Lexis+ AI with Protégé redefines NZ legal landscape

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New Zealand legal professionals gain access to country-specific legal information and generative artificial intelligence that promises to reshape daily practice, giving legal professionals the power to be exceptional

BEYOND a precedent-shifting Supreme Court ruling, it’s rare to see the entire legal profession move in unison. But a new AI solution may do just that – pushing lawyers to rethink how they work, or risk being left behind. Earlier this year, barristers and solicitors across New Zealand began testing a product that is designed to provide conversational search, draft correspondence, summarise court decisions, and analyse legal documents. What they didn’t know was that they were taking part in the start of a quiet revolution. The recent launch of Lexis+ AI with Protégé™ marks a major milestone for the New Zealand legal market, introducing a legal generative AI tool built specifically for New Zealand legal professionals.

LexisNexis is a leading provider of legal, regulatory and business information, renowned for integrating advanced AI into its legal tools. Its AI-powered solutions – such as Lexis+ AI with Protégé – enhance legal research, drafting and analytics by delivering precise, localised and context-aware results. Using natural language processing and machine learning, LexisNexis helps legal professionals streamline workflows, analyse case arguments and uncover insights from vast legal data sets. These innovations improve accuracy, efficiency and strategic decision-making in legal practice. Committed to responsible AI, LexisNexis ensures transparency and data privacy while continuously evolving its tools to meet the dynamic needs of legal professionals worldwide.

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“The legal market is highly competitive, so it’s important that we provide our partners with the tools they need to become more effective and successful in what they do”

Aya Riola, LexisNexis New Zealand

“The significance of that alone is huge – it’s the first tailor-made, localised product for the New Zealand legal industry, providing NZ lawyers with a competitive advantage improving productivity and efficiency,” says Alastair Fernandes, product manager at LexisNexis New Zealand. Unlike generic tools trained on the open web, Lexis+ AI draws solely from LexisNexis content and offers responses grounded in authoritative citations that lawyers can trust. With the personalised assistant, Protégé, the product will evolve in the future with more personalisation features, integrate with firm document management systems, and streamline tasks from research to drafting – all while respecting the profession’s high standards of accuracy and confidentiality. For a sector long sceptical of automation, Lexis+ AI with Protégé may represent a tipping point. “The legal market is highly competitive, so it’s important that we provide our partners with the tools they need to become more effective and successful in what they do,” says Aya Riola, general manager at LexisNexis New Zealand. The tool’s arrival couldn’t be better timed. Legal professionals are drowning in documents, spending countless hours on repetitive tasks that could be automated, and facing increasing pressure to deliver faster results for clients. The arrival of Lexis+ AI with Protégé represents a potential solution to these mounting challenges. “The opportunity that it gives people to speed up how they research and ask questions and find out answers is potentially phenomenal,” says Alex Wakelin, head of customer experience and learning at LexisNexis New Zealand.

Unlike generic AI tools that legal professionals might experiment with, Lexis+ AI with Protégé has been purpose-built for legal work. The generative AI assistant draws from LexisNexis’s extensive legal databases rather than the internet. This approach addresses one of the biggest concerns lawyers have about AI: reliability. The product provides citations for every response, linking back to the original legal sources. Users can trace the AI’s reasoning and verify its conclusions – a fundamental requirement for legal work where accuracy is paramount. Wakelin emphasises the importance of this transparency. “With the information that we’re providing, users can check what information is being surfaced with the transparency that we’ve got around sources and so forth that were embedded in the product,” she says.

At the heart of the product lies Protégé, a personalised AI assistant. Rather than treating every interaction as isolated, Protégé aims to become what Fernandes calls “a trusted colleague that works with you, wherever you’re working”. The assistant will integrate in the future across Microsoft 365 applications, allowing lawyers to access generative AI capabilities within Word, Outlook and other daily tools without switching platforms. The personalisation extends to integration with firms’ document management systems. Future enhancements will allow Protégé to draw from both LexisNexis content and a firm’s document management system, creating responses that blend established legal principles with house style and preferences. This represents a significant departure from the one-size-fits-all approach of generic AI tools. A barrister preparing for court will receive different types of assistance than a commercial lawyer drafting contracts.

The product addresses primary legal tasks that research identified as time-intensive and suitable for AI assistance: conversational search, drafting, summarisation, and document analysis. Conversational search allows lawyers to ask natural language questions about legal principles, procedures, or case law. Rather than constructing complex Boolean searches, users can simply ask: “What are the requirements for proving negligence in product liability cases?” The generated response will include relevant authorities and practical guidance – all linked to source materials.

“As we’ve seen since its global release in other markets, Lexis+ AI is set to be a game changer for the legal industry in New Zealand”

Katy Fixter, LexisNexis APAC

“Document drafting instantly produces contract clauses and client communications such as emails and letters from user prompts,” Fernandes says. Case summarisation draws from LexisNexis’s extensive case database, providing both editorial summaries and AI-generated summaries of cases. This dual approach ensures quality while providing comprehensive coverage. The document analysis feature allows users to upload their own documents to rapidly analyse, summarise or extract key insights. “We allow our users to upload their own documents to then run the generative AI capabilities across them,” Fernandes explains. The New Zealand legal market presents unique challenges that generic AI tools cannot address. The country’s legal system, based on Commonwealth law, requires specific knowledge and local context that overseas products often lack. “The other significance is this generative AI tool that we’re bringing to market is also based on the depth of content that we’ve got already and our well-established relationship in the New Zealand legal industry,” Wakelin explains. LexisNexis has spent months fine-tuning the product for local use. Over 150 legal professionals across different practice areas have been beta testing the product, providing feedback that has shaped its development. “We’ve been doing local research with New Zealand lawyers across all different segments of the market – barristers and in-house counsel, large law firms, medium-sized firms, sole practitioners plus others who do legal research such as librarians and knowledge managers – about what they need from a tool,” Wakelin says. This research-driven approach addresses a fundamental problem with existing AI tools in the legal space. While open-source AI tools can generate impressive-sounding legal text, they often cite non-existent cases or apply overseas jurisdictions inappropriately. Lexis+ AI with Protégé solves this by drawing on LexisNexis’s NZ datasets, with every response linked back to verifiable sources. “We got a lot of feedback forms that came through, [where the testers] already knew the answer,” Fernandes says. Users would deliberately ask about areas of law where the cases and resources were thin to see if the product was prone to fabricating plausible-sounding answers. The transparency mechanism represents a significant advancement over current alternatives. When the product provides a case summary or legal interpretation, users can immediately access the source material within the traditional LexisNexis research platform. This addresses one of the profession’s primary concerns about AI hallucinations – the tendency for AI products to confidently present fabricated information.

Legal professionals handle some of society’s most sensitive information, making data privacy and security paramount concerns. LexisNexis has built comprehensive protections into Lexis+ AI with Protégé to address these requirements. Lexis+ AI with Protégé addresses these in accordance with the RELX Responsible AI Principles, which apply to both LexisNexis and other RELX businesses. “We’re not using customer data for training our AI models,” Wakelin confirms. The product is designed with robust privacy and security measures in place to protect sensitive client information and ensure compliance with relevant data protection regulations. Furthermore, the user’s data is not used to inform performance for other users. LexisNexis remains committed to providing the most secure and confidential AI experience for lawyers and with new capabilities to unlock a more personalised AI experience. The accuracy concern is addressed through what Fernandes calls a “human-in-the-loop approach”. In-house legal experts continuously evaluate the product’s outputs, testing edge cases and refining responses. The company has also addressed data sovereignty concerns that have emerged in recent years. Unlike many AI tools that process data in the United States, the Lexis+ AI NZ platform will be hosted in Sydney, Australia – a jurisdiction that New Zealand firms consider acceptable for sensitive legal data. “The general feedback across large law and government customers has been they don’t want their data going anywhere other than New Zealand or Australia,” Fernandes notes.

Building intelligence from the ground up

Core capabilities

Published 07 Jul 2025

Lexis+ AI core features

Conversational search

Ask legal questions, term of art interpretation and queries on legal principles and receive responses, complete with cited sources

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Generate first drafts of emails or letters and standard clauses, based on authoritative content

Draft in moments

Summarise case law with both AI-generated and human editorial summaries

Accurate and complete summarisation

Upload documents to extract key insights, compare agreements, or generate summaries

Analyse uploaded documents

Source: LexisNexis New Zealand

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+4% profit per lawyer by year 3*

20,000+ attorney hours saved by year 3*

Lexis+ AI paid for itself in <6 months*

344% ROI over 3 years for firms using Lexis+ AI*

Lexis+ AI reshaping legal industry

Source: The Total Economic Impact™ of LexisNexis Lexis+ AI for Large Law Firms, a commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of LexisNexis, May 2025. Download full study HERE.

*Findings derived from a study of US-based large law firms in 2025

Privacy and security at the forefront

Early New Zealand users involved in the commercial preview phase report positive experiences across different practice contexts. Librarians and knowledge managers used the tool to enhance traditional research, quickly summarising unfamiliar cases or exploring new legal areas. Junior lawyers found it valuable for determining research starting points, while senior practitioners appreciated its ability to handle routine drafting tasks.

Training for optimal results

The success of AI tools often depends on proper implementation and training. LexisNexis plans comprehensive support including public webinars and tailored in-house training for larger firms. The focus extends beyond basic functionality to effective prompting techniques – how to ask questions that generate useful responses. “Training will be really important,” Wakelin acknowledges. Early testing revealed that prompt quality significantly affects response usefulness. Users who approach the product as they would a legal colleague, providing context and specific requirements, receive better results than those treating it as a simple search engine.

The legal profession stands at an inflection point. While lawyers have historically been slow to adopt new technologies, the efficiency gains offered by AI tools may prove too compelling to ignore. “Generative AI has been the biggest thing in technology over the last couple of years ... it kind of blew everyone’s mind,” Fernandes reflects. The expectation is that lawyers will soon interact with AI tools daily, whether for quick research, document drafting or case analysis. The firms that adapt quickly may gain significant competitive advantages. “The before and after of this will be lawyers and legal professionals, in some way, shape or form, interacting with AI on a daily basis,” Fernandes predicts. The launch of Lexis+ AI with Protégé represents the next step in LexisNexis’s long history of research and development of AI-based solutions. The company plans to expand the product’s capabilities continuously, with developments including deeper integration with Microsoft applications and enhanced personalisation features. “As we’ve seen since its global release in other markets, Lexis+ AI is set to be a game changer for the legal industry in New Zealand,” says Katy Fixter, managing director at LexisNexis APAC. The local team at LexisNexis sees the launch as a potential Year Zero event for the legal profession, much in the same way as generative AI has impacted coding work. “There’s a big opportunity to change how the legal sector works,” Fernandes says. “It’s a completely different way of engaging with research tools.” Lexis+ AI with Protégé is now available in New Zealand. Book Your Free Demo by submitting the form HERE.

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