Less than two months after commercially launching Protégé General AI, LexisNexis is back with a next-generation update. The company unveiled a significant expansion today, unifying LexisNexis content, customer documents, and open web insights under one roof, with Shepard’s Citations along for the ride like the chaperone at prom.
As we highlighted from the company’s ILTACON preview, LexisNexis places a lot of its effort in model evaluation. With an ever-expanding array of language models out there, the legal research giant has become a de facto AI consultant, weighing the competing models out there to make sure users get the best tool for their task. The new “Best Fit” mode elevates this trend, turning the system itself into a traffic cop, selecting the optimal AI model for a given user request. Like any good science fiction story, users can opt for the manual override and pick their own from the models on offer. But midlevel associates aren’t AI sommelier-priests spending their off hours swirling Anthropic vs. OpenAI vintages. The engineers at LexisNexis have spent more time on this.
Since the only products proliferating faster than AI models are the legal tools promising to deliver those models, user experience becomes the great differentiator. How does a product keep lawyers glued on its screen for their AI needs? And it’s not just about outcompeting legal tech rivals. No one wants to put it this bluntly, but we’re one frustrated partner email away from some junior dropping a PDF full of client secrets into ChatGPT at 2 a.m. Warding lawyers off the consumer-facing tools requires a secure alternative that doesn’t feel like punishment. When LexisNexis created a General AI option — within their platform — to give users a ChatGPT experience without inadvertently handing over confidential information, they took a big step toward owning eyeballs.
“Legal professionals want one trusted legal AI workflow solution,” said Sean Fitzpatrick, CEO of LexisNexis North America, UK, and Ireland. While performance still matters, the enduring legacy of Steve Jobs is that it helps a lot to build a product people actually like using.
According to the press release, this next generation product will also test counterpoints, explore alternative approaches, and deliver a second “opinion” on arguments. On the one hand, anything that keeps lawyers from practicing their arguments with their spouses can only help avoid embarrassing moments with the judge. And despite the tech industry narrative that AI is a magic box that can replace all labor, its most consistently valuable use remains as a sounding board and assistant — once you successfully convince it to stop telling you that every idea you have is amazing. Tools only work when people use them correctly, and we’ve seen how well that’s been going for lawyers and AI. Pitching the product as an a sparring partner in the drafting process helps appropriately shape expectations.
Time will tell if attorneys figure out how to navigate a world of instantaneous feedback. We’ve written before about the dromological displacement where the speed provided by the technology changes the nature of the work itself. When the sounding board isn’t a young associate who takes a day to mull over the problem, but a well-informed algorithm offering instant answers, the workflow loses those built-in speed bumps. It’s still iterative (if users continue to let it be iterative), but without the downtime historically reserved for rethinking. How many times have lawyers had epiphanies during those moments when the draft is out of their hands? When that time gets compressed, so do those periods of reflection. It’s not that the AI will steer lawyers wrong, but that lawyers will be increasingly bad at noticing when asking an entirely different question could be better.
That’s on the lawyers though. It’s up to the professionals to be cognizant of AI’s strengths and limitations as a workflow tool. Vendors can try to shape best practices by keeping their rhetoric focused on AI as more of a tool than some kind of lawyer-in-a-box, it’s the user who makes the final call. And the more a product lends itself to being used, the more likely it is the user will have an honest understanding of how the product is best used.
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.