From drafting motions to contract redlines, the legal giant is shifting focus from “agents” to trusted, lawyer-supervised automated workflows.
New York, USA, 22 January 2026 – This morning, LexisNexis announced the commercial preview of Protégé AI Workflows, marking a major move in the company’s growing push to make artificial intelligence more practical for everyday legal work. While AI has been a hot topic across industries, many law firms are still trying to figure out how to turn it from a novelty into real, measurable productivity. LexisNexis is betting that the answer is not just smarter chatbots, but structured automation that fits into real legal processes.
The company’s approach reflects a larger trend in legal tech: momentum is moving away from simple AI “assistants” and toward automation systems that can guide and complete entire workflows. Protégé aims to support lawyers across a wide range of tasks, from motion drafting and case preparation to contract review and redlining against firm playbooks.
Interestingly, LexisNexis is not pushing the word “agents” as aggressively as many other AI vendors have been. If 2025 was the year legal tech became obsessed with agentic AI, this 2026 rollout appears to be intentionally calmer in tone. LexisNexis is instead leaning on language that feels familiar and easier for lawyers to trust, such as automated workflows. At times, the company even frames Protégé as a “teammate,” positioning it as a fast-working junior helper that can accelerate routine legal work, while still requiring professional supervision.
That shift in vocabulary is not accidental. Lawyers are naturally cautious about adopting technology that seems like it is replacing judgment, responsibility, or accountability. In law, anything that sounds like it can act independently can also sound like a risk. LexisNexis seems to understand that firms need reassurance that AI tools are designed to assist, not improvise. When firms are asked to invest time, money, and trust into new legal technology, the product must feel controlled, secure, and predictable.
Protégé AI Workflows comes with hundreds of pre-built legal automation tools and also offers a custom Workflow Builder. This allows firms and legal teams to create workflows that match their own internal standards, drafting preferences, and contract playbooks. The system supports litigation-focused workflows designed for disputes, motions practice, discovery, and case strategy. This includes drafting key documents, helping identify strong cases based on specific fact patterns or legal concepts, extracting relevant facts from legal materials, and comparing laws or arguments across different jurisdictions.
Protégé also supports transactional workflows, helping lawyers handle contracts, deal execution, and risk assessment more efficiently. It can assist with drafting clauses and agreements, generating initial documents using templates or term sheets, and redlining contracts based on firm-specific standards. It can also analyze provisions, identify potential risk areas, and extract key obligations and liabilities that matter most in negotiations and compliance.
Beyond litigation and transactions, LexisNexis is also positioning Protégé as a broader legal productivity tool for daily legal tasks. Within a secure workspace, it can help draft client alerts, summarize interviews, organize timelines of key events, and transcribe audio into text. LexisNexis says the platform is powered by the latest AI models from Anthropic and OpenAI, and in the U.S., it is integrated with LexisNexis primary law and Shepard’s Citations, strengthening the system’s ability to align outputs with authoritative legal sources.
This type of sector-specific expertise is becoming increasingly important as AI adoption rises. Some studies suggest that consumer-facing AI tools can outperform legal industry tools in certain areas. However, when it comes to legal work, “good enough” is rarely good enough. As legal AI shifts toward deeper automation, the risk of errors becomes more serious. Multi-step workflows can amplify small mistakes, and when tools start making decisions without constant lawyer oversight, reliability becomes the true differentiator. In that environment, providers with a deep understanding of the legal industry, supported by trusted data and intentional design, are more likely to earn long-term confidence from law firms.
Another key element in this preview is customization. Every law firm has its own language, preferred contract structure, negotiation style, and risk tolerance. A rigid automation product can feel limiting, but a configurable system can feel empowering. Protégé’s Workflow Builder offers firms the ability to introduce their own standards into the automation process, which could help ensure consistency across teams while still keeping lawyers in control of final outcomes.
For now, the commercial preview is designed to gather feedback from selected LexisNexis customers. The company expects to roll out Protégé workflows more broadly across 2026, with availability planned across the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Europe, and Asia-Pacific markets. As legal tech continues evolving rapidly, this release highlights where the industry may be heading next: AI tools that are less about hype and more about dependable, secure, workflow-driven legal productivity.
