Like many in-house legal teams, Phoenix ME’s lawyers needed the speed of AI with the assurance that every answer it produced was grounded in authoritative legal research. Using Lexis+ with Protégé, its team is turning complex questions around more quickly and absorbing work that might otherwise require input from external counsel.
Why Phoenix ME needed AI to accelerate its legal work
As General Counsel, Julian Kirkpatrick leads a five-person legal team whose remit spans construction projects, commercial contracts, employment matters and a variety of other legal issues. Because of the broad nature of the in-house function, an urgent query from one of the group’s sites can quickly change the day’s priorities.
With speed a constant pressure, the team began experimenting with general-purpose AI to see where it could help. They found that the technology could quickly produce a useful starting point, but answers were not always reliable enough for lawyers to act on with confidence. As Kirkpatrick described:
“Occasionally you get what looks like pretty good legal advice, but upon closer inspection turns out to be anything but.”
The experience clarified what Phoenix ME needed: the speed of AI, grounded in legal content they could trust.
Choosing Lexis+ with Protégé as their legal AI tool
Phoenix ME had relied on LexisNexis research and precedents for years, so bringing AI into a resource its lawyers already used felt like “the logical next step”. Kirkpatrick says that the decision was collective, and team members with varying levels of technical confidence contributed to the evaluation:
“The team had a look at other products, so it was really a collective decision: Let’s stick with Protégé.”
The rationale behind the choice was that Lexis+ with Protégé suited a legal function that rarely knows which question will arrive next. It gave Phoenix ME one familiar resource for researching unfamiliar issues, finding precedents and responding across a varied remit, combining AI speed with linked citations from trusted authorities that could be easily verified.
Another key consideration when determining the team’s AI provider was the people behind the technology:
“The LexisNexis team is super easy to deal with, extremely helpful, very enthusiastic and on your side.”
Responsive support makes everything around adopting new technology easier, giving Phoenix ME people it can turn to as its use of the technology develops.
From faster legal research to better commercial support for the business
Kirkpatrick explains that the most noticeable change since his team’s adoption of Protégé is how quickly Phoenix ME can reach relevant legal information:
“If you need to do some research or get a precedent quickly, you know you can get your hands on it very quickly indeed. It’s easy to use and easy to navigate.”
A recent question involving economic duress demonstrated the significance of this in practice. The team needed to assess whether a particular set of facts could support a sustainable argument under a rarely used legal concept.
Kirkpatrick estimates that, before using Protégé, researching the point would have taken up to a full afternoon. The team would have needed to find the relevant authorities, establish the legal position and work through how it applied to the facts.
Using Lexis+ with Protégé, Kirkpatrick set out the facts and background in a detailed question, added a follow-up prompt and reached a useful initial answer in around two minutes.
In cases like this, the team can now reach a well-informed starting point far sooner. Legal judgement remains with Kirkpatrick and his colleagues, who have more time to test the position, consider its implications and advise the business.
The same change is visible in complex project work. A recent query concerned a subcontractor approaching insolvency in legally complicated circumstances.
Kirkpatrick believes that checking every relevant point would previously have taken two or three people a morning each. With Protégé supporting the team’s analysis, the work was completed in under an hour. He explains the impact of Protégé on the team’s workflow:
“Without it, you might get to the same result, but it’s going to take you infinitely longer. And potentially, you might just miss something.”
Keeping more legal work safely in-house
Those time savings change what a small in-house function can absorb. Phoenix ME can answer more questions, give commercial colleagues direction sooner and reduce the risk of an important point being overlooked under pressure. The wider business gets a legal service that can keep pace with its decisions.
Greater capacity also helps Phoenix ME protect an in-house model that Kirkpatrick values:
“If we hadn’t adopted Protégé, we would have to farm out a lot of the work to external law firms because we simply haven’t got the capacity and the time to do it. There would be a very significant external legal bill, and we’d need to recruit additional people, certainly one, probably two. We like to do everything we possibly can in-house safely.”
The wider business recognises the economics. Legal is currently the only Phoenix ME department paying for an AI add-on, and Kirkpatrick says there has been no resistance to the investment once the gains in speed, volume and cost are explained. In his words, the team can do more legal work, “far quicker and far cheaper”.
A more sustainable in-house legal model, powered by legal AI
Adopting Lexis+ with Protégé transformed the workflow of this small, busy team by providing lawyers with a more reliable way to reach the information they need, when they need it.
The result is a legal function that can respond more quickly, support the business more effectively and retain greater control over its workload. By combining trusted legal content with AI-supported research, Phoenix ME is making its in-house model more sustainable.
As Kirkpatrick advises other legal teams considering the same step:
“I’d say do it and do it quickly. Protégé allows us to be so much more efficient, in terms of volume, speed and quality.”
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