AI-Powered 50 State Legal Surveys: Survey of Laws and Regulations Available Within Minutes from LexisNexis Protégé

By Alison Manchester, VP Product Management | LexisNexis Legal & Professional 

One of the most time-consuming and labor-intensive tasks in legal research has always been to conduct comprehensive 50-state surveys of statutes and administrative code provisions on a specific matter of concern to a client. These multi-jurisdictional research projects are regarded by law library professionals as one of the foundational elements to legal research. 

Brace for the latest chapter in the legal technology revolution as another painful manual process is about to get much easier. 

What traditionally required weeks of painstaking research across multiple jurisdictions can now be accomplished in minutes, thanks to a groundbreaking new feature from LexisNexis Protégé that harnesses the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to revolutionize legal research. 

The Traditional Workflow

Every practicing attorney knows the drill: a client needs to understand how a particular legal issue is addressed across all U.S. states and territories. Whether it's for corporate governance requirements, environmental regulations, employment law provisions or regulatory compliance standards, the process of manually researching and comparing laws across 50 states plus federal and territorial jurisdictions has been a notorious time sink. 

The traditional approach involves methodically searching through each state's statutes and administrative codes, identifying relevant provisions, recording citations and then summarizing the key points for each jurisdiction. This process typically consumes days or weeks of billable time, requiring attorneys to navigate different legal databases, formatting requirements and varying statutory structures across jurisdictions. 

The final product — usually a comprehensive Excel spreadsheet with citations and summaries — represents countless hours of manual labor that could be better spent on higher-value legal analysis and client counsel. 

Enter AI-Powered 50-State Surveys

LexisNexis Protégé's new "Ask Protege" feature transforms this laborious process into a streamlined, AI-driven experience that delivers comprehensive multi-jurisdictional surveys in minutes rather than weeks. The system leverages advanced legal AI capabilities to automatically identify, compare and summarize laws across all federal and state statutes — and administrative code provisions — on any given topic. 

The feature operates through an intuitive prompt-based interface where users can simply request a survey by including terms like "50 state survey," "Which States," or "State Survey" in their query. The AI then processes this request across the entire corpus of federal and state laws and regulations , identifying the most relevant statutes and administrative codes for each jurisdiction. 

Here’s how it works: 

• When a user submits a broad legal query, the system provides suggested narrow topic options to help focus the search and ensure the most relevant results. This guided approach helps attorneys refine their research parameters and avoid the common pitfall of overly broad searches that return unwieldy amounts of tangentially relevant material. 

• Once the search parameters are established, Protégé conducts a comprehensive scan across all jurisdictions, identifying applicable statutes and administrative codes. 

• The results are presented in a clean, organized chart format that includes linked citations for easy verification and deeper research. 

• Perhaps most importantly, the system generates AI-powered summaries of each state's results, eliminating another traditionally manual and time-intensive aspect of survey preparation. 

[View:https://youtu.be/D28NnVKlO8w:397:239]

Practical and Strategic Benefits for Legal Practice

The implications for legal practice are substantial. Multi-jurisdictional research that previously required dedicating junior associates or paralegals to weeks of systematic statutory review can now be completed right away and at the spur of the moment. This efficiency gain allows legal teams to redirect their focus toward analysis, strategy development and client counseling — the high-value activities that truly differentiate legal expertise. 

The feature also addresses practical workflow considerations that practicing attorneys face daily. Results can be exported to Excel format, maintaining compatibility with existing client reporting systems and internal research management processes. The linked citations ensure that attorneys can quickly verify results and conduct deeper research into specific jurisdictions of particular interest. 

Beyond pure time savings, this technology offers strategic advantages that extend throughout the legal research process. The comprehensive nature of AI-driven surveys reduces the risk of missing relevant provisions across jurisdictions, a constant concern when conducting manual research across dozens of legal systems. The consistent formatting and AI-generated summaries also improve the quality and readability of client deliverables. 

For law firms, this capability represents a significant competitive advantage. The ability to rapidly deliver comprehensive multi-jurisdictional analysis allows firms to take on projects that might previously have been declined due to time constraints or budget limitations. It also enables more responsive client service, as attorneys can provide preliminary survey results during initial consultations rather than promising delivery weeks later. 

Experience the Future of Legal Research

LexisNexis Protégé's new Survey of Laws and Regulations feature exemplifies a broader transformation in legal practice, where AI handles routine research tasks while attorneys concentrate on applying legal knowledge to solve complex client problems. For the legal profession, embracing these technological advances isn't just about efficiency—it's about delivering better client outcomes while maintaining the rigorous standards that define effective legal representation. 

LexisNexis Protégé is our personalized legal AI assistant with agentic AI technology that intelligently powers productivity, drives next-level work quality, and enables legal and business professionals to unlock new economic value. To learn more about Protégé’s capabilities, please visit www.lexisnexis.com/protege.  

To learn more about how LexisNexis leverages the power of AI to help legal professionals achieve better outcomes, or to follow along for the latest in Legal AI educational content, please visit www.lexisnexis.com/ai.