LexisNexis unveils Protégé AI assistant to boost UK legal work
LexisNexis has launched Protégé, an AI assistant with agentic capabilities, designed to enhance efficiency in legal workflows for UK lawyers.
AI tool for legal tasks
The company announced that Protégé is designed to support legal professionals in drafting, researching, and providing advice to clients more quickly and accurately. Protégé leverages both customer and LexisNexis content to accelerate drafting, summarisation, and research-related tasks in a secure environment.
Developed in partnership with Eversheds Sutherland International, Irwin Mitchell and other law firms, Protégé incorporates input from these organisations as part of a customer-led innovation approach. According to LexisNexis, the technology is available across a suite of the company's products, including its Lexis+ AI legal workflow platform and the Microsoft Word-based Lexis Create+ system.
Agentic AI and compliance
Protégé uses proprietary agentic AI, a technology that enables it to undertake multi-step legal tasks, review and improve its output, and recommend workflow actions. This gives lawyers the scope to focus on more strategic aspects of their work.
LexisNexis stated that Protégé is built with a focus on privacy, compliance, and security, and that the platform supports integration with several document management systems, including iManage and SharePoint. This allows lawyers to query, extract clauses and draft directly from their firm's internal know-how and precedent databases.
Specific features
Protégé can draft tailored transactional documents and check its work before passing it on for human legal review. The drafted documents are editable within Lexis+ AI or Microsoft Word. The system can also suggest relevant workflow actions, such as producing research notes or document summaries, based on uploaded documents.
The AI assistant is programmed to suggest refinements to user queries and assist with follow-up prompts that are personalised to the user's workflow. With its Vault feature, users can securely store large volumes of legal documents and apply the AI system to summarise content, conduct research, or generate timelines based on the information provided.
Industry collaboration
Protégé has undergone development and testing in close collaboration with several clients in the legal sector. Eleanor Windsor, Partner and Director of Knowledge at Irwin Mitchell, commented on the process:
"Working closely with LexisNexis during the development of Protégé has given us the opportunity to help shape a tool that genuinely addresses the practical demands of legal work. The technology will save our teams time and allow them to focus more on strategic client matters."
Gerry Duffy, Managing Director of LexisNexis UK, outlined the company's vision for the application:
"LexisNexis is focused on improving outcomes and unlocking new levels of efficiency and value in legal work to support our customers' success. Our vision is for every legal professional to have a personalised AI assistant that makes their life better, and we're delighted to deploy that to the UK through our world-class, fully integrated AI technology platform."
Technological integration
Protégé is based on the broader LexisNexis technology platform, which the company says is capable of integrating multiple types of artificial intelligence. This includes extractive AI, which identifies relevant material within existing content, and generative AI, which creates new content based on prompts or user instructions. With the addition of agentic AI, the system aims to perform independent legal and workflow tasks without constant direct user input.
Supported document management system integrations and workflow options are designed to address the requirements of firms of different sizes and structures, offering a high degree of flexibility. The AI assistant was developed with human oversight and input from law firm partners to ensure accuracy and practical usability for legal professionals in the UK.