LexisNexis Legal & Professional today announced the opening of its Customer Innovation Lab in New York City, a physical space where legal professionals, LexisNexis engineers, and AI technology partners including OpenAI and Amazon Web Services work side by side to design, prototype and test new legal AI capabilities \u2013 sometimes iterating on an idea multiple [\u2026]<\/p>\n
LexisNexis Legal & Professional today announced the opening of its Customer Innovation Lab<\/a> in New York City, a physical space where legal professionals, LexisNexis engineers, and AI technology partners including OpenAI and Amazon Web Services work side by side to design, prototype and test new legal AI capabilities \u2013 sometimes iterating on an idea multiple times within a single hour.<\/p>\n The company says the lab \u2013 which actually opened about 1.5 months ago \u2013 offers a new model for how legal AI gets built and shipped. Rather than developing AI capabilities internally and asking customers to validate them after the fact, the lab brings customers into a working session, where LexisNexis engineers build against their specific pain points in real time.<\/p>\n Prototypes that clear the company\u2019s standards for quality, accuracy and security can advance into development as capabilities within the LexisNexis agentic platform, either customized for the customer or scaled across Lexis+ with Prot\u00e9g\u00e9.<\/p>\n \u201cFor me, the biggest thing is we\u2019re collapsing the distance between the people who know what the problem is and the people who can build the solution,\u201d Greg Dickason<\/a>, chief technology officer of LexisNexis Legal & Professional, told me in an interview for my LawNext podcast, which will air later this week.<\/p>\n \u201cPutting them in the same room means that our technologists really understand the problems, which means that our ability to respond very quickly to where the market\u2019s going is hyper-accelerated.\u201d<\/p>\n Over the years, I have sat through any number of company briefings \u2013 including by LexisNexis \u2013 in which executives told me that customer involvement was a core tenet of how the company develops products. So I asked Dickason to explain what is actually different with the lab.<\/p>\n His answer, in a nutshell, was cycle time. The traditional approach \u2013 which involves interviewing customers, going and building something, bringing it back for feedback, and then repeating the process \u2013 could take weeks or months per iteration, he said. In the lab, that loop collapses to minutes.<\/p>\n \u201cLiterally in the session in the lab, the customers are telling us their problem. We\u2019ve already got the first solution, because we\u2019ve listened and we\u2019ve already pulled that together. We show that to the customer. They say to us, \u2018Yeah, but it would work slightly better if this happened or that happened.\u2019 And then we tweak it live in the lab,\u201d Dickason said.<\/p>\n Just last week, he said, he saw a solution get changed four times in one hour as a result of customer feedback.<\/p>\n The idea is for everyone to be hands-on in real time, Dickason said. While one or two LexisNexis staff talk with the customer, engineers sit alongside, listening and coding, often using agentic coding tools such as Claude Code integrated into the LexisNexis product. At some point, they turn their laptops around and ask, \u201cIs this what you meant?\u201d<\/p>\n Dickason said the lab has been quietly operating for about a month and a half ahead of today\u2019s launch, with the company using that time to refine its working cadence, including how a lab team of roughly 20 people hands off prototypes to an engineering organization of some 4,000.<\/p>\n For functionality-level features, he said, the path from lab prototype to live product \u201ccan be less than a month.\u201d\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n The lab has already produced prototypes and designs that LexisNexis says are advancing into Lexis+ with Prot\u00e9g\u00e9 capabilities, including:<\/p>\n The vault work, Dickason said, originated from a gap the company had heard about from customers, then took shape when customers came into the lab and described the actual queries they would run. He said that one of LexisNexis\u2019s core technology providers, which he declined to name, was in the room with the customers, helping define what was technically possible.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n LexisNexis says that the lab\u2019s current top priority is legal drafting. The company cites research showing lawyers spend 40 to 60 percent of their time drafting and reviewing documents, more than on any other task.<\/p>\n Existing tools, Dickason said, get lawyers only 80 or 90 percent of the way there, leaving hours of work to reach a final product. The gaps he identified included conforming drafts to a firm\u2019s own style, precedents and playbooks; flagging risk against a customer\u2019s own standards; carrying context across related documents so a primary document and its supporting materials line up; verification of citations surfaced directly in the draft; and layering in litigation and judicial analytics.<\/p>\n With Thomson Reuters recently announcing that its own proprietary model will begin replacing general-purpose models for certain tasks, I asked Dickason whether LexisNexis sees itself heading the same direction.<\/p>\n \u201cNever say never,\u201d he said, but for now the company\u2019s view is that frontier models \u2014 he specifically mentioned Claude Opus 5 \u2014 combined with LexisNexis\u2019s knowledge graph, retrieval infrastructure and prompting deliver state-of-the-art results.<\/p>\n The company has evaluated models continuously since its work with Amazon on Bedrock more than three years ago, he said, and already uses fine-tuned models for certain parts of the legal workflow.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re going to make sure the highest quality is for us the number one bar,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Dickason also sees an agent-driven future in which AI agents increasingly act on behalf of lawyers \u2014 \u201cdisintermediating the user,\u201d as he put it \u2014 and said LexisNexis is working on agent-to-agent and MCP interfaces to participate in that ecosystem.<\/p>\n Notably, he does not want third-party agents browsing raw content inside Lexis+ with Prot\u00e9g\u00e9, arguing that raw retrieval without the company\u2019s grounding and tuning \u201cgenerally doesn\u2019t work.\u201d<\/p>\n Participation is open to \u201ceffectively anybody,\u201d Dickason said, from CIOs and partners to junior associates, small firms, solos, and even judges, and whether or not they are current customers.<\/p>\n LexisNexis owns the IP in what comes out of the lab, which participants acknowledge before joining. Dickason said the lab is also set up for a separate track in which large firms building their own internal AI platforms can explore how LexisNexis might plug in.<\/p>\n Now that the lab has launched as an ongoing operation in New York, LexisNexis plans to expand it globally as well as to conduct on-site lab sessions at ILTACON and at customer locations. Firms and legal departments can learn more at www.lexisnexis.com\/lab<\/a>.<\/p>\nA Different Approach to Customer Input<\/strong><\/h3>\n
Already Out of the Lab<\/strong><\/h3>\n
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Drafting As A Priority<\/strong><\/h3>\n
Frontier Models, For Now<\/strong><\/h3>\n
Who Gets In<\/strong><\/h3>\n