LexisNexis: The Future of Online Legal Research

Although the legal market has been slow to harness technological advancements into their daily operations, legal firms have finally come at par with the rest of the industries to improve efficiency and reduce costs through technology. This recent propensity to transform and adopt state-of-the-art technologies in their activities has not only enabled the organizations to streamline several paper-based processes but has also increased the overall competition in the market, making the selection of legal solutions paramount. Egged on by an ardent zeal to help organizations create a competitive differentiator, LexisNexis provides industry-leading legal research and content-enabled workflow solutions that aid professionals in legal, tax, corporate, academic, government, and non-profit organizations to make informed decisions for achieving better business results. “LexisNexis combines unparalleled legal and business information with analytics and technology to deliver increased productivity, improved decision-making and outcomes, and value,” begins Mike Walsh, CEO of LexisNexis.

As a digital pioneer, LexisNexis delivers powerful, new decision tools to legal customers by applying machine learning, natural language processing, visualization, and artificial intelligence into their global legal database, named Nexis. It is a comprehensive collection of public records, news, company, regulatory, legal, and industry information. The database not only provides clients with the relevant facts but also helps to identify relations between facts and paint a clearer picture in legal terms.

The company leverages RELX Group’s reach as a parent company to serve customers in more than 130 countries with 10,000 employees worldwide. LexisNexis is known in the legal industry for being the first to combine content, technology, and analytics to advance the rule of law and shape a more just world where all are equal under the law for spreading equality across the financial sector.

Creating the Difference

LexisNexis provides a comprehensive portfolio of products and services aimed at delivering strategic advantages and making more informed legal decisions. One of the company’s primary offerings is Lexis Advance—a next-generation legal research platform— which acts as a powerful resource for online legal research that enables legal firms to extract relevant and useful results for their clients. Focused on the one-and two-lawyer firms, the company’s sophisticated solution comes with a simplified as well as streamlined interface, a Google-like search bar that can search universally across all libraries and lets users zero in on the required information from the federal and state cases using smart filters. Walsh says, “With the help of our software tools, law officials can locate witnesses and investigate crimes as we give access to searchable documents and records from news and business source.”

Named the “Best Legal Solution” at the 2017 SIIA CODiE Awards, the Ravel View, a new data visualization technology at Lexis Advance, provides an integrated analytical view that helps users to identify connected cases, find seminal cases, and discerns citing trends across jurisdictions—all at a single glance. “Ravel View is a perfect example of how the LexisNexis technology can help attorneys use legal research as a competitive edge.

Now, researchers can uncover insights from vast amounts of information and spot trends that were previously unknowable—what we call the data-driven law,” adds Walsh.

Furthermore, LexisNexis also enhances legal operations with the aid of a CRM solution, InterAction, which deploys basic CRM functionality and brings marketing and mailing list management capabilities to achieve maximized ROI. The InterAction software consists of InterAction plus IQ that provides legal teams with customer engagement information, allowing firms to optimize customer relationships, automate processes, and improve communication with clients and prospects. It not only helps clients focus and prioritize the relationships but also delivers the most advantageous results, positively impacting their firm’s bottom line. In association with InterAction IQ, InterAction offers the ability to maintain complete, up-to-date as well as secure contact information. Harnessing the potential of this additional automation, it is easy to uncover more firm contacts while increasing trustworthiness and quality.

"Today LexisNexis focuses on assisting law firms to capture new business as it launches an innovative business edge module that tracks processes specific to law firms and gains a competitive advantage by empowering organizations to enhance client service"

The company’s offerings include a Litigation Research Portfolio which provides seamless access to the most extensive collection of court documents, settlements, verdicts, and insights on judges and attorneys. Furthermore, a built-in proactive monitoring tool enables the legal firms to stay abreast of new cases and updates. Legal firms use LexisNexis’ CourtLink, a document research tool, to conduct thorough due diligence and monitor litigation. By using CourtLink, legal companies receive notifications of proceedings and documents being filed in cases of interest. CounselLink is a comprehensive enterprise legal management solution that helps in the execution of legal hold notifications and assesses the counsel performance in a legal department. CounselLink focuses on the aspects of practice and legal management by enabling 100 percent visibility over matter status and legal costs. As an integrated legal management solution, it also assists the law firm to expedite invoice review, processes with e-billing practices, and match billing guidelines for automatic adjustments.

Going the Extra Mile

In addition to its vast range of offerings, LexisNexis also assists law firms in marketing and spreading their reach to a global audience. The company leverages its partnership with Martindale to help clients stay ahead of their peers. Through this partnership, LexisNexis provides a comprehensive online marketing solution that serves as an important tool for legal firms to increase web visibility, build online credibility, and accelerate business growth in the crowded online marketplace. Designed specifically for the legal industry, organizations harness unrivaled exposure through a compelling website and review-based ratings with real-time leads and live chat services.

Taking a holistic approach to reshaping the legal industry, the company also provides legal research and practical guidance including case law and statutes validation by harnessing experienced perspectives in specific legal practice areas.

It also enables clients to follow leading practitioners through treatises and online communities for smarter and better decision-making. The solution helps clients stay organized with convenient online folders for their research, plus legal forms, checklists, and other efficiency tools, which can be easily integrated into Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Word, as well as internal documents. Additionally, Lexis Practice Advisor offers a collection of practical guidance written by attorneys for their practice areas that is unsurpassed in its authority. This ensures the legitimacy of the information based on real-world experience and reflects the current state of their practice area—enabling clients to witness a clear, unobstructed view of all their legal research and transactional vistas. In addition to specialized tools that help in building insight in practice areas like intellectual property and medical malpractice, LexisNexis offers content organized for all 50 states in the U.S., Washington, D.C., the federal government, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands as well as more than 40 areas of practice.

An Impressive Delivery of Unparalleled Service

LexisNexis has been a valuable legal partner to numerous clients across the globe to rectify their legal management issues. While elucidating the capabilities of LexisNexis further, Walsh sheds light on an experience with PepsiCo. Since its inception, PepsiCo had undergone numerous operational reorganizations. The company’s Director of Business Operations, Jerome Walters, realized that when an attorney shifts from one business unit to another, a lot of confusion occurs. Moreover, the workflow of billing isn't properly updated with every change. Though PepsiCo had implemented CounselLink in 2008, the misrouted invoices issue kept increasing over time. LexisNexis’ experts seamlessly identified PepsiCo’s data requirements and fine-tuned CounselLink configurations to resolve their challenges.

Building a Road toward a Sustainable Future

Today LexisNexis focuses on assisting law firms to capture new business as it launches an innovative business edge module that tracks processes specific to law firms and gains a competitive advantage by empowering organizations to enhance client service. Another innovation from the company is its Lexis Analytics—a suite of analytics tools that leverages vast stores of legal content and expert curation, offering lawyers a decisive competitive advantage. It comes with an array of enhanced products fueled by smart content from Lexis Advance and the strategic acquisitions of Lex Machina, Intelligize, and Ravel Law, and integrates the most powerful technologies in the legal space, including machine learning, artificial intelligence, and visualization tools. The resultant analytics suite seamlessly streamlines data-driven workflows to offer unprecedented efficiency and insight to the practice of law.

Additionally, the company’s Lexis Answers technology, a recent A.I. enhancement, helped the company engrave its name in the inaugural Legal A.I. Leaders list, a distinction reserved for organizations focused on developing innovative, AI-driven solutions. Harnessing the potential of powerful machine learning and advanced natural language processing technologies, Lexis Answers played a significant role in transforming legal research. It works by understanding the user’s natural language question and delivering a concise, authority-based answer, in addition to finely tuned, comprehensive search results. “Each time we document a case, release a decision tool, or support the development of legal infrastructure, we’re working to expand the umbrella protection of the rule of law,” concludes Walsh.