Why NZ law firms are making the legal AI shift

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LexisNexis Protégé is helping New Zealand lawyers move beyond efficiency gains to create more value and reshape how legal work gets done

WHEN HENRY FORD introduced the moving assembly line at his automobile plant in 1913, he changed car production from a series of discrete tasks into an overarching system. Piecework was the prevailing logic of the day, and it seemed unassailable. What Ford grasped, and others did not, was that the transformative potential of the new machinery available lay not in doing the old work faster but in rethinking the entire sequence into an end-to-end process. This insight resulted in a different paradigm for industry where the whole was worth far more than the sum of its parts. Legal practice is at a similar juncture in its use of generative AI.

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 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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“Lawyers need an answer they can verify and trust in court”

Lindsay O’Connor, LexisNexis

For the past few years, the legal profession’s relationship with AI has followed the piecework model. AI helps a lawyer find a case more quickly here, summarises a document there, drafts a first clause somewhere else. Each application is useful. Each is also, in Ford’s terms, only an incremental improvement grafted onto an existing way of working rather than a rethinking of the workflow itself. That is beginning to change. The more significant question for New Zealand lawyers in 2026 and beyond is not which individual task AI can accelerate but how it can be made to run the whole production line. “The conversation is no longer whether lawyers will use AI,” says Lindsay O’Connor, general manager of content for the Pacific region and content strategy for APAC at LexisNexis. “It’s whether they can use AI in a way that is productive, trusted and professionally responsible.” O’Connor is central to LexisNexis’ development of Protégé, a personalised AI assistant built specifically for legal professionals. She has been watching the profession’s relationship with AI change faster than many had anticipated, and she sees that the AI story has started to transcend simple convenience. “We’ve moved on a lot from AI can help you with research or AI can help you summarise things,” she says. “Lawyers’ expectations are really evolving quite quickly to things that are not basic anymore.”

Beyond efficiency Today, it is almost standard practice for legal professionals to use generative AI for legal research, document review and summarisation, as well as drafting briefs or memos. That would have seemed improbable three years ago, but O’Connor points out that while productivity gains on the back of such changing workflows are real, they are just the starting point. “The biggest opportunity is not doing the same work faster,” she says. “It’s enabling lawyers to do more valuable work with the same resources.” As use increases, reports show the global legal AI market is expected to grow from US$1.45 billion in 2024 to US$3.90 billion by 2030. Within that, the legal AI market in the Asia Pacific region is anticipated to grow faster than any other region at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 20%.

The practical effect of increased AI use in legal work is that lawyers can get ahead of workflow demands. Where legal work has traditionally been reactive – a dispute arises, advice is requested or a contract lands on a desk – AI is beginning to enable a more proactive approach. “The real opportunity isn’t simply helping lawyers work faster,” O’Connor says. “It’s helping lawyers become more proactive advisers.” In-house leads the way Nowhere is this shift more visible than in corporate legal departments. In-house lawyers face particular pressure: their time is in high demand, external counsel spend is under scrutiny and the expectation that legal functions act as strategic business partners continues to grow. In-house lawyers in New Zealand are increasingly using AI to monitor regulatory changes, identify which contracts or business processes may be affected, assess potential exposure and provide guidance to stakeholders early, rather than waiting to be asked.

“The trick into the future will be hooking them up together so that you can really use those agentic workflows to move through the different skills needed at different stages in a process,” she says. “The future is every lawyer having a personal legal AI assistant that understands how they work, reflects their drafting style and helps them deliver more value.” For O’Connor, the broader vision is less about what AI can do for lawyers in 2026 and more about where the profession will be in 12 months’ time. The firms and legal departments that invest in understanding and shaping that trajectory, rather than simply watching it unfold, are likely to be the ones that create the most value.

“The future is every lawyer having a personal legal AI assistant that understands how they work, reflects their drafting style and helps them deliver more value”

Explore how Protégé can support research, drafting and document review in your practice. The question of trust Capability, however, is only part of what legal professionals need from AI. The other part is trust, and it is here that O’Connor believes the distinction between purpose-built legal AI and general-purpose tools becomes most important. “In legal practice, a convincing answer is not enough,” she says. “Lawyers need an answer they can verify and trust in court.” General AI tools, however capable, were not built with the specific demands of legal practice in mind. They may lack jurisdictional awareness, current legal content or the kind of auditability that professional environments require. “The difference between legal AI and general AI is trust, transparency and legal grounding,” O’Connor explains. LexisNexis’ approach to this problem involves what O’Connor describes as a data lake: a continuously updated repository of authoritative data that Protégé can draw upon to generate responses. This authoritative content includes Primary Law, proprietary research content and practical guidance that has been curated over decades. New cases and legal developments are then fed into the data pool on an ongoing basis, with court decisions typically available to Protégé within 24 hours of the case being received from the court.

“Without authoritative content, AI can generate answers,” O’Connor says. “With authoritative content, it can support professional legal work.” The localisation process for New Zealand is important. O’Connor explains that LexisNexis employs a team of New Zealand-trained lawyers, organised under what it calls the Data Discovery and Enrichment team, established about 12 months ago. Their role is to run example prompts through Protégé’s algorithms, assess every response against multiple criteria including accuracy, jurisdictional specificity and practical utility, and feed improvement recommendations back to the data science team. The same prompts are then run again to confirm improvements before new capabilities are made available to customers.

Published 03 Aug 2026

Lindsay O’Connor, LexisNexis

She also emphasises the importance of lawyers asking the right questions before adopting any AI tool. Where is the data stored? Is it being used to retrain the model? What content was the model trained on? Is it jurisdictionally specific? How often is it updated? “Governance is not a barrier to AI adoption,” O’Connor says. “It is what makes AI adoption possible.” On the question of AI sceptics within the profession, O’Connor is measured. Trust around output accuracy and trust around data use are two key barriers.“I think the sceptics are sceptics because they’re nervous. And I don’t necessarily see being nervous about AI as a bad thing, because it means that they are taking their obligations as a lawyer very seriously.” Transparency from providers, she argues, is one of the most effective tools for building confidence. When lawyers understand what is happening inside the model, how it is trained, how it is tested and where its limitations lie, the sense of risk recedes. LexisNexis applies AI responsibly through its Artificial Intelligence Management System (AIMS), covering model transparency, testing, and monitoring and strict adherence to the RELX Responsible AI Principles. Visit the LexisNexis Trust Center to learn more. “The more you see those results that are actually 80% of the way there and you’re just able to add your extra knowledge and expertise on top, [the more] we’re starting to see that people are finding the value for themselves,” she explains. Ford’s assembly line did not just speed up production. It changed what production meant. O’Connor’s vision for legal AI points in the same direction: not a set of tools that make existing work quicker but an end-to-end capability that changes what lawyers can offer their clients altogether and, perhaps, what legal service may mean. “The best measure of AI is not hours saved,” she says. “It is value created.” It is a logic that Ford would have recognised immediately. Protégé is now available for New Zealand legal professionals. Contact us for a Free Demonstration or request a Free Trial by submitting the form HERE.

“Everything that we do for New Zealand customers is specifically done in a New Zealand jurisdictional-specific version of the product,” O’Connor says. “It’s not built for Australia or the US. We localise it specifically for New Zealand, and it’s reviewed specifically by New Zealand lawyers.” One of the persistent challenges is teaching AI to handle the complexity of common law correctly. Algorithms, O’Connor explains, can struggle with the concept of legal importance: more recent cases do not always mean more significant, and a thorough understanding of court hierarchy, the relationship between cases and the commentary that sits alongside them takes considerable work to build into a system. “Algorithms can’t always prioritise what is the most important,” she says. The risk, she acknowledges, is oversimplification. “I worry sometimes that some AI tools can reduce the law down to the basics. The thing is, we have to recognise that law’s complex. Often there is no clear, correct answer.”

Governance and professional responsibility The New Zealand Law Society has issued guidance on generative AI, and New Zealand courts have published their own guidance for lawyers appearing before them. Both make clear that professional responsibility for work produced does not diminish because AI was involved in its production. “The lawyer of the future is not replaced by AI,” says O’Connor. “The lawyer of the future supervises, directs and validates AI-assisted work.” Data governance sits alongside accuracy as a key concern for legal teams evaluating AI tools. LexisNexis users can choose to store their own documents via Vaults, hosted on secure servers in Sydney that O’Connor says meets the requirements of Australian and New Zealand organisations, with strict data sovereignty requirements.

What Protégé helps lawyers do

Build legal workflows Use pre-built workflows for common litigation and transactional tasks, or create custom workflows tailored to a firm’s processes

Source: LexisNexis New Zealand

Draft legal documents Prepare transactional and litigation documents, including review-ready drafts with linked citations grounded in trusted legal content

Analyse documents securely Summarise and analyse complex documents, generate timelines, identify citations, analyse arguments and draft from uploaded materials

Access trusted legal research Obtain authoritative LexisNexis content, with outputs grounded in legal sources and CaseBase verification for cited, dependable answers

“For in-house legal teams, AI can help shift the role of legal from reactive problem-solver to proactive business partner,” she says. O’Connor notes that in-house teams appear to be grasping this opportunity first, partly because the pressure they face makes the value proposition more immediate. “I think the next wave of that is … private practice lawyers … becoming much more proactive business and risk advisers to their clients,” she says. The drafting capabilities of tools like Protégé are also becoming more sophisticated, moving well beyond generating a first draft quickly. Reviewing contracts, identifying potentially missing clauses, flagging supplier-preferential terms: these are tasks that require legal judgment, and AI is increasingly able to assist in structured, reviewable ways. Rather than piecework – using one tool to speed up discrete tasks in a lawyer’s day – AI is moving towards a complete assisted production line of legal work, from when an issue is first raised to final resolution. The next phase That production line model is already taking shape. Lawyers, O’Connor says, are no longer satisfied with AI tools that handle individual tasks in isolation. They want something that can produce outputs at each stage that connect logically to the next; in automobile terms, lawyers have the directions but want to see the whole map. LexisNexis is working on what O’Connor describes as “legal skills”: defined capabilities that replicate the specific tasks a lawyer undertakes at each stage of a matter, from reviewing a contract and extracting supplier-preferential terms to preparing a matter summary or drafting a client communication.

Source: LexisNexis New Zealand

Court decisions – within 24 hours of receipt of case from court

When new cases are available in Protégé

“Everything that we do for New Zealand customers is specifically done in a New Zealand jurisdictional-specific version of the product”

Lindsay O’Connor, LexisNexis