Unique Contributions

Generative AI and the law: how customers are adopting this new technology and creating value. Insights from LexisNexis

• RELX • Season 4 • Episode 1

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In this first episode of Season Four, YS Chi speaks with Sean Fitzpatrick, CEO of LexisNexis North American, UK & Ireland. 

In June 2023, YS interviewed Mike Walsh, CEO of LexisNexis Legal & Professional, a few months after introducing generative AI at scale to the legal profession.  

Fast forward to 2025 and thousands of small and large legal firms are now actively using this new technology across multiple regions. YS asks Sean how customers are adapting to, and adopting this new technology. Can it be trusted? What impact will it have on law firms' business model and the billable hour? How is it affecting legal education and the next generation of lawyers. What is the vision? 

YS Chi:

The unique contributions podcast is brought to you by RELX. Find out more about us by visiting relx.com

Sean Fitzpatrick:

You know the vision is not like a 10-year vision. This is not about what we're going to do 10 years from now, or five years from now, or even three years from now, a lot of this stuff is available today.

YS Chi:

Hello and welcome to a special episode on AI and the law. RELX has been using extractive AI across the company for well over a decade, and now generative AI. In early 2024 Bank of America, an investment bank, said that 2023 was the year of the ‘AI enablers.’ While 2024 would be the year of the‘AI adopters.’ RELX was listed among the top 10 companies most likely to benefit from AI. Now, fast forward to 2025 and LexisNexis Legal & Professional, our legal business, has deployed generative AI at scale across the US, Canada, UK, France and Australia, among other countries, and generating revenues. My guest today is Sean Fitzpatrick, CEO of LexisNexis for North America, UK and Ireland. Sean is uniquely positioned to share insights on how the legal profession is adapting to generative AI, the risks and opportunities, and what this means for the future of legal profession. So Sean, welcome.

Sean Fitzpatrick:

Thank you. It's great to be here.

YS Chi:

Yeah. How about we start with an introduction about yourself from you. Tell us about your background.

Sean Fitzpatrick:

Yeah, sure. So, I've been at LexisNexis for just under 20 years now. Hard to believe that much time has passed. When I came to LexisNexis my children were just babies. My daughter was two years old and now she's graduating from college. So…

YS Chi:

Alright. Congratulations.

Sean Fitzpatrick:

Thank you. It's been a wonderful, wonderful journey. So, you know over that time, I've had various jobs at LexisNexis. I came into LexisNexis working in the strategy organisation, and then transitioned into a number of different P&L roles. About 10 years ago, I took on responsibility for our North American business, and about three years ago, I took on responsibility for our UK business. So, that's kind of my remit today. Prior to LexisNexis, I was a consultant at McKinsey and Company, and I have an MBA from the University of Michigan and an undergrad degree in accounting from the University of Notre Dame.

YS Chi:

Alright. A Midwesterner?

Sean Fitzpatrick:

Yes

YS Chi:

So, you went from being in accounting to strategy and now to actually running a relatively sophisticated and huge business. Why in this field? I mean, from strategy, you must have seen every kind of industry.

Sean Fitzpatrick:

Yeah, it was an interesting transition, actually. I'd been at McKinsey for a few years, and I had to kind of make a decision that I want to try to become a partner at McKinsey, or did I want to transition into a different track? And I really wanted to go a different track, and so I wanted to do the P & L route. I got a call from a recruiter, and I had not really done anything. I hadn't put together my resume, I hadn't practiced any of my interviewing skills. This recruiter told me about this opportunity to come to work for LexisNexis in the strategy group. I kind of did a little research on it, and I thought, well, there's no way in the world that I'm moving to Dayton, Ohio. But I do want to get this process moving and I need to get my resume updated and I need to practice some skills, so this will be a good practice round for me. Then I ended up going to Dayton and interviewing, and I guess things just got out of control. The next thing I knew, I was signing the paperwork to come to work for LexisNexis. But what really happened in that process that changed my mind about working at LexisNexis was I met a couple of individuals. One of them was Rich Van Vleck. Rich ran strategy and business development at Lexis at the time, and he talked to me about the strategy of the company and how LexisNexis had all this content. And that we were at the intersection of content and technology. The timing, you know, was right to be at that intersection. That was pretty compelling to me. Then Darrell Huntsman was another individual that I met, and Darrell shared with me his vision about how we could take this content and embed it into technology solutions, and then embed those technology solutions into the workflows of our customers. I thought that was really compelling as well.

YS Chi:

Well, I think the timing of the content meeting these tech tools to be something valuable, right? Something that actually gives output, outcome, impact. That was great timing for you.

Sean Fitzpatrick:

Definitely.

YS Chi:

Yeah. So, let's talk about great timing on AI. It's generally accepted by legal professionals that Gen AI will have a notable impact on legal work, if not already there, and visible. And that it has significant potential, but also some adverse effects too. So you know, LexisNexis was extremely fast out the gate before anybody else, to adopt and roll out these Gen AI solutions and into full scale of LexisNexis advanced, right? So you've got now already, thousands and thousands of customers using Gen AI. Anything from a one man practice all the way to thousands of lawyers firms and across many, many borders. Tell us what you're hearing from those customers that are actually using them.

Sean Fitzpatrick:

Yeah, so we're seeing a number of different things when it comes to the adoption of AI. I think the first one is really speed. You know, the legal profession hasn't typically been really quick to adopt new technologies, but generative AI has been an exception to that. I like a quote that I read from Emily Floria, who's the director of knowledge and research at DLA, which is one of the largest law firms in the world and one of the most tech forward law firms in the world. What she said about AI is, we went from zero to 60 in one second. It went from being on our radar to something that we spent all of our time on. And so that's just, one of the things that we're seeing with AI, is just how quickly it's being adopted. A second thing is the kind of these, I'll describe them as‘aha’ moments that attorneys are having. So, I was reading a story about a partner at a law firm in South Carolina. He was at a bar sponsored event on AI, and he watched the facts of a car accident case being loaded into the system. And then the system delivered this argument. And he said, you know, I read the argument. It was an excellent argument. It required a few modifications, but with a few modifications, I'd be comfortable taking this thing to court. Then it produced a set of counter arguments, things that I might face from opposing counsel. And he said that was kind of my ‘aha’ moment. I'm like, okay, I get it. I understand how this can be useful in the practice of law. There's another lawyer from Austin, Texas. He described AI as the law clerk that you've always dreamed of. I think that's really what it is. We're not looking to replace lawyers. We're looking to give them tools to help them drive better outcomes for their clients and make them more efficient in the process.

YS Chi:

Well, that's a really important point Sean, right? So many people believe that Gen AI will actually replace lawyers rather than aiding them.

Sean Fitzpatrick:

Yeah, I just don't believe that they're going to replace lawyers. I think that they're going to make them more efficient, and I think they're going to drive better outcomes. The legal industry has been adopting technology for decades. I remember, as a person very young in my career, going into a deal room. It was an M&A transaction and there were 30 attorneys in there, and every attorney had a banker's box sitting on their desk full of contracts. They were reviewing every contract, word for word, and highlighting certain things and putting sticky notes on them. None of that happens today. All of that is automated. It's all done by computers today, but we have more attorneys today than we had then. So it didn't replace the attorneys. The attorneys were able to actually become more efficient, get better outcomes and drive their activities towards more high value type of tasks. Instead of working on just reviewing documents, now they're working on information security. They're working on complex anti-trust issues. They're looking for tax arbitrage, they're looking at creative financing opportunities. Really been able to transform the type of work that they do, and I think that's what we'll see with generative AI. We're just going to see it at a totally different scale.

YS Chi:

So, just taking that a little step further. Technology has always replaced some of the human tasks and then regenerated new type of tasks for those, either replaced or new, skilled people. Is this going to be any different?

Sean Fitzpatrick:

I think that it will be different. I think it will be different in terms of the scale that it happens at. But I think that the same thing will happen here. I mean, we're already seeing it. Lawyers are spending a lot of their time providing guidance to their clients on how to adopt generative AI. There are all kinds of issues around intellectual property that have been created by AI. Those things are driving additional work for lawyers. So, there are already shifting into new higher value practice areas and activities.

YS Chi:

So, one of the things that lay people like me would question is, the business model of law firms. It's based on billable hours, how much work they do. If a lot of their work is become more efficient because of these tools, does that change the billing model?

Sean Fitzpatrick:

You know what, it’s yet to be seen. I've been hearing about the death of the billable hour for 20 years, and yet it's still predominantly the method that attorneys use. So, we'll see. I think that it does. The introduction of AI powered tools creates an opportunity, potentially, for more fixed fee type arrangements, as things become automated. You know, processes become automated and more predictable. But it's yet to be seen whether that will actually play out in the real world.

YS Chi:

Right, and the best will always make great adaptive moves. So, law firms will be fine as long as they add value to customers, and they see it that way, right?

Sean Fitzpatrick:

That's right. It comes down to how much value, are you creating. And we believe that they're going to be able to create additional value.

YS Chi:

Yeah

Sean Fitzpatrick:

As they create additional value, they should be able to charge more. And part of it is, you're seeing it in rates. So, the rates that firms are charging are going up. The cost per billable hour is increasing. Well, that only increases when you can create additional value. So attorneys are creating additional value per hour.

YS Chi:

Differentiation, right?

Sean Fitzpatrick:

Yes

YS Chi:

Yeah. Another angle of efficiency comes from the clients, and not LexisNexis clients, but the law firm’s clients. If these things become so smart and usable, does it help regular people like me, who needs to use lawyers to be better prepared, and need to use lawyers less, because I can do more things on my own, or more things are done automatically, so it should be much cheaper for me to engage a lawyer?

Unknown:

Yeah, but I don't think it's a good idea to practice law on your own, or dentistry or brain surgery or anything like that. Medicine, you know. I think that these tools can benefit normal citizens. I don't think it's going to allow them to practice law, but I think it will allow them to be more prepared when they go in and talk to their attorney. I think it's going to allow them to be more informed. I think it's going to allow them to take the information that they get from their attorney and to better understand what that information is, and what it means. But I don't see it. I don't see this empowering normal citizens to practice law.

YS Chi:

But some simple things are just going to be doable. I mean, this is the case already 20 years ago, right? When some of the simple things that might have needed a lawyer. Consumer can do on her own because things are just available on the internet and they're relatively simple.

Unknown:

Yeah. I mean, that's true. If you want to draft a will. There are lots of different kits out there that you can draft a will with. I mean, I certainly would want to have an attorney take a look at my will.

YS Chi:

Yeah, and that's the point, right? And I think that in the past, you might have used the analogy of how, at the end of all these technological interventions, there's still a pair of human eyes that need to take a look.

Sean Fitzpatrick:

Absolutely. We still need that attorney. The law is very complicated. It's very nuanced.

YS Chi:

And it constantly changes.

Sean Fitzpatrick:

Exactly. You need to have somebody, a professional, that really knows what they're doing, to look at any legal document, before you sign it. That would be my approach, for sure.

YS Chi:

So, let's go down this lane just one more step. One of the reasons why I really like the idea of human intervention at the end, as quality control and adding, additional value, is this question of the downside of AI. The whole concept of hallucinations and deep fakes. I think that some of the listeners will remember how in early 2023, lawyers in New York were sanctioned for including completely fictitious AI driven citations in their filings. I know that those were early days, but hallucination risks are still very real today. So ultimately, how do attorneys and lawyers expect to trust these tools from LexisNexis?

Unknown:

Well, you hit on a really important point YS. Veracity matters. Veracity matters in the law, and it's the responsibility of the attorney. They ae responsible for their final work product. It's not the AI that's responsible. They're responsible for the documents they submit to court, the documents that they use in transactions and so on. AI can help them with that, but their AI needs to provide them with a level of transparency. They need to be able to link back to the original authority and check it, and shepardize it and make sure it's good law, and be able to stand up in court and say,“Yeah, this document is real, and these citations are real, and I'm signing my name to it. Everything in here is correct.” At LexisNexis, we're helping customers with that. If you see a citation that's produced by our generative AI, it will be linked back to our research system. You can click on that. You go directly back to the authority, go back to the case. You can read the case law summary. You can read the shepherd's report. You can verify that it's a real case, a real citation, and so on. So, there are some challenges, but we're helping our customers work through those. Another challenge that folks are facing is information security. These attorneys, they're dealing with the most sensitive information in the world, in some cases, and they need to be sure that data is going to is being protected. And again, at LexisNexis, we've been doing data security for 50 years; data security and data privacy. We've been at the forefront of using advanced encryption and privacy solutions since the very beginning. It's just super important that whoever folks partner with in terms of generative AI, that they've got that focus on information security.

YS Chi:

One area you mentioned that sometimes people inside the company and our clients take for granted is the high quality of content that LexisNexis Legal & Professional uses as its base. Correct? What can you tell me about the investment that the company is making, or still making to make sure that fundamental is not compromised.

Unknown:

We have one of the world's largest repositories of authoritative legal material. We have over 100 billion documents in our system. We collect over 2 million documents every single day and add it to that system from 50,000 sources around the world. It's important to be able to have the most updated information in your system at all times, and so we're absolutely committed to doing that. We also built an ecosystem. So, it's not just about collecting the documents, but it's about identifying the linkages between those documents. We have over 150 billion linkages identified between different documents, so you can see how they're related.

YS Chi:

This is the kind of stuff that makes LexisNexis so unique and difficult to copy by just any tech firm coming around and trying to replicate what you do.

Unknown:

That’s right. And a lot of that content is proprietary, so it can't be copied.

YS Chi:

Yeah. Now, we've discussed the impact of AI on the profession. I'd like to explore a little bit the impact of AI on the next generation of people who are going to become our lawyers. How is this affecting the education part of the law, as they get ready to be lawyers. What is happening at the law schools?

Unknown:

There are 198 ABA accredited law schools across the United States. 100% of those now have access to AI tools. They are they're all incorporating it into their programs. The last report that I saw, and this is a while ago, indicated over 90% of them had incorporated AI into their curriculum. I note that was a while ago, because I think that numbers approaching very rapidly, approaching 100%. Every law school is going to be teaching about generative AI. When law firms hire newly graduated attorney’s, they are looking for folks that are ready to practice right. And this generation of lawyers that's graduating from law schools, they're going to be the most technically savvy generation of lawyers in history. And they are going to bring that technology, those technology skills, into the firms with them and help strengthen the quality of the firm's understanding and ability to use that technology. It's going to help them become more efficient and more effective in the practice of law. Another thing is, is these tools do make you more efficient, and so if you're more efficient in law school, you can spend time working on things like legal writing, which comes up constantly as a as an area of concern. But you have, the law schools have more time to teach legal writing if they're spending less time in other areas because of the efficiencies that have been gained. Then it also can help lawyers become better writers. As someone writes something, the ability to put it through an AI tool and analyse it and get immediate feedback on it, and suggestions on it, is one way that you become a better writer.

YS Chi:

Right. And Gen AI is really changing all forms of education right now. So, it's really exciting time.

Sean Fitzpatrick:

Absolutely.

YS Chi:

How about if we look a little bit further out there? Can you talk about what your vision is about where Gen AI will take the legal profession eventually?

Unknown:

Yeah, so it's a great question. I have a number of different views on it. Our vision is that every attorney is going to have a virtual, AI powered assistant. And that assistant is going to understand their jurisdiction, their practice area. It’s going to understand their preferred writing style. It's going to have access to their prior work product. It's going to have access to all of our content, one of the world's largest repositories of authoritative legal material.

YS Chi:

Let me stop there. So, you're really suggesting very personalised AI tool?

Unknown:

Yeah. If they wanted to write something in their own style. Being able to access their prior work product to be able to do that is one way that the technology can be used in order to personalise things. Understanding the practice area and the jurisdiction allows you to get to more refined results that are going to be more on point for what you're trying to achieve.

YS Chi:

That is so exciting Sean.

Unknown:

And these assistants are going to develop more skills over time, and we believe that those skills are going to align with the workflow of the attorney. In a lot of cases, though, they'll automate that workflow to drive better outcomes and make those attorneys more efficient. You think about the different types of attorneys. You can have a real estate attorney, or an M&A attorney, or a labour and employment attorney. All those attorneys, while they're all lawyers, they're all doing very, very different tasks, right? We see a situation where there are agents for labour and employment attorneys that will take the different activities that they do, and they'll automate different things along that workflow. If you think about, what an attorney does today versus what they might do tomorrow. A typical morning might start out with reading the news about what's going on in the law, doing some research on a case for a matter that they're working on. They might draft a motion to dismiss for a particular matter. Tomorrow, those same activities with the power of AI might be quite different. So instead of reading the news, they'll get a curated summarisation of the key news that's most important to them. Instead of reading a case, they'll be able to read a case, but they'll also be able to ask a follow up question about that case. Instead of drafting a motion, they'll be able to study the tendencies of the judge, and how often has she granted a motion to dismiss. And how often does she do it relative to her peers, and when she does do it, what are the points that she highlights. When she denies that motion, what are the things that she points to.

YS Chi:

That last piece, that seems to be very analytic AI, almost predictive AI. Is that the next thing coming around the corner?

Unknown:

It might be. I think the tools are developing so quickly, it's hard to say exactly what's going to be next. But, we've been using AI for years. I mean, decades, really. We use natural language processing, we use machine learning. We use, what some have described as extractive AI, to pull information out of large data sets. We use generative AI now. On the forefront, we're on the forefront of predictive AI. We're starting to see agentic AI come in to practice. This is where the AI tools are autonomously moving to the next step without processing. They're using reasoning and logic to do the next activity. For example, if you draft a document, after you draft a document, what's the next thing you're going to do? Well probably review that document, maybe make some comments about that document, then go back and review those comments and make changes to the document. And you might be collaborating with someone else throughout that process. Well, the tools are going to be able to do those same things. It will draft a document, it will send it to another model, who will review it, provide feedback. The model will pause, take that feedback into consideration, make revisions. All this is happening autonomously, without the attorney prompting it. And it's happening, at the speed at which bits and bytes, move through these computer systems, which is nearly the speed of light, right? To the attorney, it looks almost instantaneous.

YS Chi:

It's exciting what's going to be ahead. Just like you mentioned earlier about where content and technology met together. About the timing of your joining this industry. There's something about all these things that you describe that has to do with us actually knowing what the lawyers need. Not only as someone who's adopting technology. How do you keep up with what the lawyers really need as they face their clients?

Unknown:

Well, we have a very collaborative process. We work with clients on the development of all these products. They're an integral part of everything we do in product development, and we're really trying to understand what are the big pain points for them, what are the challenges that they're facing? How do they see AI as potentially assisting them in solving those challenges? We have over 2000 research scientists in the organisation. We have, we employ, either directly or through contractors, thousands of attorneys as well. We put those entire teams, together with our clients, to develop new solutions that more effectively address those pain points and those challenges that attorneys are facing every day.

YS Chi:

Right, and I just wanted to point out how quickly, after the first euphoria came out in the end of 2022 about Gen AI that LexisNexis was able to turn around within less than handful month with already a product out there. Which tells me that you really knew what the customers wanted all along the way. You really got the pulse.

Unknown:

Yes, I think we've always been focused on the customer. They're at the center of everything that we do. When generative AI kind of exploded, we were already working with our with our customers on generative AI, and that allowed us to launch a product in October of 2023. Less than a year, after kind of that explosion. We've just continued to iterate on it. Now, we launched our latest generation of that called Protégé. It takes everything that used to be able to do in our AI assistant, and you could do it in Protégé, but usually you can do it better now. It's added a whole new set of skills. Now you can do things like prepare for a deposition. You can summarise a very complex, like a 100 page legal document. You can draft a discovery request. You can create a vault of documents and you can do things with that, like ask questions to that set of documents, or summarise that set of documents. Or create a timeline based on information that's in those documents. You can draft a set of interrogatories, which is all these activities that lawyers do, that they wanted help with, and that they saw opportunities to use generative AI for. We've worked with them to develop solutions that do that. I just see this continuing to grow and build again, like right down the line of the workflow of the attorney in different practice areas.

YS Chi:

Well, you're very modest about describing the impact that Protégé will have to the lawyers, because I think it's amazing tool that you've already introduced. It's already been adopted and commercialised. It's terrific.

Unknown:

I think that's one of the interesting things about this. I was talking about all the advancements and our vision. The vision is not like a 10 year vision. This is not about what we're going to do 10 years from now, or five years from now, or even three years from now. A lot of this stuff is available today. So the stuff that's not available today, most of it's going to be available within the next year. We have been able to move very, very quickly to turn this into actual usable products.

YS Chi:

Well, we're very happy that you were able to move so quickly and that you continue to move forward like that. Sean, I'm very jealous of the stuff that you're doing and how much success you're garnering already, but we can't leave our conversation without talking about something that is the true undercurrent in your organisation, which is your embracing of the rule of law. It is so central to what LexisNexis is. Tell me one more time, why is that the case and how does the advancing of the rule of law really help us be in the business?

Unknown:

Well, I'm glad you brought that up because I think it's a topic that we probably don't spend enough time talking about, and it's so central to what we do. It's our mission. Our mission is to advance the rule of law around the world. If you look at the studies of the impact of the rule of law, which you'll see, and this has been very well documented, is that as the rule of law gets stronger in any jurisdiction, the quality of life improves. If you can use almost any metric for quality of life, and you can see the correlation, GDP, per capita, life expectancy, infant mortality. All of the outcomes improve as the strength of law improves. We have about 8 billion people now living on this planet, and about half of them live outside of the protection of the rule of law today. How do you solve, go about solving a problem that affects 4 billion people? And how do you solve that problem quickly? Well, any problem that's that big requires a lot of different layers to solve it, but one of those layers certainly needs to be technology. And that's really what we bring to the game, technology. And with these AI powered tools, I think we're going to be able to be able to bring technology to the forefront even faster, improving the strength of the rule of law and thereby improving the quality of life for people around the world.

YS Chi:

Well, I think the way I look at it now, is that you have a combination of customer centricity, unique and high-quality content, infusion of technology as it develops, all wrapped up in this great mission of advancing the rule of law. That's really what makes you so unique.

Unknown:

Thank you. Yes. Good summary.

YS Chi:

Well, I'm again, very jealous of what you get to do. You and I joined this company almost at the same time. I'm about three months ahead of you and I've seen this happen at LexisNexis. I've seen it happen in our other businesses, and I think you and I, we really enjoy the journey.

Unknown:

Absolutely. And thank you so much, YS for spending this time with me today and giving us a chance to share our story. Thank you so much for everything that you do for our customers as well.

YS Chi:

Thank you, and I hope that I will see you very soon at one of our intersections.

Unknown:

Excellent. Looking forward to it.

YS Chi:

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