NEW GENERATION

For Jamie Khan the lightbulb moment occurred in a small seminar room during a presentation about insurance law. In January, on the final day of his annual bar convention in South Carolina in the United States, a speaker showed how generative artificial intelligence software could help litigation lawyers with research and document analysis. In the example given by the speaker, another lawyer, the AI analyzed facts about a car accident personal injury case fed into it.

Based on some instructions – “prompts” in AI speak – within seconds, the AI system spat out a winning argument for my case, followed shortly by counterarguments. Khan was impressed. “That was the lightbulb moment where I said OK, there's this thing AI and I've heard of that, but what can it do for us?”

The experience of Khan – partner and attorney at South Carolina law firm McCullough Khan Appel – is emblematic of many others in the legal sector. Around the world, a growing number of lawyers are using generative AI − software that can produce answers to search queries, summaries, first drafts, and and other content in response to simple instructions – to increase efficiency, automate data analysis and speed client research.

According to international research published last year by LexisNexis Legal & Professional, part of RELX, nearly half (47%) of lawyers questioned said they believed that generative AI would have a transformative impact on law.

Time saving

Small and medium-sized law firms are always looking for tools to help them increase efficiency to manage increasing workloads with limited resources, says Paul Speca, a legal technology expert of small law markets at LexisNexis Legal & Professional.

Common challenges include being stretched thin, lack of support staff, and hours spent on time-consuming tasks such as research, Speca says. “In small firms, research is often not billable to a client so getting to the answer faster is a top objective.”

Last year, LexisNexis released Lexis+ AI to address these challenges. The generative AI software includes conversational search to help lawyers quickly get up to speed on new topics – summarizing lengthy and complex documents. It can also write first draft of a legal document or an email to a client within a minute.

After the revelatory generative AI demo at the bar convention, Khan decided to experiment with generative AI at his firm.

Earlier this year, Khan’s firm began to use Lexis+ AI for answering legal questions, drafting documents, summarizing legal cases and analyzing documents.

“We can type in a legal question,” he says. “What are the rules for X, Y and Z? Or … is this theory allowed in South Carolina?” says Khan, a former detective with the Charleston Police Department before he entered law school.

“Within less than a minute Lexis+ AI will give us back its analysis of that question, and the citations to either the cases, rules or other authority that supports it.”

The AI is also useful for speedy analysis of court documents and for deposition – a witness out-out-court testimony before a trial – he adds.

“You can take 40-page court order documents and upload it into Lexis+ AI and ask it multiple questions about the information, including what the document specifically says about this or that, and the dates and timelines, he says.

“On a given average day I would say 30 to 40 percent of my day is writing something,” Khan says. “It can take a long time. And if you're looking for a little needle in a haystack, it can take even longer.”

The firm’s lawyers always check AI outputs for facts and legal soundness, he adds.

Although it is too early for the firm to estimate a return on investment from Lexis+ AI, Khan reckons that it has probably already given the firm a competitive advantage.

“A lot of the other things, I believe, translate mostly into saving time and being more efficient, which probably translates into a competitive edge because I can do more things in the day.”

Kate Dunnington is an equity partner at Bubalo Law, in Louisville, Kentucky.

The firm specializes in personal injury cases including car accidents, premises liability, and medical malpractice and negligence

Dunnington specializes in representing plaintiff work and electronic or “e-discovery”. Given that most lawsuit information is now exchanged electronically, e-discovery involves sifting through, analyzing and refining large amounts of information.

At the start of 2024, the firm began to use Lexis+ AI, to help with legal research, drafting briefs and filings, and analyzing opponents’ documents and legal arguments.

Although the firm is a long-established customer of LexisNexis, Dunnington says that she had some initial reservations about using the information provider’s new AI tool.

“A lot of these AI tools are really new. And I think that they have to be used with some caution. You hear a lot of the downsides such as the AI making up facts or “hallucinations”. There are certainly a lot of considerations that need to go in it especially for a lawyer where we have specific duties regarding privacy and confidentiality.”

However, Dunnington says that she was reassured by Lexis+ AI's guard rails including citing legal information sources its text outputs are based on and the AI system not retaining client information. Uploaded documents are always purged at the end of each session and users can manage or delete their prompt conversation history.

Dunnington has found Lexis+ AI helpful for initial legal analysis and outlining arguments, but still validates the sources and does her own writing.

Using the AI saves some time compared to having to do initial research and drafting from scratch, she adds. In one recent example, Dunnington had a “very short timeline” to learn about and review a case. To speed up her research, she fed court filings relating to the case into Lexis+ AI which summarized them, saving her up to one day of laborious research.

“It's about efficiency,” she says. "I have limited time trying to run a law firm and litigate cases. And if I can catch a break by having a tool that will give me something to work off ... such as a draft client letter, a draft brief research summary, then I'm happy to take that and it will save me hours of research.”

The AI isn’t perfect, of course. “Sometimes the AI doesn’t quite get something,” says Dunnington, adding that the need for nuance and lived experience underscores the value of “attorney analysis”.

Law firms should view AI as doing much of the work of a trusted colleague who responds to requests, she adds. With oversight by experienced lawyers, Lexis+ AI has become an important resource for the firm.

The additional brainpower provided by generative AI can help small and medium-sized law firms compete with larger law firms.

Competing with large law firms

“We strongly think that generative AI will help us punch above our weight class,” says Kevin Thompson, manager partner and co-founder at Thompson Burton, a Tennessee-based law firm. “Now these AI tools are available and deployed at scale to where we have access to the same tools that larger firms have.”

The firm has tested Lexis+ AI and has found it useful for summarizing documents and drafting client communications, based on prompts.

AI can help automate tasks like drafting initial key legal arguments which would otherwise require many associate hours, says Thompson. This allows smaller firms to handle more complex litigation.

“The ability to sort through hundreds of documents, such as for discovery requests, can now be automated, although there's no replacement for the judgment of an experienced attorney,” says Thompson.  

Training attorneys on how to properly use AI tools is important to avoid “garbage in-garbage out” issues − poor quality data inputs into IT systems producing poor quality outputs − Thompson cautions. Prompts need to be clear, he says. Other challenges include training lawyers to use the tools and avoiding issues AI “hallucinations” due to vague or limited source material, he adds.

“Something that would take associates 50 hours, can now take two hours,” he says.

As legal AI improves, it will be capable of handling more complex legal tasks − albeit with human oversight − he says.

“We're very early in this journey. But this technology is moving at an exponential pace. And so, in the next couple of years I think we'll be at a place where first draft of pleadings for example, a motion for summary judgement can be prepared with AI, and then of course it will need to be cleaned up with a trained eye.”

One thing is clear, lawyers cannot afford to ignore the rise of AI within their profession, says Thompson. “It's like a meteor coming for the profession. And I think it's important for lawyers to master this tool. It's a game changer.”

It is still early days for the use of generative AI in the legal sector, but early results are encouraging. Law firms using Lexis+ AI report big time savings from these features, allowing them to compete with larger firms. Others say the generative AI means they can handle more sophisticated legal matters. Some firms are surprised by how quickly the AI could inform them on complex topics, says Speca.  

Working with Lexis+ AI is like collaborating with a trusted colleague who can respond to requests and refine answers. It's an extension of you, he adds.

More than half of new customers are buying Lexis+ AI capabilities. The features customers value most are drafting, followed by research and information summarization, he says.

How will law firms’ use of AI change in the next five years or so? Speca predicts that the use of AI will continue to expand in the three core functions of conversational search, drafting and summarization, and document analysis, while becoming more of a personal assistant - by anticipating upcoming deliverables and informing output with firms' own data.

AI will absolutely change the role of lawyers,” says Speca. “I think that it's going to provide a lot more time so firms either take on more work and they can take matters on maybe where they would previously have felt it was outside their reach and would have had to refer to other folks.”

And although the legal sector is no stranger to new technology, something about the rapidity of AI use and firms’ interest in it feels different to previous technologies, Speca says.

“I’ve never seen a technology adoption like AI in the legal market,” he says. “Firms have been coming to us saying, I know I need to be part of this.”

The new Lexis+ AI technology includes conversational search, insightful summarization, legal drafting, and document upload and analysis capabilities.

In addition to help with practical tasks, lawyers say they value Lexis+ AI’s state-of-the-art encryption and privacy technology to keep sensitive data secure.

Customer feedback to LexisNexis indicates that security and privacy are among the highest barriers to generative AI adoption.

Answer quality is also crucial. Any legal research solution is only as good as the breadth and depth of the information repository from which it draws its answers to search queries. Lexis+ AI is trained on LexisNexis' global collection of 138bn legal and news documents and records spanning primary law, dockets patents, and more, providing trusted legal results grounded in verifiable sources with inline citations. This minimizes the risk of invented content, or hallucinations.

Picking the right “large language model” – the technology underpinning generative AI – is also important. LexisNexis Legal & Professional opted for a multi-model “large language model”, cherry picking what each LLM does best. As a result, the overall performance surpasses that of any one model, allowing users to benefit from the unique capabilities of each LLM while balancing out each one's weaknesses.

That approach and heavy investment in generative AI technology has already paid off.

Bank of America has identified RELX, LexisNexis's parent company, as one of the top 10 companies globally to benefit from generative AI.