Latest news with #JeffReihl
Forbes
25-03-2025
- Business
- Forbes
AI-Powered Law: LexisNexis CTO Reveals Why Waiting Is Not An Option
AI in Legal getty The legal industry, historically cautious about adopting disruptive technologies, is now at an AI-powered tipping point. Focusing on this transformation is LexisNexis Legal & Professional, harnessing artificial intelligence to redefine how lawyers perform their daily work. Their latest innovation, Protégé, a generative and agentic AI-powered legal assistant, aims to deliver efficiency, precision, and personalized legal workflows to firms around the globe. According to Jeff Reihl, EVP and Chief Technology Officer at LexisNexis Legal & Professional, the push toward AI was a natural evolution for the industry. "The work lawyers do lends itself perfectly to generative AI: drafting documents, conversational search to refine a question, and more," Reihl notes. "AI lends itself extraordinarily well to legal work." The unique value proposition of LexisNexis lies in its proprietary content and technology infrastructure. LexisNexis utilizes a Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) platform, grounding its large language models (LLMs) in an extensive database of over 160 billion documents, growing daily by 1.6 million new records. This approach ensures the accuracy, relevance, verifiability, and timeliness crucial to legal work. "A key differentiator for us is our proprietary content," explains Reihl. "We have an unmatched repository—over 160 billion documents and records, with 1.6 million new documents added daily from more than 50,000 sources.' He continues, 'we use a multi-model approach in which we select the best AI model for each legal use case, and a proprietary RAG platform that grounds answers in our repository of legal content for high-quality answers with validated citations. On top of that, we conduct model fine-tuning to ensure high performance of domain-specific, personalized LLMs." The company works closely with industry leaders like AWS, Microsoft, Anthropic, Mistral, and OpenAI to develop AI models that cater specifically to the legal sector, finely tuned to each use case. Protégé doesn't just respond to requests, it anticipates lawyers' next moves. "The vision behind Protégé is to personalize the AI experience," says Reihl. "Not every lawyer works the same way. Instead of putting the burden on the end user, Protégé will walk the user through their entire workflow and anticipate what they'll want to do." Early adopters are already reporting impressive results, according to the company. LexisNexis claims that law firms employing Protégé have seen marked improvements not just in productivity but also in the quality and comprehensiveness of legal research and document drafting. For LexisNexis, the AI advantage goes deeper than efficiency. It aims to reshape the very way lawyers approach their work. Legal professionals have long hesitated in embracing AI, partly due to early versions that were overly hyped yet underwhelming. LexisNexis tackles these hurdles by emphasizing security, compliance, and ethical AI development with robust human oversight. As Reihl emphasizes, "Trustworthiness remains a barrier due to security, confidentiality, hallucination, and recency risks in public LLMs—all serious issues for lawyers. We address these issues through our approach to AI development which prioritizes security, highest-quality answers, and performance. Our approach includes enterprise-grade security, compliance, and privacy, as well as a process grounded in responsible AI development that relies on human oversight." To address issues of ethical and responsible use of AI, LexisNexis Legal & Professional is a part of RELX, and have built their solutions in line with the RELX Responsible AI Principles. Reihl sends a clear message to firms still hesitant to embrace AI: "Waiting to embrace AI means falling behind because you won't be as effective as your competition or peers who are already using these tools. The time to invest in AI is now." Indeed, other industries provide cautionary tales. Firms slow to adopt transformative technology often lose competitive ground, as evidenced by Kodak's failure to adapt to digital photography or Blockbuster's dismissal of streaming services. Other legacy businesses can take lessons from LexisNexis' approach: prioritizing customer needs, adopting a culture of experimentation, and ensuring organizational agility to quickly embrace emerging technologies. Reihl suggests, 'You can start small by experimenting with some use cases and expand as you learn the benefits.' Looking five years ahead, Reihl envisions a landscape where every lawyer will benefit from a personalized AI assistant akin to Protégé. "Our vision is that every legal professional worldwide will have an AI assistant that is highly personalized to them," he explains. "Autonomous agents will perform work in the background, providing legal professionals with additional information they need even when they are not actively working." Despite AI's expansive role, Reihl stresses it won't replace the fundamentally human nature of law. "Law is fundamentally a human system, grounded in values, interpretation, and public trust. AI can assist legal professionals, but it won't replace the human responsibility at the heart of justice."
Associated Press
27-02-2025
- Business
- Associated Press
LexisNexis and OpenAI Announce Plan to Deliver Custom AI Technology for Legal Professionals
LexisNexis® Legal & Professional, a leading global provider of AI-powered analytics and decision tools, and OpenAI, today announced their plan to deploy OpenAI's APIs and fine-tuned models across the LexisNexis ecosystem of products like the Lexis+ AI® legal workflow solution and LexisNexis Protégé™ personalized AI assistant that intelligently powers productivity, drives next-level work quality, and enables legal and business professionals to unlock economic value. With the highest levels of enterprise security, compliance, and privacy, LexisNexis will directly leverage OpenAI's latest models and jointly develop fined-tuned models for sophisticated legal workflows that depend on generative AI technology for enhanced 'chain of thought' reasoning. As part of the company's multi-model approach that selects the best AI model for each legal task, including custom LLMs, LexisNexis has leveraged OpenAI models in its products since 2022. This new collaboration enables LexisNexis to deploy the latest OpenAI models based on its cutting-edge research to best address the customer use case for personalized and highest-quality legal AI. 'At LexisNexis, we are dedicated to delivering high-quality, highly personalized AI innovation for legal and business professionals to achieve faster, enhanced outcomes,' stated Jeff Reihl, EVP and Chief Technology Officer at LexisNexis Legal & Professional. '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.' '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,' said Brad Lightcap, Chief Operating Officer at OpenAI. Additionally, as part of the agreement, LexisNexis global teams will expedite their own productivity benefits, including accelerating innovation to address customers' core needs, via ChatGPT Enterprise. The LexisNexis global technology platform seamlessly integrates each wave of AI innovation, including extractive AI, which finds relevant results within data and provides deep insights; generative AI, which excels at creating new content from data based on user-entered prompts or instruction; and agentic AI, which can intelligently and independently perform tasks on a user's behalf. Because LexisNexis can swiftly deliver innovative, trusted tools, customers realize improved outcomes and tangible value faster. For more information on the latest AI-powered offerings from LexisNexis, visit About LexisNexis AI Development LexisNexis customer-driven AI innovation focuses on analytics and decision tools that solve complex problems and enhance value. The company responsibly develops safe AI solutions with human oversight, backed by advanced encryption and privacy technology. Its global technology platform seamlessly integrates extractive, generative, and agentic AI within a scalable, multi-cloud infrastructure to drive rapid innovation and continuously improve answer quality, accuracy, and speed. A proprietary Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) platform grounds large language model (LLM) answers in a comprehensive repository of trusted legal content and metadata, delivering high-quality answers and validated citations. Its multi-model approach selects the best AI model for each use case, and model fine tuning ensures high performance of domain-specific, personalized LLMs, supported by partners AWS, Anthropic, Microsoft, Mistral, and OpenAI. The company employs over 2,000 technologists, data scientists, and experts to develop, test, and validate solutions in line with . About LexisNexis Legal & Professional LexisNexis® Legal & Professional provides legal, regulatory, and business information and analytics that help customers increase their productivity, improve decision-making, achieve better outcomes, and advance the rule of law around the world. As a digital pioneer, the company was the first to bring legal and business information online with its Lexis® and Nexis® services. LexisNexis Legal & Professional, which serves customers in more than 150 countries with 11,800 employees worldwide, is part of RELX, a global provider of information-based analytics and decision tools for professional and business customers. Dana Greenstein Director of Communications, North America & UK LexisNexis Legal & Professional 212-448-2163 [email protected]
