LexisNexis responds to law professor Benjamin Perrin's critique of Lexis+ AI

LexisNexis Responds to Professor Perrin’s Critique

In a November 2024 article in the Canadian Bar Association’s National Magazine, law professor Benjamin Perrin evaluated Lexis+ AI, a generative AI-powered legal assistant by LexisNexis. Perrin concluded that, due to limitations, he could not recommend Lexis+ AI to his law students or for his own research. He emphasised the necessity for human oversight when using AI in legal contexts and advocated delaying the tool's release to law students until substantial improvements are made.

Below is LexisNexis' response to the article.

“An opinion article by Professor Benjamin Perrin published on Nov. 12 in the Canadian Bar Association’s National Magazine makes an assertion about the capabilities of Lexis+ AI that does not reflect the response from customers to the product.

As part of our customer-led product development approach, Lexis+ AI customers tell us that the research answer quality, document drafting skills, and summarisation capabilities in Lexis+ AI are significantly better than prior methods, saving them about 11 hours per week. We regularly receive feedback from users like, “The breadth of services offered is nearly staggering. I cannot think of a more comprehensive legal tool,” and “I like the ease of use and the certainty that the tool is accessing already verified information in the Lexis system of products.”

It’s important to note that Canadian lawyers and law faculty have contributed to the development of Lexis+ AI and continue to provide important feedback. Since Canadian law faculty access started in July, we have sought and received valuable advice and guidance from law schools across the country. This semester, limited student trials are already in progress at a dozen Canadian law schools. This input has informed our approach to law school rollout and continues to improve the performance of Lexis+ AI.

Nearly all of the law faculty, deans, and students we have consulted are supportive of providing Canadian law students with access to Lexis+ AI starting in January 2025. Canadian law firms are already using Lexis+ AI in their practices and LexisNexis is committed to preparing law students with the tools and skills they need as lawyers.

At LexisNexis, our technology combined with our content, in addition to extensive system measures that include answer quality reviews by JD-trained attorneys, and our customer-led approach to developing products make Lexis+ AI a solution that is highly trusted, accurate, safe, secure, and can adequately handle nuanced legal concepts. Here are a few core examples of how we ensure this:

First, Lexis+ AI provides linked validation of citing authority references to underlying cases and legislation to help substantiate outputs and mitigate hallucination risks. The product recommends further review if a citation is not hyperlinked.

Second, in the fast-paced large language model (LLM) evolution, Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) and fine-tuning are the best methods available to ensure the highest answer quality. LexisNexis focuses on AI answer quality through an enhanced proprietary RAG platform, which now includes AgenticRAG capabilities for complex and nuanced legal queries. Our proprietary RAG infrastructure allows us to ensure that Lexis+ AI responses are grounded in our extensive repository of current, exclusive legal content, ultimately achieving the highest-quality answer with the most up-to-date validated citation references. We are seeing week-over-week improvements in answer and citation quality, thanks to ongoing technology development.

Third, LexisNexis has incorporated other techniques to improve the quality of our responses—proprietary metadata, the use of knowledge graph and citation network technology, and two taxonomy services, to name a few. Each aids in the identification of the most relevant legal authority to support user questions. 

Importantly, LexisNexis is responsibly developing legal AI solutions with human oversight. LexisNexis, part of RELX, follows the RELX Responsible AI Principles, considering the real-world impact of our solutions on people and taking action to prevent the creation or reinforcement of unfair bias. It is important that humans have ownership and accountability over the development, use, and outcomes of AI systems. We have an appropriate level of human oversight throughout the lifecycle of our solutions. This is core to ensuring the quality and appropriate performance of our solutions.

Professor Perrin suggested that users prefer AI-summarised cases to human-summarised cases. We appreciate his suggestion and will consider this in future product development. Additionally, we tested use cases not supported by Lexis+ AI. We clearly communicate drafting use cases, supported by the product and guide users to offer feedback about future cases they would like to see supported.

Ultimately, our goal is to provide the highest quality answers to our customers, including links to validated, high-quality content sources. LexisNexis has not been contacted by Professor Perrin, but we welcome the opportunity to explore his suggestions to improve the product experience.” 

About LexisNexis

LexisNexis Legal and Professional is a leading global provider of legal, regulatory and business information and analytics that help customers increase productivity, improve decision-making and outcomes, and advance the rule of law around the world.

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