LexisNexis began rolling out its new legal research platform Lexis+ to students on August 3. In addition to an upgraded visual design and built on the foundation of the existing Lexis Advance, Lexis+ includes both new and enhanced features for users, many of which are powered by artificial intelligence.
Research starts at the landing page, where the user can select from three “experiences,” as Lexis+ calls them: legal research, Practical Guidance and brief analysis.
New Features
- Shepard’s At Risk: identifies cases that are at risk of being overruled, even if they have not directly been. It flags cases in which the underlying points of law on which they rely have been negatively treated by other decisions in the same jurisdiction, which would suggest it is at risk.
- Brief Analysis: allows users to upload their briefs and quickly receive recommendations for other cases to cite and similar briefs to review based on the citation patterns and legal concepts in the original document. The relevant cases include highlighted passages that would be of interest, and users can filter the results by the legal concepts that they are prioritizing in their research.
- Search Tree: displays visually how the terms in a terms-and-connectors search were applied and how those relationships impacted the results. In the Search Tree, each part of the search is represented in a box that displays how many results would be retrieved if only that part of the search was run. You can select any of the boxes to refresh the results with those search terms.
- Missing and Must Include: highlights terms from your search query that are missing from a specific document in the results set, without having to open the document. When you see a “missing” term at the bottom of the search-results snippet, you can select “Must Include” to rerun the search and force inclusion of that term.
Upgraded Features
Existing features that have been upgraded include Lexis Answers, which allows users to type in their questions and see the top three answers, along with an option to click on “Show More Answers.” The answers contain text from the relevant cases, as well as other key details about the cases where the answers were found.
Practical Guidance is an upgraded version of Practice Advisor in Lexis Advance. It is a collection of practice-specific forms, clauses, checklists, articles and practice notes designed to help a legal professional get up to speed more quickly on a particular matter.
Finally, Lexis+ expands the Search Term Maps feature of Lexis Advance from just case law to more than 30 content types, including news, statutes and legislation, administrative codes, secondary materials, administrative materials, and litigation documents. These maps show the location and distribution of your search terms both within the results list and within the full text of documents.
Additional analytics capabilities will be offered through Lexis+ later this year, including the integration of Lex Machina analytics, Courtlink, and other tools. Early in 2021, content from Law360 will be incorporated into the platform.
Students can log in at plus.lexis.com using their Lexis Advance usernames and passwords.