This morning, LexisNexis announced the commercial preview of Protégé AI Workflows, the inevitable next shoe to drop in the company’s AI push. As every industry searches for applications that can turn AI from a novelty into productivity, momentum has swung toward automation and building “agents” to tackle mundane (or not-so-mundane, as the case may be) workflows. In that spirit, LexisNexis has hundreds of pre-built legal automation tools paired with a custom workflow builder intended to streamline everything from drafting motions to redlining contracts against firm playbooks.
If the 2025 legal tech word of the year was “agents,” it’s telling that this 2026 LexisNexis rollout tamps down a bit on that energy. While not eschewing the term entirely, the company puts more emphasis on more familiar — and more trusted — terms like “automated workflows.” At one point, even describing the tasks that tech investors would call agentic as “a teammate,” a word I’ve championed for legal tech specifically. For a lawyer, agency means hiring someone to act in your stead and take 10 percent leaving you holding the liability bag. But a teammate better conjures an image of AI’s role — a fast-working, valuable junior that needs professional supervision.
Anyone asking attorneys to make a significant investment in this technology — either financially or with adoption — needs to understand they’re coaxing nervous squirrels by holding out a nut. Minimize anything that’s going to scare them.
So, what does this teammate bring to the table?
▪ Litigation Workflows – Workflows designed to support disputes, motions practice, discovery, and case strategy. Examples include draft a motion to dismiss, draft full discovery and deposition documents, identify top cases by fact pattern or legal concept, extract facts, and compare similar arguments or laws across jurisdictions.
▪ Transactional Workflows – Workflows focused on contracts, deal execution, and risk assessment. Examples include draft a transactional document or clause, generate first-pass agreements from term sheets or templates, redline agreements against internal standards or playbooks, analyze key provisions and identify high-risk clauses, review contracts for diligence risks, and extract key obligations and liabilities.
▪ Broader Legal AI Workflows – Designed for daily legal tasks in a private, secure workspace, powered by the latest AI models from Anthropic and OpenAI and, in the U.S., integrated with LexisNexis primary law and Shepard’s® Citations. Examples include draft a client alert, extract a timeline of key events, summarize an interview, and transcribe audio to text.
This is where providers with a deep understanding of the legal sector become so important. Some studies suggest that consumer-facing AI products like ChatGPT outperform tools built specifically for the legal industry. While Grok seems to excel at stripping things down and leaving just briefs, it’s a lot less reckless to put faith in the people who understand the space and have mountains of specific data to power their offerings. Even if a consumer tool can produce viable work product with the benefit of publicly available knowledge right now, with the leap toward more and more automation, it’s going to become more and more essential that the architects behind those products draw upon trusted experience and not vibe lawyering built by an idiot.
As technology starts making decisions without direct lawyer intervention, it speeds up the process in a manner that invites its own accidents. Preventing errors when firms go “GPTsus take the wheel,” as I’ve put it in the past, will depend on good design, not a bot trying to figure out how to perform tasks by scraping r/sovereigncitizen. How these workflows come together and avoid slippage when promising “end-to-end” work will be the secret sauce.
And to the extent a firm wants to introduce their own idiosyncrasies, LexisNexis will have a custom builder for customers to build their own systems leveraging their own experience.
This commercial preview seeks feedback from key LexisNexis customers, but the company expects to roll out Protégé workflows more broadly 2026. The pre-built and configurable workflows, as well as their Workflow Builder, will launch across the U.S., Canada, U.K., Europe, and Asia Pacific markets.
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.
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