LexisNexis Customer Innovation Lab opens in New York

LexisNexis Customer Innovation Lab has opened in New York City, giving legal professionals a place to work alongside the company’s engineers and technology partners on legal-AI prototypes. The announced model is a product-development change rather than a new standalone product: LexisNexis says it will build and test potential capabilities during working sessions instead of using a conventional interview, build and feedback cycle.

Law firms, corporate legal departments, members of the judiciary and academics are among the groups the company says can bring practical problems into the lab. OpenAI and Amazon Web Services have participated as technology collaborators, according to SiliconANGLE and LawNext.

The lab had been operating for about six weeks before the public announcement, LexisNexis Chief Technology Officer Greg Dickason told LawNext. He said a team of roughly 20 lab staff hands prototypes to an engineering organization of about 4,000 people. Those are company figures and descriptions, not independently measured results.

How does the LexisNexis Customer Innovation Lab work?

In the company’s account, participants describe a legal-work problem while engineers build possible answers in the room, then revise them against immediate feedback. Dickason told LawNext he had seen one solution altered four times in an hour. LexisNexis says prototypes can move into development only after meeting its standards for quality, accuracy and security, alongside customer feedback.

A prototype is not a released feature. LexisNexis says capabilities can become customer-specific work or scale into its Lexis+ with Protégé platform, but the reports do not establish that every lab project will reach general availability or produce measurable customer results.

Drafting is the first priority

LexisNexis has put legal drafting at the center of the lab’s work. The company says it is exploring tools that can apply a firm’s drafting style, precedents and playbooks; flag risks and suggest redlines against a customer’s standards; and preserve context across related documents. It also identifies citation verification and litigation or judicial analytics as areas of interest.

That work fits the broader product direction of Lexis+ with Protégé, which LexisNexis expanded in May with agentic drafting, secure Workrooms, citation checks, a document Vault and customer-controlled encryption. Those capabilities were announced separately, and the available evidence does not show that each originated in the lab.

LexisNexis says its platform combines its legal content with customer documents and workflows. The May announcement said its Shepard’s Verify feature checks citations in AI-generated and lawyer-drafted material against LexisNexis sources and flags citations it cannot verify. Such controls matter in legal AI because a fluent draft is not sufficient if its authority, matter data or review trail cannot be checked.

Who can take part?

Dickason told LawNext that current customers and non-customers can participate, including firm technology leaders, partners, junior associates, solo practitioners and judges. LawNext also reported that LexisNexis owns intellectual property produced through the lab, and that participants acknowledge that term before joining.

LexisNexis plans to expand the program globally and run sessions at customer locations and ILTACON, according to LawNext. Those remain plans. The company has not provided independent evidence of the lab’s speed, quality or commercial impact.

This story draws on original reporting from SiliconANGLE.