LexisNexis continues to roll out its Lexis+ system across the globe, arriving in Canada this week after successful rollouts in the United States and the UK. It brings all the now-familiar premier research features from the prior launches updated for the Canadian market, including the first Canadian brief analyzer.
And there are a lot of unique wrinkles to serving the Canadian market from bilingual capabilities to a whole different corpus of legal research to putting extra letters in words like “colour” for no good reason.
And of course having to deal with this practice:
You should watch Netflix’s Dirty Money to learn more about that one.
That said, it’s sometimes hard to hype Lexis+ because so much of its appeal is in the fact that it provides exactly what you’d expect in a clean and logical way. Lexis has a vast library of research and delivers it intuitively? No kidding! Yet that clean and logical interface belies the complexity involved in building a system to get research from the user’s instincts to the screen.
Overall, Lexis+ Canada was built around the user experience, creating a workflow-centered solution. By seamlessly integrating multiple tools in one interface, Lexis+ Canada allows our customers to work with more focus, while removing the obstacles of switching between multiple platforms.
And while we talk a lot about simple, familiar user experiences improving tech adoption, Lexis also finds that users have more confidence in the research itself when working with a modern design interface. Simplicity conveys that a lot of work went into it. But if you’re the type that wants to get into the weeds, Lexis+ offers users a Boolean Search Tree so they can see what the system did and identify how their search got (or didn’t get) the documents the user wants.
The system also provides search term maps visually depicting clusters of search terms within search results and documents across major content types.
From research to practical guidance to analytics to bill tracking, Lexis+ puts everything in one place to minimize the dreaded act of jumping back and forth between screens. But the coolest feature in the Lexis+ arsenal is the brief analyzer which has been juiced up to tackle the unique Canadian market. Plug in the text and the system pulls out the key concepts, identifies the relevant jurisdiction, and starts feeding the user suggestions.
As useful as this may be in putting together your own brief, there’s something thrilling about the prospect of feeding the opposition’s papers into the machine learning maw and getting an instant map of every bad citation.
At a certain point you have to wonder when it becomes malpractice NOT to use a system like this.
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.
