The legal research homepage for Lexis+, a new research product from LexisNexis that was built on the foundation of Lexis Advance.

Today, LexisNexis announced the phased release of Lexis+, the latest addition to its lineup of legal research products. Built on the foundation of Lexis Advance, the Lexis+ platform includes a variety of new features designed to foster a more integrated user experience in a highly competitive legal research market.

Some of the platform's novel features include Lexis Answers, which directs users to documents where the answer to a specific legal question is found. The Shepard's At Risk feature also identifies cases where the underlying points of law have been negatively treated by other decisions with a specific jurisdiction. Also, a Brief Analysis function supplies additional research recommendations while casting a net for other relevant materials to a case.

Jeff Pfeifer, chief product officer at LexisNexis, indicated that users are generally looking to drive greater efficiencies within the legal research process. "What we sought to do with Lexis+ is see how we could drive those insights faster or get the user to interact with that information much more quickly," he said.

Lexis+ will begin rolling out this week to law school faculty across the country, who will spend the month of July becoming familiar with the product before it is opened up to students in August. Law firms, in-house counsel and other commercial clients will start gaining access to the platform in September and Pfeifer said that LexisNexis' commercial teams would begin discussing pricing and packaging — which will likely be influenced by the content configuration selected — with those customers around that time.

While Lexis+ does feature new content and workflows that make it distinct to predecessor Lexis Advance, users will not be forced to upgrade or adopt the new platform. Instead, LexisNexis appears to be looking to sway clients the old-fashioned way—by incorporating customer feedback directly into the Lexis+ development process.

Specifically, users were looking for a sleeker, bolder design echoing the technology solutions they were interacting with every day in their personal lives. "That was the bar we tried to hit here. How could we make Lexis+ a solution with a modern design experience, a set of unique functional capabilities and empowered by some new technical capabilities that drive better insights," Pfeifer said.

Chief among those "new technical capabilities" is natural language processing, which helps to power features such as Lexis Answers. To be sure, Lexis+ isn't the only legal research platform deploying that technology. Fastcase, for example, entered into a partnership with ROSS Intelligence with the hopes of leveraging the company's experience with AI to diminish search lengths and bolster real-time updates.

But there's also some risk to throwing around buzz words like "natural language processing" too freely, which resulted in Lexis+ attempting to thread the tech almost invisibly throughout the platform. According to Pfeifer, if made too prominent, that kind of high-end technology can often be a double-edged sword.

"Especially machine learning and artificial intelligence, because many of our customers tell us things like, 'It kind of scares me, because I'm not exactly sure what's happening and sometimes I feel like I may loose control of the product experience,'" he said.

There are other challenges more specific to the moment. For example, Lexis+ marks the first time that LexisNexis has released a product in the middle of a global pandemic. But the legal research market in general seems healthy, with other legal research companies like Casetext and Fastcase proceeding full-speed ahead through COVID-19 following a brief slump in March.

"We've been able to amazingly find a very receptive customer audience both to ongoing research and development that's taken place, since most of our customers went to work from home back in March, all the way through the final coding work," Pfeifer said.