The wait is over: Lexis+ AI is now available for U.S. customers. This is a big deal. In the last year, we’ve been both dazzled by how powerful tools like ChatGPT are for research and writing and frightened by the cautionary tales of AI making up answers that are too good to be true.
Lexis+ AI, and Westlaw’s AI Assisted Research will which no-doubt soon follow, have the potential to ease those fears by combining the power of AI with trusted legal content. That’s a game-changer for the use of AI in legal research and writing.
This type of pairing is known as retrieval-augmented generation. RAG is an AI framework for retrieving facts from an external knowledge base (in this case, content from LexisNexis) to ground large language models (LLMs) on the most accurate, up-to-date information.
Here’s more from Law 360:
Called Lexis+ AI, the chatbot includes legal citations in its responses. LexisNexis said this feature will reduce the risk of invented content, which is sometimes referred to as “hallucinations,” and will deliver more accurate results…
The tool also addresses data security and privacy concerns by purging uploaded documents at the end of each session. Users can delete their prompt conversation history, and the interactions are also encrypted.
According to Bob Ambrogi’s LawSites, Lexis+ AI is launching with the ability to perform four core tasks:
- Conversational search, by which legal researchers can interact with the AI in back-and-forth conversations, asking questions and then asking the AI to adjust or refine the response.
- Document drafting, by which a user can quickly produce legal arguments, contract clauses, client communications and the like, all from a simple user prompt.
- Summarization, providing summaries of cases in seconds.
- Document uploading, to enable users to analyze, summarize, and query either a single legal document or a set of up to 10 documents.
In the screenshot below, you can see that the answers generated by Lexis+ AI provide citations to trusted legal content from LexisNexis. I’m super excited about the potential of this release. Unfortunately, it’s not yet available to the law school market so I was unable to test it myself.
For more information about Lexis+ AI, check out the full article in LawSites.
