Breaking Down Law Firm Data Silos with New AI-Powered Tools

By Madison Johnson, Esq. | Marketing Manager

Large law firms have been on a technology transformation journey for the past two decades, embracing new ways of empowering lawyers to work more efficiently and more effectively with the aid of fast-moving legal tech innovations.

These firms now find themselves in a bit of a quandary that was the inevitable result of this rapid growth in reliance on technology. They typically have three disparate data systems that contain the breadth of knowledge their lawyers need to bring to bear when creating work product for clients:

1. Document Management System (internal precedents)
2. Legal Research Platform (external knowledge)
3. Firm Standards (unique protocols)

The good news is that the latest technology breakthrough in our industry promises to solve this technology dilemma. Emerging AI-powered tools will empower law firms to break down these historical data silos by extracting information from all three distinct types of content and delivering drafting assistance right where lawyers are working at the moment.

Integrating Disparate Systems

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.

“We always want to ensure that institutional knowledge isn’t trapped in the heads of a limited number of people or siloed within groups but instead shared in a broader community of colleagues and clients,” said Kristin Taylor, partner at Lowenstein Sandler. Taylor noted that knowledge was locked in Lowenstein Sandler’s database management software for years, but she was “often frustrated at the amount of time and effort that had to go into finding the correct precedent or clauses.”

Lowenstein Sandler recently completed an exhaustive search for a tool that could help them extract and enrich data from their vast DMS housing tens of millions of documents, then seamlessly integrate with the Microsoft 365 applications used by their lawyers. They selected Henchman, which securely applies AI to a law firm’s own data, and described the implementation of this tool as a “game-changer.”

Now the next step in the law firm technology transformation journey will be getting even more out their internal data sets through integrations and APIs that will connect the DMS with the firm’s preferred legal research platform. This should once and for all eliminate those traditional data silos that kept the firm’s internal and external knowledge disconnected.

“A recent byproduct of the generative AI boom has brought about a sudden coupling of once-disparate document management systems and legal research tools,” reported Legaltech News. “The biggest legal research and DMS providers in the legal tech market are now forging partnerships and integrations to bring (these) kinds of precedents together via generative AI-powered systems. The goal: to improve document drafting and create better work product, faster.”

LexisNexis and Henchman Join Forces to Break Down Data Silos

LexisNexis recently completed the acquisition of Henchman, a company that was founded in 2020 in Ghent, Belgium, by Gilles Mattelin, Jorn Vanysacker & Wouter Van Respaille. They created a powerful tool that enriches data from an organization’s DMS to power the fast drafting of legal documents by interacting with the customer’s DMS, indexing the organization’s precedent documents so relevant content can be quickly extracted, and then making the data available for document insights and drafting.

The immediate plans are to utilize Henchman’s technology with the proprietary Retrieval Augmented Generation 2.0 (RAG 2.0) platform in the industry-leading Lexis+ AI solution, enabling the use of trusted customer data as grounding data for Gen AI drafting. Henchman’s capabilities will also be added to Lexis Create, enabling point-of-workflow integration for Gen AI drafting in Microsoft Word, Outlook, Teams and Copilot. The goal is to connect the full knowledge of a law firm with the legal research insights of LexisNexis to bring together everything a legal professional needs to build high-quality legal documents.

The connection of a law firm’s internal DMS and firm standards data sets with its external legal research platform data set — through the use of Gen AI technology — offers an exciting opportunity to break down the historical data silos that have limited the efficiency and effectiveness of lawyers when creating work product for clients.

We will soon be one giant step closer in the industry’s evolution toward more personalized research and drafting solutions. Learn more about how Lexis+ AI with DMS connectivity will blaze a new trail in personalized legal research and drafting solutions.