How Lexis+ Is Leading The Shift To Data-Driven Law

We live in a world of data. In the course of a day, we each interact with and generate data at levels that once likely seemed impossible. Law firms and legal departments are in possession of vast amounts of data just waiting to be collected and analyzed. The potential for data-driven insights and decision-making in the legal industry is huge. Unfortunately, though, much of this potential still remains untapped.

The legal industry today, compared to other professional industries, generally makes less use of their available data to drive decisions. This may be because, historically, lawyers have prided themselves on bespoke work, creating work product that’s highly customized to individual clients and matters. However, as lawyers become more comfortable with data, they’re increasingly seeing its value in crafting and pitching legal strategies to clients.

At its core, that’s what data-driven law is all about: how do lawyers use data to inform their decision-making and provide better client service? Tools like Lexis+, the comprehensive new solution from LexisNexis, are making it possible and opening doors to a new era of data-driven law.

Understanding the Shift to Data-Driven Law

Even just five years ago, lawyers had a limited ability to understand things like the likely outcomes of various motion-filing scenarios or the breadth of contract provisions that are market. Today, with the help of data and advanced tools, those things are increasingly knowable and are crucial in recommending the best possible legal strategies to clients.

The shift to data-driven law is driven partly by pressure from clients. While client demands for anything that increases deficiency and lowers fees are not new, today they’re heightened. Legal departments and in-house counsel themselves have access to this data and understand its value, so there’s an increased pressure on outside counsel to provide data-based recommendations more directly. Additionally, broader technology capabilities like cloud computing and machine learning have made it easier to mine this information and for technology providers like LexisNexis to deploy these capabilities in a cost-effective way.

Now that it’s easier to unlock these data insights, more and more lawyers are embracing the concept of data-driven law. In the near-term, we can expect lawyers to become conversant about data points in a way that helps them drive better legal strategy recommendations for their clients.

How Lexis+ Is Changing the Game

Lexis+ is a comprehensive new solution from LexisNexis that provides a modern user experience and exclusive integrations. It’s also making it easier for lawyers to gain data-driven insights through a host of features that are brand new to the legal market.

Lexis+ is empowering the shift to data-driven law by capitalizing on current trends and taking into consideration how lawyers actually practice. On the trend front, Lexis+ exposes lawyers to insights in ways that were previously not common or possible. With the amount of data most legal organizations have, it’s possible to model likely outcomes, whether for litigation scenarios, the introduction of legislation, or something else. This ability is new, and it’s something that lawyers are becoming and will continue to become more comfortable with as they understand how data can help them make smarter decisions about legal services for their clients. In the near future, we’ll regularly be talking about modeled outcomes, generated by sophisticated tools like Lexis+.

On the practical front, Lexis+ is customizing these new capabilities to specific workflows. How a transactional lawyer, whether they’re an M&A specialist or a tax attorney, interacts with large corporate data sets looks very different than how a litigator interacts with large data sets from the courts. Lexis+ is striving to get each of these individual use cases exactly right, customizing the data that’s presented depending on the type of law practice.

Data-driven law has long been focused on the litigation space. While Lexis+ is continuing those efforts, it also recognizes that, increasingly, there’s exciting work being done in fields like M&A or securities law where there are very big, rich data sets. To handle them, Lexis+ has developed a bespoke set of analytics tools and data review capabilities designed for each type of practice. The legal field has never had such capability before, and this power makes Lexis+ equally applicable to all practitioners and specialties.

Forging Ahead

A big concept like data-driven law can sometimes seem scary or overwhelming for lawyers who just want to focus on serving their clients. Established practices and workflows are comfortable, and there’s an understandable fear about having to adapt to new tools. However, technology experts like LexisNexis that are moving the market in the direction of data-driven law understand lawyers and how they work and make it easier than ever with the right tools. No big change happens overnight, it happens over time. With tools like Lexis+, transitioning to the future of legal practice can be seamless.

Many other professions have excelled after exploring the use of data and technology to drive new insights and confidence. The legal industry’s moment is now. It’s time to embrace data and all the insights it can offer.

Try Lexis+ with a free trial today.