Back in May, LexisNexus revealed its plans for a new product, Lexis+ AI, using large language models (LLMs) to respond to legal research questions, draft legal documents, and summarize legal issues. Initially, its availability was limited to select Am Law 50 firms that had agreed to partake in a commercial preview of the product. You can read more about those early plans here.
As of now, LexisNexus is making Lexis+ AI available to U.S customers. Promising “hallucination-free” linked legal citations, the product pools the strengths of generative AI with LexisNexis’ proprietary search technology, Shepard’s Citations functionality, and authoritative content.
The road to public release didn’t only involve Am Law firms; corporate legal departments, small law firms, and U.S courts were included in the commercial preview and testing. According to Jeff Pfeifer, chief product officer for LexisNexis in Canada, Ireland, the U.K., and U.S., this led to several fine-tunings of the product.
Lexis+ AI comes with several promises. Among these is the claim that it is considerably faster than any other legal generative AI solutions available today. It stands as the sole legal generative AI solution to provide linked citations in its responses, minimizing the risk of invented content (“hallucinations”) and checking all citations against Shepard’s for validity. This is alongside features such as inputting specific citations for accuracy verification and consumer feedback for ongoing product improvement.
Interestingly, Concierge Vincent AI from vLex, a new contemporaneous product, also has cited responses linked inline. LexisNexis spoke on how their focus lies in the placement of citations with answer components from Lexis+ AI’s LLM service and the provision of additional citation references and key Shepard’s indicators.
The remarkable points lie in what Lexis+ AI can do as it becomes generally available:
- Conversational search: Enabling legal researchers to interact with the AI in back-and-forth conversations. Questions can be asked, and the AI can be tasked to adjust or refine the response.
- Document drafting: Enables quick production of legal arguments, contract clauses, client communications, etc., from a simple user prompt.
- Summarisations: Provision of case summaries in mere seconds.
- Document uploading: Users can analyze, summarize, and query either a single legal document or a set of up to 10 documents.
Significantly, any uploaded documents to Lexis+ AI are automatically purged after a session or after 10 minutes of inactivity. Users can manually purge documents at any time and manage their conversation history with the AI. The product also comes with guided experiences to help lead customers through its use and training in prompt engineering to help users get the best results.
In conclusion, Lexis+ AI is a step forward in legal-specific tools using generative AI. It is not a replacement for traditional legal research tools, but it certainly has the potential to enhance speed and productivity in legal research tasks. And as LexisNexis continues to refine and develop this tool, it will be interesting to see how it is received and how competitors respond.