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\u2019s AI strategy. Just ahead of ILTACON, LexisNexis had announced the [\u2026]<\/p>\n
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\u2019s AI strategy.<\/p>\n
Just ahead of ILTACON, LexisNexis had announced the launch of Prot\u00e9g\u00e9 General AI, as I reported at the time<\/a>. This launch expanded its Prot\u00e9g\u00e9 artificial intelligence platform to include secure access to multiple general-purpose AI models alongside its existing legal-specific AI tools.<\/p>\n At the ILTACON media briefing, LexisNexis executives detailed new features of its Prot\u00e9g\u00e9 AI platform, provided more details on the rollout of the new General AI tool, and discussed the company\u2019s broader vision of delivering what it calls \u201ccourtroom-grade AI\u201d to the legal profession.<\/p>\n Sean Fitzpatrick<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n Related: On LawNext: How LexisNexis and Harvey Are Partnering to Reshape Legal AI, with LexisNexis CEO Sean Fitzpatrick<\/a>.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n \u201cThe amount of investment that\u2019s going into these foundational models is hundreds of billions of dollars, and we\u2019ve never seen anything like this,\u201d Fitzpatrick said. \u201cThis is the biggest technology spending cycle in the history of business.\u201d<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n To that end, Fitzpatrick described his company\u2019s vision of making AI assistants widely available.<\/p>\n \u201cOur vision is that every lawyer is going to have their own digital AI assistant, and it\u2019s going to be personalized to them,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s going to understand their practice area, it\u2019s going to understand their jurisdiction, it\u2019s going to understand their style, their preferences, it\u2019s going to have access to our authoritative legal materials, and it\u2019s going to have access to their own internal work product.\u201d<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n LexisNexis, he emphasized, is committed to creating \u201ccourtroom-grade AI,\u201d which it defines by six principles:<\/p>\n \u201cThis is about building AI that lawyers can trust in a courtroom setting,\u201d Fitzpatrick said.<\/p>\n Prot\u00e9g\u00e9 at the Center<\/strong><\/p>\n Central to that effort is Prot\u00e9g\u00e9, the company\u2019s AI assistant. By 2028, he said, Prot\u00e9g\u00e9 will automate 15-20% of what lawyers do today.<\/p>\n But he added that LexisNexis is not waiting until 2028 to deliver on that vision. Prot\u00e9g\u00e9 already automates many of the tasks lawyers routinely perform, and it will continue to add more capabilities.<\/p>\n \u201cThink 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,\u201d he said. \u201cWe\u2019re going to continue to automate different tasks along those workflows, so Prot\u00e9g\u00e9 will get more and more powerful over time.\u201d<\/p>\n Prot\u00e9g\u00e9 is expanding on several fronts, Fitzpatrick said:<\/p>\n During the media briefing, Serena Wellen<\/a>, vice president of product management, demonstrated Prot\u00e9g\u00e9\u2019s agentic workflows, which she said have been designed to increase transparency into the process and give lawyers more control over research and drafting.<\/p>\n In one example, Wellen showed how Prot\u00e9g\u00e9 can break down a complex query involving an airline\u2019s duty to an unaccompanied minor into sub-prompts that the user can review and edit before the system delivers results.<\/p>\n \u201cLawyers can review every citation, remove irrelevant ones, and ensure the final response reflects their judgment,\u201d Wellen said.<\/p>\n 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 \u201ca really good law clerk\u201d and praised the time savings of reducing weeks of work to minutes.<\/p>\n \u201cSome of them even told us that some parts of the drafts were more thorough than what they usually saw.\u201d<\/p>\n As noted above, a major recent announcement from LexisNexis was Prot\u00e9g\u00e9 General AI, a secure workspace that lets users access popular consumer AI models such as GPT-5, Claude Sonnet 4, and OpenAI\u2019s O3 reasoning models from within the LexisNexis environment.<\/p>\nBuilding \u2018Courtroom-Grade AI\u2019<\/strong><\/h3>\n
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Agentic Workflows Demonstrated<\/strong><\/h3>\n
Prot\u00e9g\u00e9 for General AI<\/strong><\/h3>\n