‘There’s a very clear need from the legal community for something that’s more bespoke’

Sebastien Bardou, general manager of LexisNexis CEMEA International, says the next generation of agentic AI systems will help lawyers work more effectively

In this Q&A, Sebastien Bardou, general manager of LexisNexis CEMEA International and vice president of strategy for CEMEA, discusses how agentic AI is going to enable more tailored, personalised experiences for lawyers without disrupting their day-to-day workflows.

Why is legal AI moving beyond generic tools into personal, adaptive assistants?

There’s a very clear need from the legal community for something that’s more bespoke and more adapted to specific processes that goes beyond what generic tools can do. The first step in this AI journey was to create Gen AI systems that were rooted in authoritative, reliable content. 

Now we’re moving into something different from a technological point of view with more agentic AI tools that are more customised to the specific needs and specific legal practice workflows of legal professionals. We see more and more tools with the ability to adapt to the specific needs of workflows, often with the existing tools that we have. If you take an example like Closd or Jarvis, we can add agentic AI on top of it to make them more effective.

How will agentic AI support lawyers?

There’s a lot happening right now with document analysis at scale, because you always have use cases and specific areas where you need to analyse a very significant amount of contracts or legal documents in general, because you’re doing due diligence or a legal audit or whatever it might be. 

Another area where we see huge potential is around legal document drafting. With legal document drafting, when you look at all the processes that come with the various different types of documents, there are very significant differences between them. For example, what’s the level of negotiation with third parties? Do you need to publish that document in a legal public repository? And so on. So there are a lot of differences in the overall drafting processes that need something that is more customised than just using a standard template. AI agents can perform those specific individual tasks that are linked to the drafting process of a particular document.

What benefits does this bring?

It’s really about getting the highest quality possible. While generative AI has delivered enormous efficiency gains, agentic AI deepens those gains by understanding and adapting to legal reasoning, continuously evaluating the quality and confidence of its outputs to ensure the consistency and reliability expected in professional legal practice.

What is best practice to embed agentic AI into workflows?

The best starting point is to look at your current workflow. What tools are you using currently? We see that there’s some reluctance to completely change your workflow, so it makes sense to have a certain level of ease with the tools that you’re using. That’s why we put Lexis+ AI in our existing online research platform – we didn’t want to create something completely different that you need to learn from scratch. 

Lawyers spend quite a lot of time doing online research, so we wanted to bring generative AI directly into the computer window that they’re already using. So we have the same thinking around workflow solutions, where we’re adding AI into it. Lawyers don’t want to open a different window every time they want to use AI, they want it embedded into the platforms and tools they are already using. It’s all about ecosystem integration to bring agentic AI capabilities into existing workflows and tools, for example Microsoft Word or Harvey. 

Will agentic AI require another mindset shift among lawyers?

If they have already embraced the change with Gen AI, then the move to agentic AI should be easier. The big revolution came from Gen AI in general. Now it’s more about how we refine it and keep on upgrading it, improving it and making it more personalised.

What impact will the rise of agentic AI have on legal practice?

The key skill for lawyers is still critical thinking. While Gen AI is enabling a lot of productivity gains, and is getting better and better, the fundamentals of what legal practice is have not changed. The true experts are not the AI agents, they are the legal professionals themselves, so their critical thinking will remain what really matters the most in the future.