New Legal AI Ignited: LexisNexis Protégé agent for Microsoft 365 Copilot

By Serena Wellen & Min Chen

There’s an entirely new category of generative AI that’s rapidly emerging – with the express purpose of making your legal work easier and faster.

If you haven’t already heard, there’s a new buzz about Microsoft Copilot agents. These are conversational AI assistants designed for Microsoft 365 Copilot, which harness the power of customized Large Language Models (LLMs), like ours at LexisNexis, to extend Microsoft 365 Copilot. In our case, we’re collaborating with Microsoft to introduce LexisNexis Protégé AI assistant into Teams™ to seamlessly integrate with your legal tasks. The experience we’re creating is one in which you will use the AI-powered assistant in your legal workflows in improved and surprising new ways across Microsoft 365 applications. 

Whether used within Teams, Microsoft 365 Copilot surfaces, Lexis+ AI, or across the LexisNexis ecosystem, Protégé is a personalized AI-powered assistant that streamlines workflows and enhances productivity for legal and business professionals. One example of a use case for Protégé is drafting a contract in a law firm's style and searching internal documents for applicable precedent.

When it becomes generally available next year, Protégé will assist users with hundreds of tasks and transform the way they work to reach new levels of efficiency, productivity, and value generation. Customers will be able to:

• Ask: Collaborate with Protégé like a trusted colleague who intelligently and conversationally responds to requests, questions, and instructions, responding with direct and authoritative answers and analysis.

• Draft: Go from a blank page to arguments, contract clauses, and concise client communications, all grounded in authoritative content with remarkable speed, ease, and precision.

• Summarize: Get accurate and complete summaries in seconds without clicking on a single search result.

Protégé represents a step change in personalization for our customers, building on the deep integration of analytics and Lexis+ and the significant expansion of use cases leveraging the generative AI capabilities of Lexis+ AI. For example, within law firms, the Protégé AI agent will draft property contracts for real estate attorneys, draft discovery documents for personal injury attorneys, and find what’s missing or redundant in a merger agreement for M&A attorneys.

“LexisNexis is putting Gen AI technology to work for legal professionals in practical ways. Legal professionals spend a lot of time in Microsoft applications—drafting, communicating, and collaborating. And they depend on the breadth, depth, and accuracy of LexisNexis content and finely tuned, legal domain-specific AI. Our customers are telling us that they want our content and Gen AI capabilities integrated within the Microsoft surfaces - where they spend most of their time. With our Protégé agent release, we are excited to be delivering on that request,” said Serena Wellen, VP Product Management, LexisNexis.

Microsoft Ignite, a conference kicking off November 19 that brings together IT professionals, developers, decision-makers, and data and security professionals, will showcase some of the most groundbreaking technologies and innovations, including legal AI innovations like the LexisNexis Protégé AI agent, which is now listed in the Microsoft AppSource and Teams Store as a preview for US customers.

“In today’s landscape of increasingly complex legal challenges, our customers depend on AI solutions like LexisNexis Protégé to work and collaborate more effectively—from managing cases to drafting contracts,” said Srini Raghavan, VP of Product Management at Microsoft Corp. “We are excited to see LexisNexis leverage Microsoft 365 Copilot to bring its legal AI innovations to customers, enhancing the value and impact of their legal services.”

We’re proud of our long-standing relationship with Microsoft and continued collaboration in cutting-edge ways to deliver superior technology solutions that are personalized, seamless, deeply secure, and drive real value for customers. This includes:

• Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service, a private, secure large language model (LLM) environment customers can trust. As part of our multi-model approach, ensuring that the best model is deployed for each customer use case, LexisNexis leverages the latest GPT-powered LLMs for Lexis+ AI and Protégé through Azure OpenAI Service

• Drafting apps like Lexis Create+™ that deliver a powerful, personalized, generative AI drafting experience in Microsoft 365, where customers spend most of their time, grounded in their firm’s own DMS and authoritative LexisNexis^® 

• Now, the Protégé AI agent, first for Teams, and soon for Microsoft Word and the remaining Microsoft 365 suite. Protégé empowers legal and business professionals in making informed decisions faster, generating outstanding work quality, and freeing up time to focus on efforts that drive economic value for their clients and organizations