When building and deploying AI, enterprises typically prioritize accuracy, but in complex industries like law, accuracy alone is not enough. According to Min Chen, LexisNexis‘ SVP and chief AI officer, models’ outputs must be assessed for relevancy, authority, citation accuracy, and hallucination rates to meet higher standards.
To tackle this task, LexisNexis has evolved beyond standard retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to graph RAG and agentic graphs, and has built out “planner” and “reflection” AI agents that parse requests and criticize their own outputs. Chen acknowledges that “there’s no such [thing] as ‘perfect AI’ because you never get 100% accuracy or 100% relevancy, especially in complex, high-stake domains like legal.” The goal is to manage that uncertainty and translate it into consistent customer value. Chen’s team has established over a half-dozen “sub metrics” to measure “usefulness” based on several factors, including authority, citation accuracy, hallucination rates, and comprehensiveness.
For instance, a user may ask a question that requires an answer covering multiple distinct legal considerations, and gen AI may provide a response that accurately addresses only some of these, resulting in an incomplete and potentially misleading answer. Chen’s team is working to overcome this limitation by developing agentic graphs and accelerating automation so agents can plan and execute complex multi-step tasks. The company has released its personal legal assistant, Protégé, which incorporates a knowledge graph layer on top of vector search to overcome the limitations of pure semantic search. LexisNexis has also launched its flagship gen AI product, Lexis+ AI, a legal AI tool for drafting, research, and analysis.
The future of AI, according to Chen, is a deeper collaboration between humans and AI, where human experts and AI agents can “learn, reason and grow together.” As LexisNexis continues to develop and refine its AI capabilities, the company is focused on managing uncertainty and providing consistent customer value. With the development of more advanced AI agents and the integration of human expertise, LexisNexis is poised to revolutionize the legal industry and set a new standard for AI-powered legal tools.
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