LexisNexis Legal & Professional has opened a Customer Innovation Lab in New York City to bring legal professionals, engineers and technology collaborators together to develop and test new legal artificial intelligence capabilities.
The lab is designed to involve customers at the beginning of the product development process rather than asking them to validate technology after it has already been built.
Legal professionals from law firms, corporate legal departments, courts and academic institutions will bring specific workflow challenges and product ideas into the lab. LexisNexis engineers will then develop and test prototypes alongside those customers in real time.
LexisNexis said initial prototypes can be created within hours or days, while successful concepts may become production-ready capabilities within weeks.
Each prototype must meet the company’s standards for accuracy, security, quality and legal-domain performance before advancing into the LexisNexis platform.
Successful projects may become customized capabilities for individual customers or broader skills and agents available through Lexis+ with Protégé, the company’s agentic legal AI platform.
OpenAI and Amazon Web Services are participating as technology collaborators, working with customers and LexisNexis teams to evaluate how newer AI models and infrastructure can address complex legal workflows.
LexisNexis engineers will lead each lab session and assess model outputs using the company’s private infrastructure, legal content and validation processes.
The lab has already worked with dozens of customers on prototypes and product designs. Several projects are expected to become available through Lexis+ with Protégé.
One initiative involves legal AI models developed by LexisNexis specifically for professional legal work. These models use the company’s legal content and subject-matter expertise to improve performance across research, analysis, drafting and other complex tasks.
Another planned capability is an advanced, customer-managed Protégé Vault for securely storing and analyzing documents, videos, images, audio recordings and other matter-related materials.
For example, a legal professional could use Protégé to analyze a lengthy deposition, identify relevant statements and trace the findings back to specific timestamps and original source materials.
LexisNexis is also developing secure Protégé Workrooms that will allow internal legal teams, outside counsel, clients, experts and other authorized participants to share documents, analyses, AI skills and matter-related work within one controlled environment.
The workrooms are expected to include detailed access permissions intended to help legal teams collaborate while protecting confidential information.
Legal drafting is one of the lab’s initial priorities. LexisNexis cited independent research indicating that lawyers spend approximately 40% to 60% of their time drafting and reviewing documents and contracts.
The company said customers have identified several continuing challenges involving legal drafting, including personalization, writing tone, subject-matter knowledge, strategic positioning and legal accuracy.
The lab is testing AI drafting capabilities that can adapt to an organization’s preferred style, precedents and internal playbooks.
The planned tools could identify risks, recommend redlines based on a customer’s standards and retain context across multiple related documents.
This could allow a legal professional to draft a primary document and its supporting materials without repeatedly rebuilding the underlying context.
LexisNexis is also developing document-aware editing tools tailored to different legal document types. The capabilities are expected to preserve lawyer oversight by displaying AI-generated changes through features such as Track Changes and version histories.
The company plans to place its proprietary trust markers within the drafting workflow, helping users verify AI-generated work without moving content between multiple systems.
The drafting tools could also incorporate LexisNexis litigation, judicial and regulatory analytics to support more informed strategic decisions.
Every capability developed through the lab will be grounded in LexisNexis’ legal information resources, which include approximately 200 billion documents and records, four million daily additions, 150 years of attorney-led curation and Shepard’s citation intelligence.
The New York Customer Innovation Lab will operate on an ongoing basis. LexisNexis also plans to expand the model into additional markets globally.
LexisNexis Legal & Professional serves customers in more than 150 countries and employs approximately 11,900 people. The company is part of RELX.
KEY QUOTES:
“The Customer Innovation Lab changes who’s in the room when legal AI gets built. Customers help originate and shape what we build from day one.”
“Our job is to validate it, ground it in citable legal authority and decide what’s ready to scale into Lexis+ with Protégé, the platform our customers rely on every day.”
Greg Dickason, Chief Technology Officer at LexisNexis Legal & Professional
“This new space reflects a shared belief that the most meaningful AI innovation happens through close collaboration with customers.”
“We are thrilled to support LexisNexis as it turns that collaboration into new products and experiences with real-world impact.”
OpenAI statement
“Bringing trusted AI into professional work requires both rapid innovation and a strong technology foundation.”
“We look forward to continuing our collaboration with LexisNexis as it advances secure, authoritative AI capabilities for legal professionals.”
Scott Liska, Vice President at Amazon Web Services
