Robert Ambrogi Blog
Even though ILTACON ended more than a week ago now, I am still digging out from the deluge of briefings and meetings I attended there. One of particular note was a media briefing with LexisNexis executives in which they provided further information on the company’s AI strategy.
Just ahead of ILTACON, LexisNexis had announced the launch of Protégé General AI, as I reported at the time. This launch expanded its Protégé artificial intelligence platform to include secure access to multiple general-purpose AI models alongside its existing legal-specific AI tools.
At the ILTACON media briefing, LexisNexis executives detailed new features of its Protégé AI platform, provided more details on the rollout of the new General AI tool, and discussed the company’s broader vision of delivering what it calls “courtroom-grade AI” to the legal profession.
Sean Fitzpatrick, CEO of LexisNexis North America, UK and Ireland, opened the session by describing the moment as unprecedented in terms of both technological change and financial investment.
“The amount of investment that’s going into these foundational models is hundreds of billions of dollars, and we’ve never seen anything like this,” Fitzpatrick said. “This is the biggest technology spending cycle in the history of business.”
With costs for large language models dropping by more than 99% since 2022, he added, the economics now make it possible to operate these systems at scale.
To that end, Fitzpatrick described his company’s vision of making AI assistants widely available.
“Our vision is that every lawyer is going to have their own digital AI assistant, and it’s going to be personalized to them,” he said. “It’s going to understand their practice area, it’s going to understand their jurisdiction, it’s going to understand their style, their preferences, it’s going to have access to our authoritative legal materials, and it’s going to have access to their own internal work product.”
Building ‘Courtroom-Grade AI’
Fitzpatrick said that while consumer-grade AI tools are widely used among legal professionals, they lack the privacy, citation rigor, and reliability necessary for legal practice.
LexisNexis, he emphasized, is committed to creating “courtroom-grade AI,” which it defines by six principles:
- Grounding in authoritative legal content. “LexisNexis has 160 billion documents and records in our system,” Fitzpatrick said, “and so that’s what we use as grounding data when we do our AI.”
- Verifiable source citations. Shepard’s provides the ability to verify that citations are accurate and up to date, he said.
- Continuous updates with no knowledge cutoffs. Fitzpatrick noted that GPT-4o had a knowledge cutoff of 2023. “We add 2.5 million documents and records to the system every single day from 50,000 different sources.”
- This has two aspects, Fitzpatrick said: One is transparency back to the authority, so you can verify for yourself. The second is knowing what’s going on inside the black box – what is the reasoning and logic.
- Bias mitigation. Gold-standard security and privacy.
- Security and privacy. It has to be disconnected from the foundational models so the data is not being used for learning or training.
“This is about building AI that lawyers can trust in a courtroom setting,” Fitzpatrick said.
Protégé at the Center
Central to that effort is Protégé, the company’s AI assistant. By 2028, he said, Protégé will automate 15-20% of what lawyers do today.
But he added that LexisNexis is not waiting until 2028 to deliver on that vision. Protégé already automates many of the tasks lawyers routinely perform, and it will continue to add more capabilities.
“Think of all of the different things that all of the different types of attorneys do, there are tens of thousands of tasks that need to be automated,” he said. “We’re going to continue to automate different tasks along those workflows, so Protégé will get more and more powerful over time.”
Protégé is expanding on several fronts, Fitzpatrick said:
- Geographically: It is already live in the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia, Hong Kong and New Zealand, with additional rollouts coming to South Africa, France, and Austria.
- Across products: It has been integrated into Lexis+, Lex Machina, Intelligize, and other tools.
- Within the ecosystem: LexisNexis has added integrations with Microsoft Word, Outlook, Teams, and Copilot, as well as a new connection with Harvey that allows Harvey users to query Lexis AI directly.
Agentic Workflows Demonstrated
During the media briefing, Serena Wellen, vice president of product management, demonstrated Protégé’s agentic workflows, which she said have been designed to increase transparency into the process and give lawyers more control over research and drafting.
In one example, Wellen showed how Protégé can break down a complex query involving an airline’s duty to an unaccompanied minor into sub-prompts that the user can review and edit before the system delivers results.
“Lawyers can review every citation, remove irrelevant ones, and ensure the final response reflects their judgment,” Wellen said.
She also gave a preview of a judicial workflow currently in development, which allows judges to upload case files and receive draft bench memos or opinions. Judges who have tested it, she said, compared the drafts to the work of “a really good law clerk” and praised the time savings of reducing weeks of work to minutes.
“Some of them even told us that some parts of the drafts were more thorough than what they usually saw.”
Protégé for General AI
As noted above, a major recent announcement from LexisNexis was Protégé General AI, a secure workspace that lets users access popular consumer AI models such as GPT-5, Claude Sonnet 4, and OpenAI’s O3 reasoning models from within the LexisNexis environment.
David Ganote, vice president of product planning, said the move responds to the fact that two-thirds of lawyers already use consumer AI tools such as ChatGPT or Claude, often for research, brainstorming or drafting.
“But they’re putting privileged data into open models that aren’t designed to protect it,” Ganote said.
Protégé General AI, by contrast, offers enterprise-grade security and incorporates LexisNexis’s Shepard’s citation agent, which flags unverified or hallucinated citations. It also allows users to toggle clearly between Legal AI, grounded in Lexis content, and general AI, better suited for exploratory or creative tasks.
“There are lots of things that general AI does really well that don’t require legal authorities,” Ganote said, pointing to examples such as explaining concepts to a jury or drafting marketing content.
Selective Approach to Models
Jeff Reihl, executive vice president and chief technology officer, said that the company’s development of agents is not just a PR ploy.
“We do not build agents just so that you guys can write about us building agents,” he said. “Agents are extraordinarily powerful technology and we will use those to serve a purpose for our customers.”
Reihl also explained the strategy behind the company’s choice of AI models, saying that it maintains a multimodal strategy, choosing the best generative AI model for each use case rather than chasing the newest release.
Although the company had early access to GPT-5, he said, it had not yet been deployed in Lexis products (at least as of the press briefing).
“As of right now, the performance is not better, so we won’t use it,” Reihl said. “We don’t put a new model into our product just because it’s the latest and greatest.”
LexisNexis has direct partnerships with Anthropic, OpenAI, AWS, Microsoft, and Mistral, giving it early access to models and input into their development roadmaps.
Competitive Landscape
As the briefing concluded, Fitzpatrick was asked about the broader competitive landscape, and whether Microsoft or Google could eventually come to dominate legal AI. He argued that LexisNexis’ combination of authoritative content, secure AI, and workflow integration gives it an edge.
“It’s a lot of work to try to pull together the collection of assets that we have,” he said. “You could give somebody a billion dollars and they wouldn’t be able to do it.”
He also gave an update on the partnership between LexisNexis and Harvey, which in part involved the co-development of AI workflows for lawyers. I asked him if there had been update on that since I spoke to him in July for my podcast.
“It’s evolved since we talked about it,” he replied. “It’s really coming together.”
He said customers have been testing it and they are building on the feedback from those customers. “Really, really amazing feedback on it, so we’re very excited.”
Fitzpatrick closed the briefing expressing confidence in LexisNexis’s continuing leadership in developing AI for lawyers.
“There’s a lot of room for people to innovate around these things, but I do think that major players like LexisNexis that have the content … do have an advantage.
“From a technology standpoint, it’s really hard to maintain a competitive advantage if it’s just technology. And so that’s why we try to take our content, embed it in our technology solutions, and then embed those technology solutions into the workflows of our customers.”