ross alliance is about creating a new paradigm for the next 10 years.”

Ross will gain access to the Fastcase pipeline of case law, statutes and regulations across all 50 states. Walters described t he benefits of the alliance in the press release. Fastcase will benefit from Ross’s “trailblazing work in the field of natural language processing in machine learning. The partnership will enable Fastcase to collaborate on exciting new products and jointly create new solutions for unmet needs of the legal profession.”

Lexis and Westlaw (Thomson Reuters) invented the online legal research market and have dominated it for years.
Continue Reading In Paradigm Shift Legal Research Innovators Fastcast and Ross Intelligence Form Development Alliance

I wrote about the launch of Gavelytics in October 2017 which offered judicial analytics for two of the largest California county courts: Los Angeles and Riverside. They recently added data for San Francisco County. The number one  analytics solution demanded  by respondents to my annual Dewey B Strategic Start Stop Survey is a comprehensive 50 state court docket and analytics product. Well the 50 state solution is still a pipe dream, but the folks at Gavelytics have continue to  use AI and machine learning to build out an analytics solution for California lawyers who litigate in county courts. Rick Merrill the Founder and CEO of Gavelytics, described Gavelytics as being a product “developed by lawyers for lawyers,” and designed to address the fact that most lawyers have very little insight into the behavior of state court judges.

The Use Cases
Continue Reading Gavelytics Expands California Judicial Analytics with Rulings Research Capability and adds Arbitrator Archive

Practicing Law Institute (PLI) will be removing their content from Bloomberg Law at the end of 2017 when the current license ends. PLI is one of the premier Continuing Legal Education Providers in the U.S. The big question is – will PLI content show up on Lexis or Westlaw. The answer is “no.” According to…