Robert Ambrogi Blog
Last August, LexisNexis Legal & Professional released the preview version of Protégé, its AI-powered legal assistant that incorporates both generative and agentic AI capabilities, describing it as a “substantial leap forward in personalized generative AI that will transform legal work.”
Now, in what it says is a “step change” in its AI offerings, LexisNexis is releasing Protégé to general availability, with capabilities that include autonomous task completion and the ability to review its own work and identify areas where it can improve its own output.
“We’re continually evolving our AI solutions in collaboration with customers, and the Protégé personalized AI assistant marks a step change in our legal AI functionality, whether legal professionals are using their own internal data or LexisNexis trusted resources,” said Jeff Pfeifer, chief product officer for LexisNexis North America and UK.
Initially available within the Lexis+ AI legal workflow solution and Lexis Create+ for legal drafting within Microsoft Word, Protégé will soon be ubiquitous across all LexisNexis products, the company says. It replaces the previous AI Assistant on Lexis+ AI.
“LexisNexis is focused on improving outcomes and unlocking new levels of efficiency and value in legal work to support our customers’ success,” said Sean Fitzpatrick, CEO of LexisNexis North America, UK, and Ireland. “Our vision is for every legal professional to have a personalized AI assistant that makes their life better, and we’re delighted to deploy that through our world-class, fully integrated AI technology platform.”
Agentic AI Capabilities
At the core of the Protégé release is its use of “agentic AI” – technology that can autonomously complete tasks based on user goals, including reviewing its own work and identifying areas for improvement. The goal is to simplify AI use while accelerating productivity and enhancing work product quality.
Drafting a work for hire agreement. (All images provided by LexisNexis.)
The system can process significantly larger documents than previous versions, handling up to 1 million characters or approximately 300 pages – a 250% increase over prior processing limits, LexisNexis says. This expanded capacity enables users to work with more substantial legal documents, such as complex contracts and litigation filings.
I have not seen Protégé in action, but, according to LexisNexis, tasks it can perform include:
- Draft full, tailored transactional documents, as well as litigation motions, briefs and complaints, and check its own work before turning it over for human review.
- Suggest legal workflow actions based on the type of documents uploaded – e.g., draft a legal memo, summarize, draft an argument – and dynamically generate follow-up prompts that are personalized to the lawyer’s workflow.
- Provide prompt assistance, suggesting refinements to queries to help the user more precisely accomplish their goals.
- Allow users to securely upload and save tens of thousands of legal documents to Protégé Vault, where users can perform various AI tasks to summarize, draft, research and more.
- Draft deposition questions based on fact patterns, descriptions of witnesses, and other relevant information.
- Draft discovery documents, including interrogatories, requests for production of documents, and requests for admissions.
- Generate graphical timelines of events from uploaded documents.
- Answer questions about or summarize large, complex documents of up to 1 million characters or approximately 300 pages.
- Conduct systematic analyses of transactional documents.
- Review an uploaded motion or argument and find similar motions and arguments in the LexisNexis system to help the user refine their argument, find stronger authority, and identify potential weaknesses.
- Link quotes in litigation filings back to source documentation to confirm accuracy.
Personalization and Integration
Protégé now has features that allow users to define profiles and personalization settings, including practice areas, preferred jurisdictions, and other work-related details. This helps tailor answers and drafts it produces to the preferences of the individual user.
Protégé provides users with options to personalize its output according to the user’s role, writing style preferences, and more.
In addition, Protégé can integrate with major document management systems (DMS), including iManage, NetDocuments, and SharePoint, allowing firms to leverage their existing document repositories and knowledge bases.
Building on its acquisition last year of Henchman, the DMS integration enables Protégé’s writing style, tone and formatting to be customized based on internal standards and individual preferences, LexisNexis says.
Asking a question against the document management system.
“While we’re well-known as a leader in legal research, our integrated AI technology supports the full range of legal tasks in a very personalized way,” Pfeifer said. “Looking forward, expect more role- and task-based agentic AI-assisted workflows from LexisNexis.”
Development of Protégé
The development of Protégé involved collaboration with over 50 customers, including Am Law 50 firms, small law firms, corporations, government offices, and law schools including the University of California, Berkeley School of Law and the University of Notre Dame.
Generating a timeline within Protégé.
The technical infrastructure behind Protégé integrates multiple AI approaches, LexisNexis says, including:
- Extractive AI for finding relevant results within data.
- Generative AI for creating new content based on prompts.
- Agentic AI for autonomous task completion.
The product employs a proprietary retrieval augmented generation (RAG) platform that grounds large language model responses in LexisNexis’s legal content repository. In developing Protégé, the company partnered with several AI providers, including Mistral, Anthropic, AWS, and Microsoft.
“The LexisNexis evolution from extractive to generative to agentic AI makes our legal AI solutions easier than ever to use, helping customers accomplish a remarkable amount of work without needing to be an expert in prompting,” said Min Chen, chief AI officer at LexisNexis Legal & Professional.
Of course, even as AI adoption is accelerating in the legal sector, there remain significant concerns about security, confidentiality, and accuracy. LexisNexis says its approach is to focus on responsible AI development with human oversight, implementing advanced encryption and privacy technology. LexisNexis says it adheres to the responsible AI principles of its parent company RELX.
LexisNexis says that Protégé marks a “substantial leap forward” in AI personalization, giving users control to customize their AI experience and ensure highly tailored outputs.
“Our vision is for every legal professional worldwide to have an AI assistant that is specifically trained and personalized to their needs,” the company says. “Starting with legal applications, LexisNexis Protégé will evolve into a portfolio of AI agents, seamlessly built into LexisNexis solutions, services, and applications.”