LexisNexis and Microsoft announce Lexis Connect, an AI-powered matter intake application
Lexis Connect is built specifically for corporate legal teams, and built on Microsoft Teams. It includes two generative AI powered chatbots: Ask Legal, and a legal research assistant chatbot tied directly to Lexis Connect.
In an effort to meet corporate legal teams where they are—that is, on the collaboration platform they are on—LexisNexis and Microsoft have partnered to launch a generative artificial intelligence-powered matter intake solution for Microsoft Teams.
The tool, called Lexis Connect, is now open for free commercial preview, where a select number of legal departments will test the tool and provide feedback on its development.
Serena Wellen, the senior director of product management at LexisNexis, noted that “five to six slots” would be available for the commercial preview. Companies can potentially sign up for a slot during the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC) 2023 conference following a “one-on-one demo.” These customers would also then receive the product at a discount should they decide to subscribe.
Wellen noted that Microsoft is the tool’s first commercial preview customer, and that the solution was built in partnership with the company’s general manager and associate general counsel of digital transformation, Jason Barnwell.
She added that Lexis expects the tool to officially launch “during the summer.”
What is the Lexis Connect?
The matter management tool comes in a package of two: the Lexis Connect application—which is the hub of matter intake and management—and another application called Ask Legal, a generative AI-powered chatbot which can assist a requester within the organization with legal questions. Both are accessible as apps on Microsoft Teams.
Wellen noted that at this time, Lexis is working to develop the generative AI used in Ask Legal and Lexis Connect, and is hoping to use feedback from the customers in commercial preview to hone the technology further.
At the heart of Lexis Connect is its integration with Microsoft Teams “[When] you’re in the application, it feels like you are in a specialized in-house legal version of [Microsoft] Teams,” Wellen said.
Some of the key pain points the matter management and legal intake portion of the solution aims to solve are the struggles corporate legal teams have with locating relevant documents and gaining transparency into how projects are progressing through a visual timeline.
She added that via the Ask Legal chatbot, non-legal requesters can input a query, and the generative AI-powered tool can answer them in a conversational manner, freeing up the lawyer’s time. The chatbot can also cite and link the source documents where it received its output from, but is constrained to data within the business.
Wellen noted that the solution is “focused on [automating] repetitive tasks that come up for corporate counsel, like answering questions about company policies,” the date that a particular nondisclosure agreement was filed, or “if I can donate to a particular nonprofit organization who is a potential customer,” among other queries.
In additional to Ask Legal, Lexis Connect also includes its own generative AI-powered chatbot, called its legal research assistant, which is aimed at answering broader questions in-house legal teams may have. This solution has wider range than Ask Legal and leverages all of LexisNexis’ data to answer the research-based questions attorneys may have.
Currently in process is an integration with Microsoft Outlook so that emails can automatically be sorted into Lexis Connect’s intake ecosystem, Wellen said. What’s more, LexisNexis is exploring ways to integrate its recently announced Lexis+ AI platform into its new offerings.
