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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

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

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…

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

Acquisition will combine Henchman’s Document Management System data enrichment with trusted LexisNexis drafting guidance content to deliver personalized generative AI experience

NEW YORK, June 3, 2024 – LexisNexis Legal & Professional®, a leading global provider of information and analytics, today announced it has agreed to acquire Henchman, a legal tech company that enriches data from Document Management Systems (DMS) for faster document drafting. Henchman is a Belgium-based company, founded in 2020, with 170+ legal and corporate customers globally including top U.S. and European law firms and companies.

By acquiring Henchman, LexisNexis will deliver personalized generative AI solutions to customers around the world. Henchman core product functionality will be available to existing and new customers. LexisNexis has immediate plans to utilize Henchman’s technology with its proprietary Retrieval Augmented Generation 2.0 (RAG 2.0) platform in its flagship Lexis+ AI solution, enabling the use of trusted customer data as grounding data for generative AI drafting. Henchman’s capabilities will also be added to Lexis® Create, the Microsoft 365 add-in solution that enables point-of-workflow integration for generative AI drafting in Microsoft Word, Outlook, Teams and Copilot.

Henchman is used by leading law firms and corporations to enrich internal work product, creating a layer of intelligence on contract databases to accelerate drafting tasks.Continue Reading Breaking News: Press Release – LexisNexis to Acquire Document Drafting Tech Provider Henchman

Today Thomson Reuters announced the “Buy Now Program” which will enable law firms and legal departments to lock in pricing before the official rollout of their new CoCounsel Drafting solution.

 Rawia Ashraf, VP, Product, Legal Technology at Thomson Reuters provided a product walkthrough. She described the product as an end-to-end workflow solution for both transactional lawyers and litigators. The beta version of the transactional tool is currently available to 20 law firms and legal departments.

According to  a recent Thomson Reuters survey,  lawyers spend 40 to 60% of their time drafting and that 96% are dissatisfied with their drafting tools.

The CoCounsel Drafting tool is grounded in Practical Law content and will also allow firms to access their own Sharepoint document. The tool does not currently integrate with document management systems but that linkage is being developed.

Integration with Other TR products – the full functionality of the Drafting Tool  requires customers to also have subscriptions to Practical Law, Deal Proof and Westlaw when the litigation drafting tool is launched. WestKM, Thomson Reuters knowledge management solution was not mentioned as a potential component. Since many law firms still have not built workable KM solutions, is there an opportunity to address the KM gap by creating an AI enabled version of WestKM?

The Knowledge Management Gap.  many firms have not yet developed their own playbooks or curated precedent repositories, TR is prepared to help firms develop their own playbooks. As AI is integrated into the DMS products these new features should help firms identify and tag their precedent documents.

How it works.  Workflow is driven by CoCounsel drafting tool.Continue Reading Thomson Reuters announces the “Buy Now Program” for New CoCounsel Drafting end-to-end Solution.

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

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

Today LexisNexis Legal & Professional, released results from a survey of senior leadership at top U.S. law firms and legal professionals at Fortune 1000 companies. The survey   2024 Investing in Legal Innovation Survey: The Rise of GenAI at Top Firms & Corporations  explores  the business impact of generative AI technology on the legal industry.

I can’t recall any prior technology that has simultaneously trigged both of breathless enthusiasm and panicked resistance . While the technology shows game changing promise, there are significant ethical, client relations, security and intellectual property concerns which still need to be addressed. The C-Suite survey charts the issues of concern where are impeding adoption of GenAI.

Rapid Uptake and Generative AI investmentsContinue Reading LexisNexis Report: What Every C Suite Leader Needs to Know about Legal AI