This AI-Powered Document Tool Will Meet You Where You Are

Documents make the legal world go round, and attorneys working in litigation and transactional practice areas rely on accurate, precisely worded work products to gain the best outcomes for their clients.

Lexis Create, the most recent edition of which was made available in the U.S. late last year, eases the process of creating those documents by bringing a suite of unique tools into the drafting environment where attorneys spend much of their time.

In a recent interview, LexisNexis Head of Product for Legal Drafting Maya Hodroj broke down how Lexis Create can empower attorneys with simple access to external and internal knowledge — all directly within Microsoft Word.

A Legal Drafting Assistant Directly in Word

Document drafting and review have consistently been popular use cases for generative AI tools in the legal space, and Lexis Create brings this technology (among others) to the environment where many lawyers spend most of their time.

“Lexis Create is essentially a drafting tool that leverages extractive and generative AI, as well as non-AI technology, to help users draft, review, and complete documents across litigation and transactional workflows,” Hodroj says.

“We bring LexisNexis premium content and value-add capabilities to where lawyers actually spend most of their time, and what we hear is that 80% of lawyers’ time is spent in Microsoft tools, specifically Word.”

Lexis Create is also integrated with Lexis+ AI empowering users to interrogate their document as well as generate a summary of the document. This can help attorneys distill documents down to key facts, either for their own consumption or when sharing the key points with a colleague or client. Lexis+ AI also uses the fastest legal generative AI with conversational search, drafting, summarization and hallucination-free linked legal citations

Lexis Create is an add-in for Word and available directly from the Microsoft store, allowing for a streamlined download process and automatic updates.

Leverage Internal Knowledge Across Projects

The practice of law is, at its core, knowledge work. While LexisNexis boasts a massive database of legal knowledge, firms also produce internal knowledge through experience and practice.

Lexis Create provides users with immediate access to their internal knowledge through a snippets bank as well as LexisNexis content, according to Hodroj, who adds that users can then review, filter, insert, and format that content within their document without ever leaving Word. A recently added feature, Recommend, scans a user document and suggests alternative clauses to the ones in a user’s document.

“This integration helps reduce the context-switching pain all of us have suffered from when bouncing back and forth from one application to another, from one product to another,” Hodroj says.

“Snippets effectively allow users to save and edit specific clauses or specific segments of documents that they think they’ll want to reuse, as well as share those segments with relevant teams or other attorneys at their firm,” Hodroj explains.

By building a shared set of Snippets, users can more seamlessly utilize the best language produced by the firm for the task at hand without spending time searching through previously drafted documents.

Hodroj adds that knowledge managers within firms can take advantage of Snippets to create centrally managed knowledge repositories that draw upon content from the firm’s established document management system.

Refine And Optimize Your Work With Ease

In addition to Snippets, Lexis Create’s other core features — all of which are available regardless of a user’s access to other products from the LexisNexis suite — are focused on building original documents, scanning and reviewing those documents, and finalizing them for whatever their intended use may be.

For initial drafting, the Set Cite Format tool, for example, allows users to tell Lexis Create which jurisdiction’s style guide to use when checking citations within the document.

To take things a step further, the Get Cited Docs tool not only pulls the materials relevant to every citation in the document, but also checks those citations with Shepard’s Signals so users can be sure they’re citing good law.

Other tools are available to double-check quotations and citation formatting or to scan the entire document for inconsistencies related to definitions, dates, numbers, inclusive language, incomplete information (such as placeholder text), and broken or outdated links between clauses and clause references.

Lexis Create can also implement e-signatures via DocuSign integration and assist in preparing a table of authorities, redacting sensitive information, and scrubbing metadata from a document.

All of these features were designed with the goal of meeting attorneys where they are and making the most of their experience and knowledge without just adding another tool to their workflows, according to Hodroj.

“There is a bit of fatigue in terms of using yet another tool, yet another product,” she says. “Integrating with existing workflows is the way to go.”

To learn more about Lexis Create and request a demo, visit LexisNexis.com.