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4 Reasons Why Law Firms Need to Connect Their Legal AI Tool with Their DMS Platform

December 12, 2024 (3 min read)

By Madison Johnson, Esq | Manager, Large Markets

More than half of Am Law 200 law firms have already purchased Legal AI tools, generative artificial intelligence developed specially for the legal profession, and nearly all large firms expect their investment in Gen AI technologies to increase over the next five years, according to a LexisNexis survey conducted earlier this year.

These breakthrough tools are having a major impact on empowering lawyers to work more efficiently and more effectively, but an exciting potential new use case for law firms is already on the horizon.

Connecting Legal AI and the DMS

As we blogged about this fall, large law firms perform at their best when their skilled lawyers and legal professionals adopt a “sharing mindset” in which collaboration among each other — and with their clients — is emphasized. This requires that institutional knowledge and legal source materials are easily accessible when needed to shape legal strategy and draft client work product.

Unfortunately, this has been difficult to achieve as data systems have grown more robust and often more difficult to mine when lawyers need to pinpoint precise information. The firm’s access to legal research, news and information resides in an external source — such as LexisNexis’s Lexis+ AI platform — while the firm’s access to its client experience and work product resides in an internal source with its preferred document management system (DMS) platform.

Imagine the possibilities if we could leverage the power of technology to help law firms get even more out their internal and external knowledge sources by connecting the firm’s Legal AI tool with its DMS. What if your legal research platform was familiar with each lawyer’s relevant contracts, forms, clauses and other legal documents so that it could deliver a truly personalized solution to the lawyer’s specific work product needs? That day is now dawning.

4 Reasons to Connect

There are a number of things that firms will be able to do with emerging AI-powered tools that break down historical data silos by extracting information from both internal and external knowledge databases, then delivering research and drafting assistance right where lawyers are working at the moment.

Here are four immediate reasons to connect your Legal AI tool with your DMS platform:

  1. Leverage your firm’s internal data and work product to generate drafts aligned with your firm’s professional standards and your lawyers’ individual writing styles.
  2. Create personalized user profiles to ensure that AI outputs are tailored to your specific preferences and needs.
  3. Access an expanded range of tailored use cases across litigation, transactions and other practice group workflows, with continuous improvement based on internal user feedback.
  4. Deliver to your legal professionals a truly customized AI experience by harnessing your firm’s collective knowledge, adapting to your individual requirements and providing targeted assistance across a broad scope of legal tasks.

This Legal AI-DMS connectivity will yield very practical assistance for lawyers. Document drafting will be faster as the Legal AI tool generates legal arguments, contract clauses and client communications from a few simple user prompts. Legal research will be more precise as conversational search capabilities help users surface more relevant insights and authorities. Case analysis will improve as the tool summarizes cases, analyzes briefs and compares arguments in a matter of minutes. Even deposition preparation will become more efficient as the Legal AI-DMS connection enables the creation of potential deposition questions based on the unique case facts and witness information.

This fall, LexisNexis began previewing a third-generation release of our Lexis+ AI platform, in which we promised to lead the industry with a major leap forward in personalized Legal AI that will transform legal work. The centerpiece of this new release, which we are preparing to roll out in the first quarter of 2025, will be a private, trusted Legal AI assistant that blazes a new trail in personalized legal research and drafting solutions by connecting a law firm’s Legal AI tool with its DMS platform.

Introducing LexisNexis Protégé

LexisNexis Protégé is your gateway to a world of new possibilities in which AI technology becomes an extension of your expertise. It is a versatile Legal AI assistant for all of your firm’s legal needs across the applications that you use most often — from Microsoft 365 to LexisNexis — that streamlines your tasks, anticipates your intent, and delivers uniquely tailored work product to you, wherever you are. This all happens with you in control and in a private, secure online environment.

Join our exclusive AI Insider program and be the first to discover LexisNexis Protégé or register for a free trial of the Lexis+ AI legal research platform.