LexisNexis Customer Innovation Lab: OpenAI and AWS Embedded in Real-Time Prototyping with Law Firms and Legal Departments

LexisNexis opened its Customer Innovation Lab in New York City (August 4, LawNext), a physical space where legal professionals, LexisNexis engineers, and AI technology partners — including OpenAI and Amazon Web Services — work side by side to design, prototype, and test new legal AI capabilities. Prototypes are tested on the same day they are built; those clearing quality, accuracy, and security standards can advance into development as capabilities within Lexis+ with Protégé in less than a month for functionality-level features. Products already shipping from the Lab include LexisNexis-developed legal AI models (purpose-built using authoritative legal content), a customer-managed Protégé Vault for multimedia materials (documents, video, audio, images — including deposition timestamp extraction), and Protégé Workrooms (secure shared spaces for outside counsel, clients, and experts with permissions and access controls). The top priority is legal drafting quality: lawyers spend 40–60% of their time drafting and reviewing documents. For legal tech operators and law firm procurement teams: the Lab's model — customers bring pain points, LexisNexis engineers build against them, OpenAI and AWS participate in sessions — is a product development acceleration mechanism that also creates customer stickiness. The collaboration architecture means LexisNexis products reflect actual lawyer workflow problems, not the assumptions of internal product managers. Legal departments wanting to influence roadmap should engage.