LexisNexis Legal & Professional said today that it has entered into an agreement to acquire Henchman, a Belgium-based contract drafting legal technology company.

LexisNexis said it is acquiring the company for its document management system that enable faster document drafting. It say its technology enriches a law firm’s internal work product, creating a layer of intelligence on contract databases to speed up drafting.

“By acquiring Henchman, LexisNexis will deliver personalized generative AI solutions to customers around the world,” said Jeffrey S. Pfeifer, chief product officer for LexisNexis Legal and Professional. “The acquisition will combine Henchman’s document management system data enrichment with trusted LexisNexis drafting guidance content to deliver a personalized generative AI experience.”

Pfeifer said that LexisNexis has immediate plans to use the technology in combination with its own retrieval augmented generation technology that underlies its Lexis+ AI legal research platform and its Lexis Create, the Microsoft 365 add-in that enables integration of generative AI drafting in Microsoft Word, Outlook, Teams and Copilot.

“The union of LexisNexis and Henchman is an extension of our drafting vision to proactively surface valuable and strategic insights for customers – delivering a center of knowledge to legal teams,” Pfeifer said. “We believe the combination of our teams and technology will allow customers to make informed decisions faster, generate better work product, and drive economic value for their organizations.

Henchman interacts with the DMS of a law firm or corporation, indexing the organization’s contract documents at the clause level, making the data available for contract insights and drafting. The technology works with legal‐specific DMS providers and general enterprise content management systems and is language agnostic, it says.

“We see this union with LexisNexis as an extension of our drafting vision to proactively surface valuable and strategic insights for customers – delivering a center of knowledge to legal teams,” said Henchman cofounder Gilles Mattelin. “We believe the combination of our teams and tech will empower customers to make informed decisions faster, generate outstanding work, and drive economic value for their organizations.”

Founded in 2020, Henchman says it has more than 170 legal and corporate customers globally.

It was a finalist in this year’s Startup Alley at ABA Techshow, which I  oversee.

The deal is expected to close early in the second half of 2024, LexisNexis said.

Photo of Bob Ambrogi Bob Ambrogi

Bob is a lawyer, veteran legal journalist, and award-winning blogger and podcaster. In 2011, he was named to the inaugural Fastcase 50, honoring “the law’s smartest, most courageous innovators, techies, visionaries and leaders.” Earlier in his career, he was editor-in-chief of several legal publications, including The National Law Journal, and editorial director of ALM’s Litigation Services Division.