LexisNexis opened a Customer Innovation Lab in New York City on August 21, 2026, where legal professionals, company engineers, and AI partners including OpenAI and Amazon Web Services build legal AI tools side by side from the first working session. The model reverses the typical product cycle: instead of building capabilities and asking customers to validate them afterward, the Lab turns specific workflow pain points into tested prototypes in hours or days and production-ready features within weeks.
The Lab is an ongoing operation, not a one-off event. Lawyers, corporate legal teams, judges, and academics bring concrete problems and ideas into the space. LexisNexis engineers build against those problems in real time, and prototypes advance only after clearing the company's standards for quality, accuracy, and security. Successful work becomes new skills or agents within the LexisNexis agentic platform, either customized for a single customer or scaled across the core platform.
What's already shipping from the Lab
Dozens of customers have already worked in the Lab, and several capabilities have advanced into Lexis+ with Protégé. One is a customer-managed Protégé Vault for analyzing complex multimedia materials. A lawyer could upload a two-hour deposition and pinpoint in minutes the exact moments when key facts emerge, with findings traced directly to timestamps and source materials.
The Lab also produced secure Protégé Workrooms for team collaboration. Legal professionals can share documents, analyses, skills, and AI-assisted work with internal teams, outside counsel, clients, and experts, with precise permissions and access controls inside the LexisNexis environment. LexisNexis-developed legal AI models are also in development, built on authoritative legal content and the company's own legal expertise.
Drafting quality is the first problem in scope
The Lab's current focus is legal drafting, which independent research shows consumes 40 to 60 percent of lawyers' time - more than any other task. LexisNexis confirmed this pattern directly with customers, who identified personalization, tonality, subject matter expertise, strategic positioning, and legal accuracy as unmet needs in drafting tools.
The AI drafting capabilities being prototyped adapt to a firm's own style, precedents, and playbooks; flag risk and suggest redlines against customer standards; and carry context across related documents so drafting supporting materials doesn't start from scratch. The tools preserve lawyer control through visible AI-generated edits, Track Changes, and version history, and surface LexisNexis trust markers at the point of need so verification doesn't require cut-and-paste checks. Litigation, judicial, and regulatory analytics are integrated into the drafting workflow to inform strategy.
OpenAI and AWS participate in Lab sessions to explore how their latest models apply to complex legal work, but LexisNexis engineers anchor every session. They apply the company's secure infrastructure, authoritative content, and validation standards to evaluate every model output.
"Our vision is to empower customers with world-leading, purpose-built, and trusted legal AI," said Greg Dickason, Chief Technology Officer at LexisNexis Legal & Professional. "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. 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."
LexisNexis plans to expand the Lab beyond New York. Interested law firms and legal departments can learn more at lexisnexis.com/lab.
Why this matters for legal professionals
The Lab's model puts lawyers in the product development room before code is written, which means the tools that ship are built around how legal work actually happens rather than how vendors imagine it. For legal professionals, the practical consequence is that drafting tools are being designed to match firm-specific standards and preserve lawyer control over edits - not to replace judgment, but to compress the time spent on document production. The emphasis on citable authority and trust markers also signals that AI outputs will be traceable to source materials, which matters for anyone responsible for the accuracy of filed work. For those working in legal support roles, the shift toward document-aware AI tools is worth watching closely - the AI Learning Path for Paralegals covers the kind of document analysis and drafting assistance skills these tools are beginning to automate. The broader takeaway for anyone practicing law: expect AI capabilities to arrive with customer input baked in, not as generic features bolted onto existing software. The Lab's focus on drafting - the single largest time sink in legal work - suggests the next wave of legal AI will target the daily mechanics of practice, not just research and summarization.
Your membership also unlocks:
