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Lexis+ Streamlines Legal Research With a Modern Design
September 17, 2020
Today's TechnoLawyer Buyer's Guide report covers a new legal research with a modern user experience that delivers results in less time, including information never previously available.
Lexis+ Streamlines Legal Research With a Modern Design, Practical Guidance, and Data-Driven Insights
Online legal research has come a long way since the red terminal computers that put LexisNexis on the map many years ago. As LexisNexis moved from terminal to desktop software to the web, it made several key acquisitions. This resulted in a deep suite of services across several different websites. The time had come to unify everything with a modern design that would also support major new initiatives in machine learning.
Lexis+ in One Sentence
Lexis+ from LexisNexis integrates the company's legal research services to deliver results in less time — including information never previously available — via a modern user experience "unlike anything the legal industry has ever seen before" according to Jeff Pfeifer, Chief Product Officer at LexisNexis North America.
The Killer Feature
LexisNexis consulted with more than 2,000 customers during the development of Lexis+. "By taking a customer-centric approach to product development and emphasizing modern design, Lexis+ delivers a premium legal research experience that is powerful, intuitive, and easy to use," says Pfeifer.
One result of this feedback is the Experience Dock, a contextually aware navigation bar that groups together Legal Research (primary and secondary sources), Practical Guidance, and Brief Analysis. While conducting research, the Experience Dock enables you to access related materials with one click.
Practical Guidance offers resources for more than 20 practice areas. These include checklists and practice notes, as well as interactive Smart Forms and Market Standards for drafting and negotiating agreements in less time.
Brief Analysis is a new artificial intelligence (AI) tool for analyzing a brief whether yours, opposing counsel's, or a model. The Brief Analysis dashboard lists Shepard's treatment for all citations in the brief, case recommendations for potentially important opinions missing from the brief, similar briefs that may have useful arguments, and extracted concepts. When you review the Shepard's results and recommended cases, Lexis+ highlights the relevant passages, saving you time.
Speaking of AI, Shepard's now employs it too for a new warning called "At Risk," indicating that a higher court may have implicitly invalidated a case you've cited by explicitly overruling a case on which it relies.
"Lexis+ was designed for the ways that attorneys work, with deeply integrated product components, cutting-edge technologies and modern design elements that put the LexisNexis applications, content, and data that attorneys need right at their fingertips," adds Pfeifer.
The Brief Analysis Dashboard in Lexis+ lists cases missing from your brief and other AI-driven insights.
Other Notable Features
Have you ever wondered why a search comes up empty or how the LexisNexis algorithm interprets your searches? Two new features exclusive to Lexis+ — Missing & Must Include and Search Tree — give you insight to help hone your results.
Missing & Must Include shows you which of your search terms is missing from a result and lets you make any of them mandatory with a click, generating a new list of results.
Search Tree visually deconstructs your search terms to explain why it returned no results or insufficient results. You can view omitted results that didn't meet all the criteria or modify your search to correct a misspelling, use a more common synonym, etc. It's like WordPerfect's famous Reveal Codes for legal research.
Lexis+ also reveals insights about federal and state law with Code Compare. This new tool compares any two versions of a statute section side-by-side, dating back to the early 1990s.
Rounding out the marquee features is the newly enhanced Lexis Answers, which now gets an assist from AI to deliver more precise answers to your plain English questions and links to related references.
What Else Should You Know?
Notwithstanding the depth of features, you can run a new search from anywhere in Lexis+, and the new design makes it impossible to lose your way. As Pfeifer puts it, "Regardless of where or how a user starts a task or research, they will be guided to the information that best addresses their legal question."
Neil J. Squillante is the founder and publisher of TechnoLawyer, an award-winning network of free email newsletters for lawyers and law office administrators. Many consider TechnoLawyer newsletters the only ones they need. A Fastcase 50 award winner, Neil has a long track record of inventing successful advertising and publishing technologies and related best practices. Previously, Neil practiced commercial litigation at Am Law 100 firm Willkie Farr & Gallagher. He received his J.D. from UCLA School of Law and his B.A. from Duke University. At UCLA, Neil served as a Managing Editor of UCLA Law Review.
