Civil Law

As someone who worked in the KM trenches for years, I have repeatedly watched legal tech companies promise to tame the wild west of documents residing in law firm Document Management Systems (DMS). Over the years I implemented or worked with a variety of KM solutions from Lexis, West and smaller software companies.  Recently the dominant DMS providers iManage and Netdocs have launched AI enabled drafting solutions

This past July Lexis completed the acquisition of Henchman, a Belgium based legal tech company that enriches the data from the DMS for faster document drafting. 

Over the past decade many large law firms opted to implement the Lexis LSA solution which offered the unique taxonomy, tagging and algorithms from their corporate intelligence product Intelligize to tame the DMS precedent collection. As a fan of LSA I wanted to find out what would happen to the LSA product following the Lexis acquisition of Henchman. Was LSA about to be sunset? Would there be a marriage of LSA and Henchman and most important …Would it be a happy one? I am happy to report – after talking to Jeff Pfeifer, Chief Product Officer, Canda, Ireland, US and USA – I am feeling optimistic.

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Lexis Search Advantage has been in the market for over a decade. It included solutions for both transactional and litigation documents. Both LSA and Henchmen work by analyzing the contents of a firm’s DMS. Let’s be honest, DMS’s like many things in life are subject to the 80/20 rule. Eighty percent of the documents in a DMS are not valuable precedent or even final documents. DMSs are loaded with document fragments, redundant documents with variant names and the  ultimate dross – fax cover sheets, lunch menus, March Madness Bracket Sheets…..  In my prior experience with LSA, KM experts with curation expertise were required to develop vetting rules to winnow down the DMS collection to identify a smaller subset of high value DMS documents  to be ingested by LSA. Was the same thing true for the new Henchman based solution?

I asked Pheifer to explain the roadmap for both LSA and Henchman.  The firs thing he pointed out is that Henchman has been rebranded as Lexis Create DMS.

Henchman was developed as a tool for active drafting and within the Lexis suite of product will enable lawyers to access exemplars from within the firm’s DMS from within Microsoft Word during the drafting process. The ultimate goal is to marry the two products together and deliver the benefits of both Henchman and LSA within the drafting process.

Current LSA Subscribers – Here’s the bottom line. You will be able to to continue LSA for the foreseeable future. There are no plans to sunset LSA. LSA subscribers will not be pressured to migrate to a new platform. However, the Intelligize classifiers are scheduled to integrated in to Lexis Create DMS in January 2025.

Here is where I see the challenge. There are two kinds of firms.  Firms with KM teams who have curated documents and firms without KM teams. The benefits of Lexis Create DMS will be more immediately available to firms that have already created curated DMS collection of valuable precedents. Today Lexis Create DMS is not a magic bullet that can easily crawl a DMS of 30 million documents and product a good outcome.

The fims with a mature KM environment, which can point  LCDMS at a specific DMS folder where the best templates exemplars and  model  clauses have been curated will have a “plug and play” type implementation.

Firms without a curated repository of documents can not use Henchman alone to solve the curation problem outlined above.  Currently firms without a preexisting precedent folder have to find ways of limiting the number of documents ingested by LC-DMS. For example, they only ingest the most recent 5 years. Once the LSA features including the Intelligize classifiers are added to LC DMS it will be easier for firms to optimize the quality and relevance of the documents going into the system.

Here is the Ultimate Marriage of LSA and Henchman. The LSA indexing will be used to help firms reuse valuable documents as grounding data for generative AI document drafting. Benefits of document organization and classification from LSA along with the benefits of Clause identification at the point of drafting from Henchmen.

What’s Next?

Lexis + AI. In January Henchman will become part of Lexis + AI. Firms that don’t have their own curated transactional dataset can leverage Henchman  using  publicly available data that is available within Lexis + Ai to generate drafts. Intelligize classifiers will be incorporated in to Lexis Create DMS in January and will be available both in Word and Lexis +AI for generative AI drafting.

Plans for Litigation Documents and Drafting.  Pfeifer noted that Lexis has amassed  a collection of 32 million litigation documents including briefs, pleading motions and complaints. In addition, they have built a rules based classification system which can identify 130 litigation types with high levels of accuracy. All of this intelligence will be integrated into Lexis Create DMS.

These same litigation documents are currently used in the Lexis +AI  argument drafting tool in Lexis + AI. In 2025 firms will be able to use Lexis Create DMS  with both Henchman LSA features for drafting litigation documents. In addition, litigation groups can use their own documents as grounding data for a GAI drafting experience.

All of these new drafting capabilities can be customized at the firm and personal level using Lexis Create and Lexis Protégé.

• Lexis Create is product capability for use in MS Word or Outlook. So ability for bring in DMS samples and asking word to create a draft.
• Protégé is an ai assistant capability that is presented within the context of the specific Lexis Nexis product (e.g. Lexis +AI or Intelligize)

Cracking the Grounding Data Challenge. Most firms are grappling with creating a custom repository of  grounding data which can be used to create Gen AI answers Protégé will help firms address this challenge.

Next evolution of Lexis+AI. Lexis AI solutions currently are offered in 5 countries outside the US. This  will be expanded to 8  additional countries in Europe, AsiaPac and and South Africa. The next launch will be for Austria.

New Protégé  Capabilities will include  high value task expansion  including surveys, document comparison,  and building internal  databases.

APIs. Pfeifer also highlighter that customer can enhance all of their GAI projects by accessing  Lexis data via APIs. This of course requires a special license.

.Generative AI adoption in marketplace.  I asked Pfeifer if law firms were getting more comfortable with GAI adoption. Pfeifer noted that Gen AI adoption rates in law firms with 50 or fewer attorneys is  “off the charts.”  Small firms have  embraced  GAI adoption much more quickly than large firms. Smaller firms also experience the benefits of GAI efficiencies immediately. But he also noted that large firm adoption is picking up as firms become more comfortable with security review issues and embrace the products from a limited number of  trusted vendors.

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