Here’s some of the top news stories AL didn’t cover last week because….well, because New York, and talking to people, and wandering around seeking inspiration via happenstance on the island of Manhattan.
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‘I’m Sorry, Dave’ – LexisNexis Launches Voice AI Assistant
LexisNexis has launched its voice AI assistant, which operates as part of Protégé. It will ‘interact naturally…using spoken language instead of manually entering prompts to conduct legal work’.
The ‘multi-modal experience provides customers with greater workflow flexibility’ – (and more on voice soon).
Sean Fitzpatrick, CEO of LexisNexis North America, UK, and Ireland, commented: ‘We want to make it increasingly effortless for our customers to collaborate with LexisNexis AI solutions to generate outstanding legal work. With the launch of the legal industry’s first personalized AI voice assistant, we are drawing on our deep technology expertise to make the human-AI exchange more intuitive, productive, and beneficial to each individual customer for achieving better outcomes.’
They’ve also boosted their agentic capabilities.
This all provides, among other things:
Users can ask a legal question, initiate a drafting task, and request case law summarization using voice commands.
And,
Lexis’s Agentic AI capabilities provide a Planner Agent that ‘dynamically breaks down extremely complex legal questions into several steps for more comprehensive responses, while an Interactive Agent will allow the user to modify the agent’s plan and choose the best course of action for highly tailored results. A Self-Reflection Agent self-evaluates and refines its work for superior document drafting’.
(It is not called HAL – see below – but maybe if you ask it nicely, it will let you address it that way?)
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Opus 2 Launches AI Workbench
Opus 2 has announced the roll-out of AI Workbench, which ‘empowers lawyers and litigation teams to quickly develop case strategy using generative AI to analyse, summarise, and query sets of multiple case documents’.
Legal professionals also can chat with its AI to quickly uncover deeper insights and organise relevant facts and details to shape strategy faster, they added.
Liza Pestillos-Ocat, Senior Vice President of Global Client Success, commented: ‘Working closely with clients, our goal was to create an intuitive, AI-driven workspace where legal professionals can find evidence, build arguments, and extract insights from sets of case documents with unprecedented speed and accuracy. AI Workbench does just that, seamlessly connecting the powerful capabilities of our award-winning case management software with the productivity benefits of generative AI.’
When users open AI Workbench, they get: ‘a complete view of the people, events, organisations, and legal topics contained inside a set of case documents. They can review sourced AI summaries of each and connect the relevant facts to their chronology, witness list, and other case management workflows already within Opus 2. Users also can chat with the query tool in AI workbench using everyday language to get deeper insights from the content inside the set of case documents, revealing crucial details, patterns, and conclusions’, they said.
More about Opus 2 here.
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iManage Launches Range of AI Updates
Launched in 2024, ‘Ask iManage’ is an AI-powered assistant. The latest release introduces ‘a guided actions interface making it easy for users to leverage the benefits of generative AI without the need to be experts in crafting prompts’. Guided actions available today include:
‘Overview, to quickly see the main points of content
Extract, to grab exact text and data points from documents
Summarize, to generate summaries for specific topics within content
Analyze, to check if content meets certain requirements.’
Ask iManage already offers multi-document processing: the ability to run guided actions on multiple documents simultaneously. This capability is beneficial for tasks such as due diligence, compliance reviews, or remediation projects, they added.
A newly introduced question library also lets users browse a curated set of prompts and save, customize, and reuse prompts for personal or team use.
You can find more about iManage here.
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Simmons & Simmons and Percy AI
Simmons & Simmons launched Percy a while ago, which is their genAI platform. In a missive from Microsoft – which they’re working with – they also announced what they aim to do next. This is what they said:
‘Looking forward to Percy 3.0, the firm is planning to develop the solution into a ‘fully-featured Generative AI platform, including a space where lawyers can collaborate, and to be one of the places where people can ask agents to perform complex tasks,’ says Drew Winlaw, Global LLM Lead at the firm.
From Winlaw’s perspective, the firm began by enhancing AI literacy across its workforce and is now working on developing innovative services to generate new income streams, anticipating changes to their business as their clients adopt AI.
The firm added: ‘We’re collaborating with Microsoft to create a legal inference engine for much more complicated work for specialist divisions. The LLM-driven engine that is unique to Percy produces significantly higher outputs than a standard LLM and it is being constantly upgraded.’
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Note: it’s called Percy because that’s the name of one of the twin brothers who co-founded the firm. But Percy is also short for Percival….or Parsifal, one of the Knights of the Round Table who quested for the Holy Grail….which is very apt as well.
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Legora Goes To America
Sweden-based Legora has launched in America with the opening of an office in New York. It’s also entered into ‘a strategic partnership with Goodwin’, the US law firm.
CEO Max Junestrand, said: ‘The US is the most important market for innovative legal technology. Legora is beyond excited to establish our footprint in North America and partner with the pioneering lawyers at Goodwin. In this fast-moving market, it will be firms like Goodwin who show the way and innovate in their ability to deliver exceptional client service.’
While Mary O’Carroll (of CLOC fame), who is now Goodwin’s Chief Operating Officer, added: ‘Our partnership with Legora allows us to be hands-on in shaping AI-driven solutions that deliver real impact, helping our lawyers work smarter and giving our clients even better results.’
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And, Haystack ID has announced the launch of Core Intelligence AI ‘Case Insight’, a generative AI powered matter intelligence engine designed ‘to revolutionize how legal and investigative teams analyze case data’.
As the latest addition to HaystackID’s expanding Core Intelligence AI portfolio, Case Insight delivers faster, more precise intelligence, empowering professionals to assess case strengths, detect critical issues, and act on key evidence within days rather than weeks, they added.
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That’s all for now folks. AL is back to regular news and views publishing.
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[ Main image: Lexis Voice – note the reference to Dave….from 2001 🙂
‘HAL: I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.
Dave: What’s the problem?
HAL: I think you know what the problem is. ]
