From hours to minutes: agentic AI frees solicitors for high-value legal work
Venture back a mere two years in time and the concept of injecting AI into your legal workflow would have sounded preposterous. Now, a legal workflow managed entirely by humans seems more irresponsible
In the same forward-thinking vein, the consistently heralded second, third and fourth wave of AI disruption that was said to be forthcoming is already here. Agentic AI, which acts autonomously and makes decisions to achieve its goals without constant human oversight, is that next wave of disruption.
LexisNexis has launched Protégé in the UK, a secure, agentic AI assistant designed to complete complex, multi-step legal tasks, review its own work and suggest improvements. For solicitors, this means less time spent on repetitive drafting and more time for strategic client advice.
The new era: why agentic AI matters for solicitors
The first wave of legal tech adoption focused on digitising research, automating document retrieval, and building searchable knowledge systems. Generative AI marked the second wave, capable of producing summaries, drafting text, and answering complex legal queries. But generative AI still requires constant user input and verification.
Agentic AI changes the rules of engagement. Unlike earlier tools, it can take a goal and work through multiple steps autonomously, without human intervention at each stage. Protégé does not just generate text, it drafts entire contracts, checks its own work, and recommends improvements before presenting the output for a final human review. It proactively suggests actions, remembers context, and dynamically adjusts to the lawyer’s workflow.
For busy legal teams, this means transforming high-volume, routine tasks into near-instant outputs, freeing solicitors to concentrate on judgment-driven, client-facing work.
What makes Protégé different?
LexisNexis Protégé represents a major leap forward because it blends three critical factors: security, integration, and intelligence.
1. Security and compliance at its core
Legal work demands absolute confidentiality and adherence to professional standards. Protégé was developed with the highest levels of security, privacy, and compliance, ensuring sensitive information is safeguarded throughout. Unlike open consumer-grade AI tools, Protégé is built for legal practice.
2. Deep integration with the legal workflow
Protégé is embedded within Lexis+ AI®, the comprehensive legal workflow platform, and integrates seamlessly with Microsoft Word through Lexis® Create+. It also connects to leading Document Management Systems (DMS) such as iManage and SharePoint. This enables solicitors to query firm-specific knowledge bases, extract clauses, and draft with full access to internal precedents and institutional memory.
3. Intelligent, autonomous assistance
At its core, Protégé’s agentic AI capability allows it to do what previous AI could not: autonomously complete multi-step tasks. For example:
- Drafting transactional documents: Protégé can produce tailored drafts, verify its accuracy, and propose refinements before human review.
- Suggesting next steps: Upload a set of documents, and Protégé identifies logical actions, whether summarising, creating a research note, or generating a timeline of key events.
- Enhancing legal research: It does not just answer questions, it proactively refines prompts and recommends queries that help lawyers achieve their goals faster.
- Vault-based knowledge access: Protégé can securely store and work with tens of thousands of documents, allowing advanced summarisation, clause extraction, and research.
By combining these features, Protégé is not just a drafting tool, it becomes an active partner in the legal workflow.
From research to reasoning: AI as a legal strategist
The leap from automation to agency has profound implications. Legal professionals have long worried about technology replacing human reasoning. But agentic AI shifts the debate, it is not about replacing solicitors, it is about elevating their work.
Consider how long junior lawyers traditionally spend drafting, checking precedents, and summarising case law. Protégé compresses these processes from hours into minutes. This does not diminish the solicitor’s value, rather, it allows more time for nuanced judgment, complex negotiations, and client advisory roles, tasks that no AI can yet replicate.
Eleanor Windsor, Partner and Director of Knowledge at Irwin Mitchell, captures this sentiment:
“Working closely with LexisNexis during the development of Protégé has given us the opportunity to help shape a tool that genuinely addresses the practical demands of legal work. The technology will save our teams time and allow them to focus more on strategic client matters.”
This shift represents more than efficiency, it is a cultural and professional evolution. Firms that adopt agentic AI early will likely outpace competitors in responsiveness, pricing flexibility, and client satisfaction.
Built with and for the legal profession
One of the defining strengths of Protégé lies in its co-development with leading UK law firms, including Eversheds Sutherland International and Irwin Mitchell. Through a customer-driven innovation programme, LexisNexis worked alongside practitioners to identify real-world pain points and design features that address them head-on.
The result is a tool that understands the rhythms of legal practice, from the need for precise drafting to the complexities of multi-document workflows. Protégé is not a generic AI repurposed for legal, it is purpose-built from the ground up for the profession.
The three waves of AI
The legal sector is living through its most significant technological evolution in decades. LexisNexis frames this as three overlapping waves:
- Extractive AI: Tools that retrieve and rank relevant results within massive datasets, transforming how lawyers conduct research.
- Generative AI: Systems that create content from data and prompts, enabling rapid summarisation and drafting.
- Agentic AI: A new paradigm, where AI can plan and execute multi-step legal tasks, learn from context, and suggest improvements autonomously.
Protégé embodies this third wave, combining the precision of extractive AI, the creativity of generative AI, and the decision-making of agentic AI.
What this means for the future solicitor
For solicitors, the message is clear: AI literacy is no longer optional. As clients demand faster, more cost-effective service, firms that harness agentic AI will redefine what “premium legal service” means.
Protégé’s launch in the UK is more than a product release, it signals a tipping point in the profession. The firms that thrive will be those that see AI not as a threat but as an enabler: reducing drudgery, enhancing accuracy, and freeing lawyers for the high-value, human-driven work that truly differentiates their service.
As Gerry Duffy, Managing Director of LexisNexis UK, puts it:
“Our vision is for every legal professional to have a personalised AI assistant that makes their life better, and we are delighted to deploy that to the UK through our world-class, fully integrated AI technology platform.”
The age of agentic AI has arrived. The question is not whether solicitors should adopt it, but how quickly they can integrate it into their practice.