In this week’s interview, Marc May (Founder, The Legal Technologist – MM) spoke with Karen Waldron (Director of Product Development, LexisNexis – KW) about the enhancements to the Lexis+ AI offering and recent launch of Protégé, a personalised AI assistant with agentic capabilities.
MM: Hi Karen, thanks for joining me today to talk about LexisNexis’ recent launch of Protégé for UK lawyers.
MM: Tell me a little about your current role at LexisNexis
KW: I’m currently focused on how AI can improve and ultimately transform the legal industry, with an emphasis on the emergence of agentic AI tools that can be used within complex, multi-step tasks. As Director of Product Development, I lead the UK Product Management team at LexisNexis, the team behind the launch and ongoing evolution of Lexis+ and Lexis+ AI, which now includes our new generation AI assistant Protégé.
“As Director of Product Development, I lead the UK Product Management team at LexisNexis“
Karen Waldron
MM: Could you tell me a little about the launch of Protégé? How does it improve your current Lexis+ AI offering?
KW: We’re proud to have launched Protégé in the UK this week as the next major leap forward in our Lexis+ AI offering.
Protégé is a personalised legal AI assistant, built with direct input from UK law firms to support the real day-to-day tasks lawyers face – whether drafting, researching or advising clients. It brings new levels of efficiency and value by helping legal professionals move faster and focus on higher-value strategic work.
What makes Protégé different is its agentic capability. Agents are trained to perform specific tasks within a workflow really well, and Protege has the ability to review and refine its own drafting output and suggest intelligent next steps when researching. Of course, its responses are always grounded in trusted content from LexisNexis. Protégé will securely integrate with document management systems like iManage and SharePoint – letting users ground the AI response in their own document store.
This is more than a feature update. It’s a significant deployment of an agent-powered AI in the legal sector. Importantly, Protégé is embedded in the tools lawyers already use, such as through Create+ in the Microsoft Word environment. Protégé is a major step towards our vision of giving every legal professional a trusted AI assistant that understands their work and makes their life easier, and as ever is underpinned by the LexisNexis commitment to responsible AI
MM: What functionality do you think users will appreciate the most from the recent set of enhancements you’ve released?
KW: There are so many new functions and features, it really is hard to pick one. As we were building and testing Protégé, there was one feature that clearly caught the attention of our customers. I think users will be especially excited by the Vault and Protégé’s ability to work across multiple documents simultaneously.
The Vault allows users to securely store tens of thousands of their own documents within their own curated collections, then run AI-powered tasks across them. That could be summarising a set of documents, extracting key points, generating timelines, or drafting responses based on the uploaded work. It’s more than just storage; it transforms a lawyer’s own knowledge base into something they can actively query, explore and build from.
“The Vault allows users to securely store tens of thousands of their own documents within their own curated collections, then run AI-powered tasks across them“
Karen Waldron
What’s particularly powerful is that Protégé doesn’t treat each file in isolation. It can understand and respond to context across a set of documents – which is invaluable for tasks like pulling together case timelines, comparing precedents or preparing summaries across a matter. That kind of document-level intelligence, combined with the security and privacy of the Vault, is something I think will fundamentally reshape how lawyers handle their workload.
MM: You’ve worked with a number of customers to develop Protégé – how important was it to have firms involved to refine the end product?
KW: As with all our products, customer involvement and feedback is absolutely critical. Protégé was built with, not just for, the legal profession.
We worked closely with firms like Irwin Mitchell and Eversheds Sutherland throughout development. Real lawyers used Protégé on real legal work. They provided feedback on everything from accuracy to usability. Their insights helped us tailor Protégé to the specific challenges UK lawyers face day to day – whether that’s improving drafting flow, surfacing relevant precedent faster, or making the AI feel more intuitive in the way it interacts. Those partnerships don’t end now that Protégé is live. We’re continuing to work with all our customers to continually evolve our services. Bluntly, we believe the best legal tech is shaped by those who use it.
“Bluntly, we believe the best legal tech is shaped by those who use it.“
Karen Waldron
MM: You’ve worked in product development for a number of years now and I’m sure have seen a number of technological advances over that time. How big an impact do you think generative AI has had on the legal research space?
KW: Generative AI is the most transformative shift I’ve seen in legal research. We’ve had powerful legal search tools for years, but generative AI changes the nature of the interaction. Instead of searching for documents, lawyers can now ask direct legal questions and receive clear, contextual, citation-linked answers – often in seconds. That shift from retrieval to response generation is profound. It removes friction, speeds up analysis and frees up time for strategic thinking.
It is important to stress that AI is not about replacing expertise. In my view, it’s about multiplying that expertise. Protégé is designed not to be a replacement bot for a lawyer; but to be an extension of the human. It can and will help the human lawyer do more, faster and with greater accuracy by assisting with task completion.
Of course, trust and accuracy remain essential, which is why we’ve built systems like Lexis+ AI and Protégé to ground outputs in authoritative sources and provide full transparency through linked citations and editable drafts.
And don’t forget – we are still at the very early stages of this remarkable technology and already working on how to make Protégé even more powerful.
MM: Where do people go to find out more about Protégé?
KW: You can join a Lexis+ AI demo and see how Protégé works across Lexis+ AI, Lexis Create+ and the wider LexisNexis ecosystem. We have two taking place next week, on Tuesday 29th July at 1pm, and Thursday 31st at 2pm. More dates are scheduled.
Or, visit our webpage here to explore FAQs and get a quote. One of our expert team will be in touch.
