The Future Of Legal Research: An In-Depth Look At Lexis Advance

LexisNexis has long been one of the top names when it comes to legal research. The Lexis you may remember from your law school days, however, is not the same Lexis that’s changing the legal research game today.

We sat down with Paul Speca, VP of the Large Law and Law School Market at LexisNexis, to discuss Lexis Advance, the sophisticated platform that’s revolutionizing legal research through AI technology, analytics, and visualization, and how it’s making waves with the next generation of lawyers.

How is Lexis Advance different from the Lexis that many attorneys may have been familiar with in the past?

Lexis is a very different company than it was when today’s practicing associates experienced it in law school. The change was a result of the $1.2 billion investment we made to reinvent the core platform and develop LexisAdvance. We invested in the platform, we invested in preparing students to practice law, and we invested in buying or building emerging technologies. It was an ambitious endeavor, because we needed both a new platform and new content systems to feed that platform in order to enable us to do new things with content and big data that we couldn’t do before, like analytics and visualization. In the end, we were able to bring all our products together to work as one integrated product, all accessible through Lexis Advance.

What were some of those emerging technology investments you just mentioned?

We focused on acquiring technologies that would allow us to really exploit the capabilities of the data in our new platform. We acquired Ravel Law, known for its case law visualizations, Lex Machina, known for legal analytics, and Intelligize, known for finding legal precedent. We also very recently formed a joint venture with Knowable, a leader in contract analytics. At the same time, we built out some impressive new features, such as our Context product, which focuses on legal language analytics, and Search Terms Maps, which use visualization to enhance case search queries.

What are some of the key features of Lexis Advance that are changing the way today’s lawyers are doing legal research?

Two of the main features drawing the next generation of lawyers to LexisAdvance are analytics and visualization. Even just a few years ago, law students wouldn’t have known what those features were. Today’s law students, though, are Gen Z. They’re digital natives who are used to looking at things visually and are used to using tools that deal with big data.

Analytics and visualization are very natural for the new generation of lawyers, and it’s likely that they’ll be able to very seamlessly usher in these new technologies as they enter the law firm world. Firms are recognizing that big data is here to stay, and that trying to find a document through a Boolean search is the old way of doing things. But while firms understand that big data is the trend, they don’t necessarily know how to change their practices and processes. I think they’re going to be very happy to have students come in and lead the firm in developing technologies. Market research has shown that today’s law students view analytics and visualization as very important research tools.

[LexisNexis Legal & Professional recently commissioned PwC to conduct a law student preference study to better understand future lawyer attitudes, behaviors, and key drivers in relation to legal research solutions. PwC conducted a blind survey of 5,061 law students from 201 ABA-accredited U.S. law schools between June 21 and July 30, 2019. https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.lexisnexis.com/en-us/nextgenstudy.aspx&sa=D&ust=1573674757605000&usg=AFQjCNF4f7sQV4K3nZfrRiKChO-Zs4hWWw]        

Let’s talk about the recent PwC study on law student legal research preferences. Why did LexisNexis commission the study? 

Our law firms are some of our biggest champions. They want to see us move forward in terms of preference and see all the investments we’ve made pay off. We wanted to show them that they have. This may not yet be as obvious to law firms simply because a lot of their current associates haven’t experienced Lexis in a long time. This study was an opportunity for us to tell the marketplace that the future generation of attorneys is responding very well to the investments we’ve made and very much are going to be bringing our new technologies with them to the firms. The study shows firms that what we’ve built is resonating and coming to them.

What were some of the key results of the survey?

The study showed that law students prefer Lexis Advance over Westlaw for legal research across a broad range of categories. Our trajectory of preference has been moving up and up — our preference among law students is now 50 percent, as opposed to 46 percent for Westlaw. Much of this is attributable to our analytics and visualization tools.

Of the students surveyed, 76 percent cite analytics and 77 percent cite visualization as extremely or somewhat important tools for research. This is a remarkable shift over a very short period of time, and the study shows that our investments in this space have paid off. In terms of analytics, seventy-seven percent of participants viewed Lexis’ tools to be particularly helpful, whereas 68 percent found Westlaw’s tools to be helpful. For visualization, 80 percent said Lexis’s tools were helpful, but only 59 percent said Westlaw’s tools were helpful. I’d also note that, in this study, our Net Promoter Score (an index that measures how willing customers are to recommend a company’s products or services to others) was three times higher than that of Westlaw.

So, from a product satisfaction perspective, our tools are scoring very high, and we’re very happy about that.

What can we expect to see in the future from Lexis Advance?

Right now, we’re at the end stage of migrating all of our countries and all of our products onto the integrated Lexis Advance platform. Going forward, we’re going to be building a system that will recommend a seamless workflow experience for the user, meaning that users won’t have to know what products their firms have purchased, because Lexis Advance will be smart enough to know what’s at the user’s disposal and what tools will be helpful to the work they’re doing. We’ll also continue to double down in the analytics and visualization space. While we are the leader in this space, we believe these technologies are still in their very early days and that there’s a lot more we can do.

As a closing note, why should attorneys be making the switch to Lexis Advance?

Lexis Advance is digital research ecosystem comprised of world-class content and technology that integrates all the tools you need in one place so you can work at maximum speed and efficiency. We are redefining legal research by applying sophisticated analytics and AI technologies to traditional methods of legal research for new and powerful insights. If you haven’t experienced today’s Lexis Advance, it’s time to take another look.