5 Drafting Challenges Solved with LexisNexis Protégé™︎

AI-powered drafting is changing how Canadian lawyers approach legal work. This article explores how the AI assistant Protégé^TM, available in Lexis+ AI and Lexis^® Create+, supports a connected drafting workflow. By reducing repetitive tasks and providing drafts grounded in trusted legal authority, lawyers can focus on strategy, consistency, and client outcomes.

AI Is Reshaping the Drafting Process

Legal drafting has always been central to legal practice, but it is also one of the most time-intensive activities lawyers perform. From initial emails and document review to research, drafting, and revision, much of the process involves repeated preparation and manual comparison.

AI-powered drafting is changing this reality. By automating lower-value steps and anchoring outputs in reliable legal sources, AI assistants like Protégé allow lawyers to move more quickly from information gathering to analysis, advocacy, and client advice without sacrificing quality or control.

Why Legal Drafting Is Ripe for Innovation

Lawyers across jurisdictions increasingly see drafting as a prime opportunity for AI support. In the LexisNexis^® International Legal Generative AI Report, more than half of surveyed lawyers identified document drafting as a top use case for generative AI and adoption has only accelerated since the survey.

That momentum reflects how drafting actually works in practice. A single document may begin with a client email, incorporate research from multiple sources, and go through several iterations in Microsoft Word. AI can streamline this workflow by summarizing inputs, surfacing relevant authority, and accelerating early drafts, which frees lawyers to focus on judgment, refinement, and outcomes.

For Canadian legal professionals balancing growing workloads and client expectations, this shift represents both a productivity gain and a quality opportunity.

A Connected Approach to Legal Drafting

Protégé was designed to support legal drafting as an end-to-end workflow rather than a single task. Embedded across Lexis+ AI and Lexis Create+, Protégé helps lawyers work seamlessly across drafting, research, and review while remaining in the tools they already use, like Microsoft Word.

How connected drafting works with Protégé:

• Draft directly within Microsoft 365. Lexis Create+ integrates with Microsoft Word and Outlook, enabling lawyers to begin drafting from an email, attachment, or blank document with access to LexisNexis Canada legal content.
• Ground drafts in trusted authority and internal precedent. Protégé draws on LexisNexis Canada legal sources and a firm’s own documents, helping ensure drafts reflect both current law and organizational standards.
• Maintain transparency and citation confidence. Linked sources and LexisNexis Citations Service allow lawyers to review, validate, and defend every legal position with clarity.

Together, Lexis+ AI and Lexis Create+ support a drafting experience that is faster, more consistent, and easier to validate.

What You Can Do With AI-Powered Drafting

With Protégé supporting a connected workflow, lawyers can handle a wide range of drafting and review tasks more efficiently, including:

• Summarizing lengthy email chains and attachments to quickly understand a matter
• Asking targeted questions of documents to extract key facts and obligations
• Getting answers to legal questions supported by authoritative Canadian sources
• Drafting agreements, briefs, memos, and other legal documents tailored to specific objectives
• Revising individual clauses or sections to adjust tone, risk, or negotiating position
• Preparing internal memos and client-facing communications
• Verifying citations and legal authority through linked sources and LexisNexis Citation signals

This flexibility allows drafting to happen wherever the work starts without breaking focus.

Less Obvious Ways Protégé Enhances Drafting

Many lawyers are familiar with using AI to generate a first draft from a prompt. Protégé goes further by supporting drafting in ways that reflect how legal work takes shape.

Start with your existing documents.
Rather than starting from a blank page, upload matter-specific materials into a secure Vault and use them to generate drafts that reflect the facts, history, and context of the file.

Draft directly from email.
Within Microsoft Outlook, Protégé can summarize long threads, extract action items, convert PDFs into editable Word documents, or generate clauses that can be refined without leaving your inbox.

Preserve consistency through DMS integration.
By benchmarking clauses against prior firm documents, Protégé helps maintain company style, approved language, and required provisions which reduce risk and rework.

Pressure test legal strategy.
Lawyers can quickly generate counterarguments, explore alternative positions, or compare buyer- and seller-friendly versions of a draft to prepare for negotiation or litigation.

Rely on built-in citation integrity.
Unlike general-purpose AI tools, Protégé grounds outputs in vetted LexisNexis Canada content, with citation signals and source links that support review and verification.

Supporting Better Outcomes, Not Just Faster Drafts
Legal drafting will always require professional judgment. What AI changes is how much time lawyers spend on repetitive groundwork versus higher-value thinking.

By delivering reliable first drafts, supporting iterative refinement, and maintaining clear links to authoritative sources, Protégé helps Canadian lawyers focus on shaping arguments, advising clients, and achieving better outcomes across a fully connected drafting workflow.

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