LexisNexis Legal & Professional has opened a Customer Innovation Lab in New York City where legal professionals, engineers, and technology partners will build and test new legal AI capabilities together. The lab moves customer involvement to the front of product development instead of asking firms to validate finished tools.
Lawyers, in-house counsel, judges, and academics will bring specific workflow problems and product ideas into the lab. LexisNexis engineers will then build and test prototypes alongside those customers in real time. Initial prototypes can be created within hours or days, the company said, and successful concepts may become production-ready in weeks.
How the lab works
Each prototype must pass LexisNexis standards for accuracy, security, quality and legal-domain performance before it enters the company's platform. Projects that clear that bar may become customized capabilities for individual customers or broader skills and agents available through Lexis+ with Protégé, the company's agentic legal AI platform.
OpenAI and Amazon Web Services are participating as technology collaborators. They work with customers and LexisNexis teams to test how newer AI models and infrastructure can address complex legal workflows. LexisNexis engineers lead each session and assess model outputs using the company's private infrastructure, legal content, and validation processes.
The lab has already worked with dozens of customers on prototypes. Several projects are expected to reach Lexis+ with Protégé. One initiative involves legal AI models developed by LexisNexis specifically for professional legal work, using its own legal content and subject-matter expertise to improve research, analysis, drafting, and other tasks.
Secure workrooms and advanced drafting tools
Another planned capability is a customer-managed Protégé Vault for securely storing and analyzing documents, videos, images, audio recordings and other matter-related materials. For example, a legal professional could use Protégé to analyze a lengthy deposition, identify relevant statements, and trace findings to specific timestamps and original sources.
LexisNexis is also developing secure Protégé Workrooms. These will allow internal legal teams, outside counsel, clients, experts, and other authorized participants to share documents, analyses, AI skills, and matter-related work within one controlled environment. The workrooms will include detailed access permissions meant to protect confidential information.
Legal drafting is one of the lab's initial priorities. Independent research cited by LexisNexis indicates that lawyers spend roughly 40% to 60% of their time drafting and reviewing documents. Customers have identified persistent challenges around personalization, writing tone, subject-matter knowledge, strategic positioning, and accuracy.
Lab prototypes include drafting tools that can adapt to an organization's preferred style, precedents, and internal playbooks - an area where resources like AI for Legal Professionals can help teams develop the skills to work with such tools effectively. The planned tools could identify risks, recommend redlines based on a customer's standards, and retain context across related documents, allowing a legal professional to draft a primary document and supporting materials without rebuilding context.
Document-aware editing tools tailored to different legal document types are also in development. These are expected to preserve lawyer oversight by displaying AI-generated changes through features such as Track Changes and version histories. The company plans to place its proprietary trust markers within the drafting workflow, helping users verify AI-generated work without moving content between systems.
Drafting tools could also incorporate LexisNexis litigation, judicial, and regulatory analytics to support more informed strategic decisions. Every capability developed through the lab will be grounded in LexisNexis' legal information resources, which include roughly 200 billion documents and records, four million daily additions, 150 years of attorney-led curation, and Shepard's citation intelligence.
Broader industry context
The New York lab will operate on an ongoing basis. LexisNexis also plans to expand the model into additional markets globally. Skills like document review and contract analysis that the lab is targeting overlap directly with training curricula such as AI for Paralegals, which covers the fundamentals of working with AI in legal workflows.
LexisNexis Legal & Professional serves customers in more than 150 countries and employs roughly 11,900 people. It is part of RELX.
Greg Dickason, Chief Technology Officer at LexisNexis Legal & Professional, said: "The Customer Innovation Lab changes who's in the room when legal AI gets built. Customers help originate and shape what we build from day one." He added, "Our job is to validate it, ground it in citable legal authority and decide what's ready to scale into Lexis+ with Protégé, the platform our customers rely on every day."
OpenAI said in a statement: "This new space reflects a shared belief that the most meaningful AI innovation happens through close collaboration with customers. We are thrilled to support LexisNexis as it turns that collaboration into new products and experiences with real-world impact."
Scott Liska, Vice President at Amazon Web Services, said: "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."
Why this matters for legal professionals
The lab signals that LexisNexis is investing in co-development rather than top-down product releases. For law firms and legal departments, this means tools that address real daily friction - especially around drafting and document review - may arrive faster and with more direct input from practitioners. The emphasis on secure environments and granular permissions also suggests that enterprise-grade confidentiality controls are being baked into the product from the start, not added as afterthoughts. Professionals who develop familiarity with these platforms now will be better positioned to shape how their organizations adopt legal AI.
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