LexisNexis Expands Legal AI With Next-Generation Protégé General AI
LexisNexis Legal & Professional has expanded its legal AI platform with a next-generation release of Protégé General AI. The unified environment blends authoritative LexisNexis legal content, customer documents, and open web data inside the secure Lexis+ AI experience. For legal teams, that means broader analysis, stronger drafting support, and improved reasoning in one place.
What's new
Users can now choose between Protégé Legal AI-optimized for legal drafting and analysis-or Protégé General AI for broader tasks. A new Best Fit option automatically selects the most suitable model for the job, with options including Claude Sonnet 4.5, GPT-5.1, GPT-5, GPT-4o, Claude Sonnet 4, and OpenAI o3.
Shepard's Citation Agent is integrated into drafting to check, verify, and link to authoritative citations as you work. The interface centralizes your question, sources, citations, and drafts so you don't bounce between tools.
Why it matters for your practice
The system blends insights from legal content, your proprietary documents, and the open web-while giving you full control over which sources are used. Advanced reasoning and deeper research features help tackle complex matters with fewer manual steps. It's built for real workflows: drafting, research, strategy, and client communications.
How it works under the hood
A new agentic infrastructure coordinates multiple AI agents: an Orchestrator Agent, a Legal Research Agent, a Web Search Agent, and a Customer Document Research Agent. These agents interpret your request, break down legal questions, plan research steps, and pull insights from legal and nonlegal sources. The system builds on Agentic Retrieval-Augmented Generation to retrieve relevant information and produce grounded, accurate responses.
What you can do today
- Draft client communications and strategy memos with Shepard's-backed citations.
- Upload documents for summarization, issue spotting, and audience-specific formatting across many file types.
- Run deeper research on complex questions with source controls for Lexis content, your repository, and the open web.
- Use Best Fit model selection to match the model to the task automatically.
Trust, governance, and stack
Protégé is being developed in alignment with the RELX Responsible AI Principles, with contributions from more than 2,000 technologists and experts. The multi-cloud stack integrates advancements from AWS, Anthropic, Microsoft, Mistral, and OpenAI, and Shepard's Citation Service supports responses for added trust and authority.
This release follows the October launch of Protégé General AI and shows the company is moving fast on AI for legal workflows.
Practical next steps
- Start a pilot with one practice group and 3-5 priority use cases (e.g., research memos, client updates, deposition prep).
- Set source guardrails: Lexis content only, Lexis + internal docs, or include web-then document when each mode is appropriate.
- Measure impact: time saved per task, citation accuracy, and rework rates. Keep what works. Drop what doesn't.
- Integrate with your document management and playbooks so drafts flow into your standard review process.
Key quote
"Legal professionals want one trusted legal AI workflow solution. Only LexisNexis can bring together agentic intelligence, customer documents, open web insights, and our authoritative content to produce next-level legal drafts and work output backed by Shepard's." - Sean Fitzpatrick, CEO, LexisNexis North America, UK, and Ireland
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