Launching Legal Technology Is Hard Enough... And Then LexisNexis Faced The COVID Pandemic
Designing Lexis+ presented some new challenges.
The recent announcement of Lexis+, the new premium research tool from LexisNexis, brought a bevy of new features under the Lexis umbrella from AI-driven brief analysis to flagging at risk opinions to unprecedented control over search term application. But the exciting development that received little fanfare was the launch itself. LexisNexis launched a major product — one that feels a bit like a whole new platform as opposed to a premium addition to Lexis Advance — in the midst of a pandemic.
Yeah, yeah. The wheels of progress are always turning and all that, but let’s take a second to take in what this effort entailed.
I had an opportunity to chat with LexisNexis VP of Product Management Jeffrey Pfeifer about developing a product under unprecedented conditions. Well, maybe not unprecedented. Allegedly the fortune cookie was invented in 1918, but the treat’s natural language prediction capabilities have always been suspect.
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Unveiling a product in a pandemic is impressive enough, but putting together an offering for the legal sector presents more daunting challenges. “One of the things that’s unique in legal is that there’s a stronger tension between immediate usability and evolution of design,” Pfeifer explained. Anyone ever unfortunate enough to buy the initial version of a Microsoft product knows the sort of growing pains the consumer market deals with all the time. Updates and bug fixes eventually leave Microsoft customers with tools that are deservedly the market standard, but it’s a process. In “the biz” it’s called the minimum viable product, presumably because MVP sounds like a good thing as opposed to an engraved invitation to constant updates.
Legal, on the other hand, demands a product far closer to finished. Consumer products can use the MVP launch as an opportunity to generate — both good and not-so-good — feedback and adapt. “The nature of billable time and client deadlines means the iterative design approach hasn’t held as much as it does in other markets.” Indeed, Pfeifer explained that this is one of the problems with the legal tech market writ large as it’s a requirement directly at odds with innovation which depends on putting out works in progress and fixing them based on customer experiences. Startups, for example, don’t always have the same advantages as the big players when it comes to adapting to the legal model: “Everyone wants innovation in these markets but the market needs to look inward. It’s difficult with these other design expectations. It’s difficult to build to buttoned endstate first.”
This is why legal tech coverage tends to be one long tale of consolidation with promising IP scooped up by larger providers who have the resources to get it into the state attorneys demand.
So an MVP in legal requires a more polished product to meet the “viability” threshold of a lawyer. This was the challenge for LexisNexis: “Could we complete the process to refine all of the ideas to the degree we wanted to and meet the MVP concept and launch commercially in the market when most were working from home?”
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Presenting another design challenge, of course, is what I call Office Space Syndrome:
Attorneys can have trouble communicating their needs to engineers, making it even more of a challenge. Even with ample pre-launch feedback, it’s hard to get it right in the initial release when engineers don’t have an ingrained understanding of what the lawyers are actually looking for. It’s a communication gap that industry mainstays like LexisNexis have invested a lot of time and effort in surmounting. Lexis, for example, has testing protocols to determine which audiences embrace particular features that may deliver useful feedback that the user might not even be able to vocalize. But if pre-launch feedback was an issue before, how exactly would a robust Beta test work during lockdown?
As it turns out, the global pandemic may have actually helped the design process. “Clients are more accessible… which is nice. They’re more interested in the process now too. It’s not clear why… the billing pressure and deadlines haven’t gone away. Social interaction maybe? Or maybe a personal investment now that they’re more reliant on tech.” These seem likely factors. The sudden reclamation of commuting time probably doesn’t hurt either.
Still, adopting an all-digital feedback system required adaptation. “It’s not about just taking the same techniques and shoving them into Zoom.” But the research team modified its approach and “what we found is the interaction experience worked well and we had better feedback than expected.”
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Lexis+ is in the midst of its launch period now. It’s already in the law school market and has a planned September commercial release. And thanks to the efforts of the LexisNexis product development team, it’s going to be a polished product from day 1.
Earlier: LexisNexis Launches An All-New Premium Legal Research Service
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.
