Following the preview release in August and the business launch in October of its Protégé Basic AI, LexisNexis Legal & Professional at the moment rolled out what it’s calling the product’s subsequent era, increasing its capabilities to unify authoritative authorized content material, buyer paperwork and open internet insights inside a single safe AI workflow atmosphere.
LexisNexis developed Protégé Basic AI as a approach to supply clients with safe entry to a number of general-purpose AI fashions alongside Protégé’s current legal-specific AI instruments. The model unveiled at the moment represents what LexisNexis describes as essentially the most complete integration but of a number of knowledge sources for authorized AI work.
“Authorized professionals need one trusted authorized AI workflow answer,” mentioned Sean Fitzpatrick, CEO of LexisNexis North America, UK, and Eire. “Solely LexisNexis can deliver collectively agentic intelligence, buyer paperwork, open internet insights, and our authoritative content material to provide next-level authorized drafts and work output backed by Shepard’s.”
The product’s fast tempo of improvement from August to now additionally underscores the aggressive depth within the authorized AI market, in addition to what LexisNexis describes as its dedication to “customer-driven innovation.”
Unified Content material Sources
Protégé Basic AI is designed to work alongside Protégé Authorized AI and permit authorized professionals to entry normal AI fashions throughout the firm’s current Lexis+ AI workflow.
LexisNexis says this permits customers to decide on between Protégé Authorized AI, which is optimized for authoritative authorized AI workflows like authorized drafting and evaluation, or Protégé Basic AI, which permits customers to carry out numerous duties utilizing the most recent accessible AI fashions grounded in internet content material and LexisNexis content material.
The core development on this launch is Protégé Basic AI’s means to simply mix insights from three distinct content material sources:
- Buyer authorized paperwork uploaded to the system.
- Open internet search outcomes.
- LexisNexis’s complete authorized content material database.
Customers retain management over which content material sources Protégé attracts upon, permitting them to floor responses in all sources or choose particular combos of LexisNexis content material, internet sources, and their very own paperwork.
Clever Mannequin Choice
One other important enhancement is the introduction of “Greatest Match” mode, which robotically selects the optimum AI mannequin for every particular process. Customers also can manually select from an expanded roster of AI fashions, together with:
- Claude Sonnet 4.5 from Anthropic.
- GPT-5.1 from OpenAI.
- Claude Sonnet 4
- GPT-4o
- GPT-5
- OpenAI o3
Something generated from these fashions that Protégé Basic AI acknowledges as authorized citations are verified and linked by way of the Shepard’s Quotation Agent, offering an extra layer of reliability for authorized professionals working with general-purpose AI fashions.
Enhanced Agentic Capabilities
Behind the scenes, Protégé Basic AI contains what LexisNexis describes as “a brand new agentic infrastructure” that permits AI brokers to collaborate on complicated authorized workflows requiring broad understanding from various knowledge sources.
The system contains 4 specialised brokers:
- Orchestrator Agent: Coordinates a number of brokers working collectively.
- Authorized Analysis Agent: Decomposes consumer prompts into authorized questions and generates solutions primarily based on related authorized authorities from LexisNexis content material.
- Net Search Agent: Brings related open internet insights into Protégé responses.
- Buyer Doc Analysis Agent: Autonomously causes, plans and makes use of different analysis instruments to provide evaluation primarily based on clients’ personal paperwork.
LexisNexis says this infrastructure extends what it calls “Agentic Retrieval-Augmented Era (RAG),” which itsays excels at understanding consumer intent, intelligently planning workflows, and retrieving authoritative info to make sure correct and grounded AI responses.
Expanded Use Circumstances
In accordance with LexisNexis, the improved Protégé Basic AI now allows authorized professionals to:
- Draft extra exact communications for each authorized and non-legal audiences, together with consumer emails, matter updates, and plain-language explanations
- Speed up foundational analysis with quick overviews of technical ideas and evolving areas equivalent to AI coverage and crypto regulation
- Enrich authorized work with real-world context by incorporating non-legal sources to strengthen authorized technique and proposals
- Drive strategic ideation by outlining arguments, testing counterpoints, exploring different approaches, and acquiring a second “opinion” from AI
- Break down complicated, multi-layered issues throughout M&A, compliance, multi-party disputes, and rising regulatory points
- Securely add and analyze paperwork, producing summaries, difficulty lists, and audience-specific variations throughout a wider vary of codecs
The system additionally now helps Deep Analysis capabilities and superior reasoning for high-complexity authorized issues, options that customers can toggle on or off as wanted.
Safety and Management
LexisNexis emphasizes that every one of this performance operates inside what it describes as a “absolutely encrypted Lexis+ AI atmosphere” that gives “enterprise-grade knowledge privateness protections for assured entry to normal objective fashions.”
Organizations can disable normal AI entry fully for customers, and particular person customers can toggle the function on or off in accordance with their preferences or agency insurance policies.
The corporate additionally highlights a “streamlined interface” that retains questions, sources, citations, and drafts collectively for what it describes as “a extra environment friendly, clear workflow.”
Evolution of Protégé
Right this moment’s announcement represents the most recent milestone within the fast evolution of LexisNexis’s Protégé AI assistant since its preliminary unveiling in August 2024.
The unique Protégé preview, coincidentally launched in August 2024 on the same day as Thomson Reuters’ CoCounsel 2.0, launched agentic AI capabilities and emphasised personalization primarily based on consumer profiles and preferences.
It was made typically accessible in January 2025 with options together with autonomous process completion and the flexibility to evaluate its personal work.
In August 2025, LexisNexis launched Protégé Basic AI in buyer preview, permitting customers to toggle between legal-specific and general-purpose AI fashions. That launch gave roughly 200 legislation companies, company authorized departments and legislation colleges entry to fashions together with GPT-5, Claude Sonnet 4, GPT-4o, and OpenAI o3, all throughout the safe LexisNexis atmosphere.
