Robert Ambrogi Blog
It’s not quite BattleBots, but competitors LexisNexis and Thomson Reuters both made significant announcements today involving the development of generative AI legal assistants within their products.
Thomson Reuters, which last year acquired the CoCounsel legal assistant originally developed by Casetext, and which later announced plans to deploy it throughout its product lines, today unveiled what it says is the “supercharged” CoCounsel 2.0.
Meanwhile, LexisNexis said today it is rolling out the commercial preview version of its Protégé Legal AI Assistant, which it describes as a “substantial leap forward in personalized generative AI that will transform legal work.” It is part of the launch of the third generation of Lexis+ AI, the AI-driven legal research platform the company launched last year.
I am at ILTACON, where this week I will be seeing demonstrations and learning more about both of these products, but here is what the companies have said so far.
LexisNexis Protégé
In describing its new Protégé Legal AI Assistant, LexisNexis emphasizes its ability to be personalized by the user.
“Protégé is a private, trusted Legal AI Assistant, unique to each legal professional,” the company said. “Personalization choices are controlled by the user or their organization – creating a set of choices to optimize the user’s generative AI experience.”
LexisNexis says its acquisition last month of Henchman, a Belgium-based contract drafting legal technology company, has enabled it “to catalyze its shift to personalized generative AI” because of Henchman’s ability to access and mine a law firm’s internal work product and allow users to extract and interact with key insights.
Protégé’s personalization capabilities will enable a wide set of new AI-enabled tasks,” LexisNexis says.
“Protégé knows specifics about each user like workflow preferences, daily task requirements, firm standards, teamwork and communication styles, legal areas of specialization, and past work product,” the company explained in a press release. “It proactively suggests subscribed LexisNexis products to provide insights and analytics.”
Similar to what Thomson Reuters has said about its deployment of its CoCounsel across all its products, LexisNexis says Protégé will be ubiquitous across its ecosystem, including its portfolio of products and its Microsoft 365 integrations for Word, Outlook, Teams, and Copilot.
“Protégé seamlessly works alongside the user, whether in a LexisNexis solution or third-party application like Microsoft, to reduce application switching time, accelerate efficiency, and meet the user where they work,” LexisNexis says.
For this initial preview release, LexisNexis says it is working with a number of Am Law 100 firms to get their feedback. During the remainder of this year, the product will have or get the ability to:
- Leverage a user’s or firm’s work product by providing search of internal firm data combined with AI for deep insights, enabling batch upload capabilities and performing AI tasks, and analyzing a users’ documents and providing contextual recommendations.
- Integrate within a user’s workflow by its availability across LexisNexis products and Microsoft 365 and providing Shepard’s insights within conversations.
- Support a user’s daily task organization, client meeting deliverables, and deposition preparation, including by building timelines, conducting AI code compare, initiating statutory horizon scanning, drafting documents, and conducting legal research.
- Provide personalized responses based on user profiles and past behaviors.
- Engage in sophisticated dialogue with clarifying questions and recommendations, and get responses informed by subscribed LexisNexis products.
Coming in 2025 will be the ability to answer prompts by voice, multimedia processing across text, image, video and audio, and news horizon scanning to identify breaking opportunities and risks.
“Today marks the next major milestone in our customer-led AI product development journey, and we are thrilled to announce the third generation of Lexis+ AI, featuring new capabilities powered by customer DMS integration, an incredible expansion of use cases individually tailored to each user, and integration across LexisNexis products and Microsoft 365,” Serena Wellen, vice president, product management, said in a statement provided by the company.
You can read more at: http://www.lexisnexis.com/
Thomson Reuters CoCounsel 2.0
TR describes CoCounsel as “an extra team member” that “draws on its robust set of specialized skills to handle complex, multi-step work, helping professionals quickly pinpoint key knowledge in vast databases, thoroughly communicate sophisticated information, and complete essential work with unprecedented speed.”
CoCounsel 2.0 is a “profound leap forward in GenAI assistance,” TR says, that will:
- Work three times faster than the first generation of CoCounsel, generating answers in seconds, not minutes.
- Operate more intuitively, with a better understanding of the ways customers naturally communicate, and improved ability to make sense of documents.
- Deliver more thorough, nuanced results, because it will be able to consider the full context and history of more difficult, sophisticated requests.
- Be accessible from within Thomson Reuters products, beginning with Westlaw Precision and Practical Law.
- Be accessible from within Microsoft 365, beginning with Word, Teams, and Outlook.
- Be able to access customer documents directly, through server-to-server integrations with document management systems iManage, NetDocuments, and SharePoint.
- Offer CoCounsel High Throughput Beta, for teams needing to automate the review of hundreds of thousands or even millions of documents, with human-level accuracy. This capability has been successfully deployed on an as-needed basis and will now be available to all CoCounsel users.
“CoCounsel 2.0 is the culmination of Thomson Reuters work to deliver the experience professionals have been asking for: A single GenAI assistant that does more than reliably complete individual tasks, while also working more smoothly, naturally, and independently on more of the jobs constituting complex workflows.”