Last August, LexisNexis Legal & Professional introduced the preview version of Protégé, an AI-powered legal assistant, showcasing its potential to transform legal work with generative and agentic AI capabilities. Now, the company has announced the general availability of this AI assistant, a move described as a “step change” in their AI offerings. Designed for the streamlined completion of legal tasks, Protégé can autonomously review its own work and suggest improvements. This represents a significant leap in AI personalization and functionality in the legal sector.
Protégé is being released initially within the Lexis+ AI legal workflow solution and Lexis Create+ for legal drafting in Microsoft Word. According to Jeff Pfeifer, chief product officer for LexisNexis North America and UK, “Protégé marks a step change in our legal AI functionality.”
The AI assistant can autonomously complete tasks based on user-defined goals and review its work, identifying areas for improvement. The aim is to simplify AI use while enhancing productivity and quality of legal work. Notably, Protégé can now process documents significantly larger than its predecessors, managing up to one million characters or roughly 300 pages. This expanded capacity is crucial for handling complex legal documents, such as contracts and litigation filings.
Protégé’s capabilities include drafting transactional documents, litigation motions, and briefs while providing personalized workflow suggestions. It can integrate with leading document management systems like iManage, NetDocuments, and SharePoint, thanks to the recent acquisition of Henchman. This integration facilitates the customization of Protégé’s writing style, tone, and formatting according to organizational standards and user preferences.
The development of Protégé involved collaboration with over 50 customers, including Am Law 50 firms, corporations, and law schools. The technology underlying Protégé fuses extractive, generative, and agentic AI approaches. LexisNexis partnered with various AI providers, including Mistral, Anthropic, AWS, and Microsoft, to build its proprietary retrieval augmented generation platform, which integrates large language model responses with LexisNexis’s legal content repository.
Despite the rapid adoption of AI in the legal sector, concerns about security, confidentiality, and accuracy persist. LexisNexis emphasizes responsible AI development and human oversight, following the responsible AI principles of its parent company RELX. The company envisions Protégé as the first of many AI agents that will evolve into a comprehensive portfolio embedded within LexisNexis solutions, offering a personalized AI assistant for legal professionals globally.
For further details on Protégé’s launch and its implications for the legal industry, visit the full article here.