Inside the Innovation: How Protégé™︎ General AI Was Built to Balance Power, Privacy, and Choice

05 January, 2026

Authored by Seeta Bodke, Head of Product - Pacific, LexisNexis® Legal & Professional

At LexisNexis, our mission is to advance the rule of law through responsible innovation. The launch of Protégé General AI marks an important milestone in that journey bringing a secure, trusted, and adaptable AI assistant to legal professionals across Australia.

Protégé General AI allows users to select from a bouquet of large language models to conduct a wide range of tasks, from high-level exploration and strategic planning to industry intelligence, firm growth optimisation, and even employee retention analysis.

For many, however, a question naturally arose: “Why General AI?”

A New Era of Legal Intelligence

Our vision for Protégé is to become the AI assistant for every legal professional, meeting them where and how they work.

While core legal research, document analysis, and workflows such as due diligence and drafting remain central to legal practice, we know they are far from the only activities lawyers perform daily.

Australian lawyers and in-house legal teams also engage in strategic, operational, and client-facing tasks that extend beyond traditional legal boundaries, including business planning, stakeholder communication, market scanning, and firm operations.

This is why General AI was conceived: to address those adjacent, non-core legal tasks that practitioners handle every day, within the same secure environment as their legal AI workflows.

Our customers remain central to every product decision we make. We listen carefully to their feedback, not only from Australia, but from across the globe.

And from this feedback, one consistent theme emerged- legal professionals want to avoid context switching and conduct their legal and general tasks within Protégé itself, instead of jumping between multiple AI tools.

That insight drove the creation of a powerful combination: specialised legal AI assistants and a general-purpose AI layer that supports exploratory and cross-functional tasks inside a single, secure Lexis+ AI^® environment.

From Specialisation to Exploration: The Evolution of Protégé

Our early and continuing focus has been on providing AI solutions for core legal tasks such as document review, drafting, conversational legal search, and contract analysis.

But as AI evolved, so did the expectations of legal professionals.

With the rise of advanced large language models capable of contextual reasoning and adaptive intelligence, Protégé can now support far more generalised and exploratory functions - such as strategy building, performance management, and understanding new markets or clients.

In short, Protégé General AI has evolved from a specialist’s assistant to an adaptive legal partner, one that provides today’s lawyers not just with answers, but also with judgment, context, and control across their broader legal workflow.

Balancing Power and Precision: The Architecture Behind Protégé General AI

Protégé General AI provides power with flexibility, designed to deliver both depth and control across every task.

Security and Privacy by Design: The fully encrypted Lexis+ AI environment ensures data protections that far exceed what consumer-grade tools offer.

Flexible Model Choice: Users can select the AI model that best fits each task or use case, and we continually evolve to include the latest models and versions.

CaseBase^® Citation Agent: An advanced citation system proactively checks legal references for human review.

Powerful Deep Research Capabilities: Legal professionals can uncover comprehensive insights across any topic, supported by contextual understanding.

Integrated General and Legal AI: By securely combining Protégé General AI and Protégé Legal AI in a single Lexis+ AI solution, professionals can solve more problems—faster and with greater confidence.

At launch, Protégé General AI grounds responses in web search results, a feature that enhances factual reliability beyond typical LLM capabilities.

Future iterations will, however, introduce grounding in both domain-specific legal reasoning and user-supplied work product.

This will place an even wider universe of trusted information at legal practitioners’ fingertips - all while maintaining explainability, interpretability and reliability.

The Privacy Core: Building Trust into Every Layer

At the heart of Protégé General AI lies an unwavering commitment to privacy and data integrity. In fact, every innovation introduced to our products is guided by one principle: trust must be built in, not added later.

Since legal professionals operate in a domain where confidentiality is paramount, Protégé was architected with privacy-by-design at its foundation.

The system adheres to stringent SOC 2 Type II compliance standards, ensuring that every process - from data ingestion to response generation - meets enterprise-grade security protocols.

Data is encrypted both in transit and at rest, and no user data is used to retrain or fine-tune models without explicit consent.

This ensures that confidential client information remains secure, isolated, and inaccessible to external systems.

Beyond compliance, Protégé applies data minimisation principles, processing only what is necessary to generate accurate, relevant responses.

Legal professionals can therefore engage with confidence, knowing that no residual or identifiable information is ever retained or exposed.

By placing privacy at the core, Protégé General AI upholds the sanctity of legal confidentiality, empowering professionals to explore, analyse, and innovate - without fear of data compromise.

Choice and Control: Empowering Legal Professionals

Protégé General AI is not only powerful - it’s personal and participatory.

The concept of choice underpins every user interaction, giving professionals the ability to decide how the AI assists them, what data it accesses, and to what extent automation is applied.

Users can also tailor model behaviour based on task sensitivity and preferred communication style.

Whether drafting a nuanced legal argument, conducting in-depth legal research, performing business analysis, or preparing a client briefing, Protégé allows customisation of tone, reasoning depth, and creativity to align with firm standards.

Protégé does not replace human judgment; it enhances it. Every response, suggestion, or citation remains reviewable, editable, and auditable, ensuring lawyers maintain complete control over outcomes while benefitting from faster, smarter legal workflows.

This human in the loop approach fosters a form of collaborative intelligence, where human expertise and AI capability complement one another. The result is a smarter, faster, and compliant workflow that supports legal decision-making rather than substituting it.

The Future of Responsible Legal AI

As AI becomes embedded in professional workflows, LexisNexis is leading the charge in defining ethical, transparent, and accountable AI for the legal industry.

Future versions will bring deeper domain-grounded reasoning, enhanced interpretability, and tighter integration between Protégé’s Legal AI and General AI.

This will allow legal professionals to move seamlessly between structured analysis and strategic exploration within a single trusted environment.

Yet, innovation will never outpace principle.

Our roadmap for Protégé continues to prioritise human oversight, bias mitigation, and transparent auditability, ensuring every advancement strengthens both ethical practice and public trust.

Together, Protégé Legal and General AI are shaping the next generation of intelligent legal assistants - ones that are not just smart, but also responsible, reliable, and human-centric.

And as the legal industry stands on the brink of an AI-powered transformation, Protégé offers not just a tool, but a trusted partner in legal intelligence, helping legal professionals across Australia work smarter, think more deeply, and deliver greater value to their clients and organisations.