While advances in artificial intelligence continue to wow legal tech users, even the best AI solution still requires lawyers to thoroughly understand the underlying issues.
The dynamic can be challenging for attorneys at all levels, from junior associates to seasoned partners, as every attorney hits roadblocks when tackling unfamiliar tasks.
This is where LexisNexis’ Practical Guidance excels, offering a streamlined solution that bridges the gap between initial research and final drafting. This tool, with contributions from over 2,900 leading practitioners across all major practice areas, ensures a seamless, step-by-step workflow for users to quickly get up to speed on unfamiliar issues or dive deeper into evolving areas of law.
LexisNexis Practical Guidance is a robust subscription-based legal research and workflow solution designed to support attorneys and legal professionals across a wide range of practice areas. A subscription includes access to a vast and continually updated library of over 20,000 Practice Notes authored by leading practitioners and subject-matter experts.
Practical Guidance keeps legal professionals informed of the latest developments across all relevant practice areas — both within the United States and internationally — ensuring your organization remains current and compliant in a rapidly evolving legal landscape.
Additionally, Practical Guidance offers a comprehensive suite of downloadable resources, including:
- Pre-drafted Templates and Sample Clauses: Access to a wide array of downloadable, customizable templates for contracts, agreements, letters, and pleadings. These are created by experienced practitioners and can serve as a starting point, reducing time spent drafting from scratch.
- Practice Notes with Drafting Tips: Practice Notes go beyond black-letter law — they include practical advice on how to draft specific provisions, explain common pitfalls, and offer alternatives depending on the client’s goals or risk tolerance.
- Clause-Level Guidance: Many documents in Practical Guidance are broken down into individual clauses with annotations. This means users can see not only how a clause is typically worded, but also why it’s included, when it might need to be modified, and how it has been interpreted by courts.
- Jurisdictional Considerations: Helps attorneys navigate variations in legal requirements across jurisdictions by flagging differences in laws or standard practices, which is especially useful for multi-state or cross-border work.
- Workflow Tools and Checklists: Practical Guidance includes checklists that ensure all necessary components are included in a document. These act as a quality control mechanism for legal drafting, particularly useful for less routine documents.
- Searchable by Topic and Document Type: Users can filter results by document type, industry, or task, making it easy to locate highly relevant precedents and drafting resources.
The platform also integrates seamlessly with other LexisNexis products, allowing users to conduct legal research, access case law, and find precedents within one seamless workflow.
Whether used for transactional work, compliance, litigation preparation, or internal knowledge management, LexisNexis Practical Guidance stands out as a valuable resource that transforms legal research into actionable insights.
Here’s a tour of how Practical Guidance works. If you’d like to book a free trial, you can do so here.
The Search Engine Approach
The Practical Guidance interface operates like a search engine, with suggestions automatically populating from your query.
In the example below, a query for confidentiality agreements is auto-populated with practice notes, checklists, templates, and other relevant resources.
The results are easily filtered by jurisdiction, type of resource, and other criteria, and they’re sorted in order of relevance.
If you were looking to draft a confidentiality agreement for a particular jurisdiction, one click opens a checklist.
The checklist template above has a “maintained” stamp indicating it’s the most up-to-date version.
You can also bookmark it to your homepage, save it to your account folder, and create an alert so you’re notified if anything is updated.
Relevant content is hyperlinked throughout the checklist, saving you the time of toggling between search results or running multiple searches.
Once you’ve done your initial research, you can open a template of the agreement itself directly from the checklist.
All templates can be downloaded into Word, and they are all enhanced by the attorney-authors.
The authors provide a summary at the top of the document, detailing everything the agreement covers so you can ensure it’s a fit.
The authors also include drafting notes and potential alternate clause language throughout the document, providing the guidance you need to customize it to your situation.
The templates also integrate with Lexis’ Automated Templates feature.
Notably, Automated Templates includes an intelligent Q&A interface, where users answer a series of questions, and then this information is used to populate a document that is personalized to the user’s scenario.
A “multi-doc” feature further streamlines this process. It does so by assembling multiple documents from the same interview answers, saving time and ensuring consistency across outputs.
Browsing by Practice Area
Practical Guidance is also sorted by practice area on the intro screen, allowing you to select from 20 practice areas, including nine that are unique to LexisNexis Practical Guidance.
One such area, “In-House Advisor,” contains extensive guidance for corporate law departments on topics as varied as professional soft skills, ethics, finances and operations, and risk management.
It also contains all of the bookmarks you have added to your profile.
The hundreds of In-House Resource Kits are one particularly popular feature. These kits contain all of the relevant content pertaining to a particular topic, for example, “company policies,” “compliance,” or “training and guidance.”
These are also organized by industry and practice areas. In the screenshot below, a click on “data privacy” brings up the Practical Guidance content related to that area.
To follow a particular practice area, you can create alerts for an entire resource kit, so you’re notified if any aspect is updated by the attorney-authors.
Tools & Resources
In addition to browsing by practice area or the search bar, you can also access Practical Guidance through a Tools & Resources functionality.
This interface allows you to access content by the 2,900+ attorney-authors. To ensure transparency, the authors tool lists the lawyers and law firms contributing to a particular jurisdiction or practice area — 99% of the Law360 Pulse Leaderboard firms are represented.
Market Standards allows you to compare your matter to publicly available SEC filings in four practice areas: employment agreements, mergers and acquisitions, finance agreements, and antitrust. The system tracks over 150 deal points over more than 38,000 deals that it has brought in from public filings, allowing you to compare your matter to real-life examples. They can be filtered by numerous factors as well to determine your exact market precedent.
The State Law Comparison Tool in LexisNexis Practical Guidance streamlines multijurisdictional research by providing side-by-side comparisons of laws across states, saving time and improving accuracy. It helps legal professionals quickly identify key differences in state requirements, enhancing compliance, drafting, and strategic decision-making—especially for clients operating in multiple jurisdictions.
When you download the report, you get a polished PDF with an overview table of contents.
Each detailed answer contains hyperlinks to the full materials in Practical Guidance.
In addition to the State Law Comparison Tool, the Practical Guidance tools also bring you numerous other features including trackers that monitor regulatory and case law developments across various topics, helping users stay informed about emerging trends and changing compliance requirements, thus enabling proactive legal strategy and risk management. For those who prefer a more visual or interactive learning experience, the platform includes hundreds of short, practice-focused videos. These cover key legal concepts, processes, and drafting techniques, making them ideal for quick refreshers or on-the-go learning.
See for Yourself
An article like this can only scratch the surface of the capabilities of a program like Practical Guidance.
If you’re curious about this product and would like to try it out, you can do so here.