LexisNexis Legal & Professional today (4 August) announced the opening of its Customer Innovation Lab in New York City – describing it as a new model for how legal AI gets built and shipped.
Within the Lab, legal professionals, LexisNexis engineers, and AI collaborators like OpenAI and Amazon Web Services will “build side by side”, solving workflow pain points with prototypes “in hours”.
The Lab launches with around 30 people, made up of engineers, AR scientists and productivity UX specialists, of which 20 are fully dedicated to the Lab. They have been hired in as well as moved internally, with the anticipation that LexisNexis will also cycle through its other 4,000 engineers and technologists.
Speaking to Legal IT Insider about the Lab, LexisNexis executive vice president and chief technology officer Greg Dickason said that it is a reflection of the speed of change, observing: “What was done in months and years in the past is now being done in weeks.”
With model providers such as Anthropic and OpenAI releasing models every six weeks to eight weeks, Dickason observed that “what we’re really seeing is that our customers are struggling with how do they absorb all of this AI, not just from the model providers, but also across the board from all the different vendors out there.”
The idea of the Lab is to bring LexisNexis engineers closer to the customer, with “none of this middle layer.” It is hoped that this will help customers to get a handle on how to cut through the noise as well as help to build products live.
Dickason says: “We did one this week, which I was pretty excited about. The customer gave us feedback, we iterated, they gave us more feedback, reiterated, and essentially in one hour, we had changed the product three times.
“For me, that’s the real sort of signal of how the Lab can work, is that we can [not only] understand customer problems, but put them right with the people who can build the solution, which is the engineers.”
Much of the development will focus on legal AI assistant LexisNexis Protégé, and asked how LexisNexis will streamline customer demands, Dickason said that “when you get that feedback from one customer, that doesn’t immediately become a product. It gives us really good ideas as to where we should be going. And then we can test it with a second set of customers and a third set. But very quickly, within a week or so, we would have tested it with, say, 10 or 20 different customers and got real ideas to what’s going to make a difference for them.”
He adds: “The Lab’s really helping us crystallise what’s most important.”
LexisNexis via the Lab is already engaging with associates and CIOs and technology leaders. It is already working with a few of the Am Law top 50 firms and a couple of the Am Law top 10 firms.
Examples of ideas that have come to fruition include an advanced, customer-managed Protégé Vault for analysing complex multimedia materials. Legal professionals will be able to store and analyse documents, videos, images, audio files, and other matter materials. A lawyer could, for example, analyse a two-hour deposition in minutes with Protégé, pinpoint the exact moments when key facts emerge, and trace findings directly to the timestamps and source materials.
Interestingly, as we enter a period in which a lot of the largest law firms are looking at leveraging their own ecosystem rather than buying a product off the shelf, and even training their own models, Dickason says the Lab helps “because it helps them conceptualise.”
“I see it as educational,” he says. “So it’s not just about coming and us getting all the benefit of it. It’s also for them to get other benefits to come in, understand how we think about fine tuning, where we see fine tuning models make sense and where you should still be using foundation models. We use a blend of models across all the major vendors, but also fine tune our own. And I think it really comes down to what’s the right use case for your particular need , what you need to do.”
While the Lab is currently a physical space in New York, LexisNexis will also be looking at rolling out in other major centers around the world.
Dickason says: “I think you get so much more when people are in one room and they can actually see and interact. You get far more when people can see the response. And say ‘okay, that worked. That didn’t work.’ You don’t get that over Teams, et cetera.”
“Congratulations to LexisNexis on the launch of its Customer Innovation Lab,” said Scott Liska, VP AWSI, Amazon Web Services in a 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.”
At the time of publishing, LexisNexis was looking for a director of software innovation, if you think that has your name on it, you can take a look at that role here: https://www.builtinnyc.com/job/director-software-engineering-customer-innovation-lab/9690097
