Westlaw have been getting the AI press for the last couple of weeks so they had to do something!
Artificial Lawyer reports
LexisNexis and OpenAI have launched a partnership that will see the legal tech giant deploy the LLM developer’s APIs across its product ecosystem, and work with them to fine-tune OpenAI models for legal needs.
LexisNexis told Artificial Lawyer: ‘OpenAI and LexisNexis will collaborate on model fine-tuning to deliver the highest quality results to customers. Because legal language can be complex, we deploy the best LLM for the customer use case. Model fine-tuning of the latest reasoning models to handle our customers’ very sophisticated legal queries is essential.’
They added that this will include improving ‘workflows that depend on generative AI technology for enhanced chain of thought reasoning’ – which is a key component for agentic actions, i.e. plan an action or several actions via reasoning, then execute that multi-part plan.
The company explained that this will help boost Lexis’ genAI legal products such as the Lexis+ AI workflow solution and the LexisNexis Protégé personalized AI assistant. They also noted they have already been using OpenAI’s models since 2022 – around the same time many other companies started to leverage them.
Brad Lightcap, Chief Operating Officer at OpenAI, said: ‘We’re thrilled to use our most advanced AI models to power new use cases that accelerate productivity, help gather legal insights faster, and simplify complex workflows for thousands of customers on LexisNexis’ platform.’
Commenting on the agreement to work more closely with OpenAI, Jeff Reihl, EVP and Chief Technology Officer at LexisNexis Legal & Professional, said: ‘At LexisNexis, we are dedicated to delivering high-quality, highly personalized AI innovation for legal and business professionals to achieve faster, enhanced outcomes.
‘As leaders in customer-focused legal AI, we prioritize selecting top-performing models and developing custom models for customers’ complex workflows and quickly integrating those models into our products. Our direct collaboration with OpenAI allows us to accelerate this innovation.’
Is this a big deal?
Well, the proof will be in the genAI pudding. It’s fair to say that a huge swathe of legal tech products are now connected to multiple LLMs to provide a range of skills that are core to their offering, from giants such as Lexis, to the smallest, newest startups. From there both legal tech companies and law firm teams have refined responses, evolved their approach to prompting, and built sophisticated application layers to get more out of those foundational language models.
But, any form of close collaboration with such a major LLM developer is significant, and especially now when LexisNexis and its peers are in a major battle to establish their genAI credentials in the legal market.
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