Earlier this week, LexisNexis Legal & Professional unveiled the upcoming availability of Lexis+ Fact & Issue Finder, at the American Association of Law Libraries conference . This new feature enables litigators to identify caselaw relevant to the specific facts and issues
of their client’s case. The new offering covers six litigation practice areas – Personal Injury, Labor & Employment, Insurance, Real Estate, Intellectual Property, and Business & Commercial – with additional practice areas planned.
I met with Jeff Pfeifer, LexisNexis Chief Product Officer during the Conference to get an overview of the Lexis+ Fact and Issue Finder. Pfeifer alluded to a “abyss of information” which practically paralyses an associate faced with so much precedent and so many research tools. The Fact & Issue Finder is focused on helping lawyers locate the most factually relevant cases quickly. According to Pfeifer the product grew out of an attempt to completely deconstruct the research process. The developers used feedback from more than 1,000 customer interactions in order to understand the research experience and address specific pain points. One important goal is to eliminate the “fractured” research process by delivering a set of unified results in a single dashboard.
Fact & Issue Finder is designed from the ground up to mimic the exact processes that legal professionals perform when researching their cases. Developers leveraged machine learning technologies to deliver a streamlined workflows which is enhanced with data visualizations.
When a lawyer types in their relevant facts, issues and topics , the Fact & Issue Finder gathers relevant content – including case law, practical guidance, verdicts and settlements, expert witness analytics, and unique practice specific content. The aggregated information is displayed via an interactive dashboard that enables users to conduct extensive research on cases whose facts, issues and topics are the most similar to theirs.
In doing so, Fact & Issue Finder reduces the countless hours and burden associated with having to research, compile and review data from numerous sources individually.
“Our customers asked us to help them cut through an overwhelming amount of information for every legal matter, minimize the number of searches, sources and applications they require to complete increasingly complex legal research tasks, and give them confidence that they did not miss any crucial information that would impact their case,” said Sean Fitzpatrick, CEO of LexisNexis North America, UK and Ireland. “Put simply, litigators want to find ‘cases like mine.’ We’ve built a litigation solution that places all of the relevant information they need at their fingertips, wrapped in a highly intuitive and visual user experience.”
Key features include:
- Case Graph: Visually presents a case’s entire life cycle, displaying its dockets, pleadings, motions, briefs, verdicts and settlements, and cited statutes and making them available with a single click.
- Expert Advisory Content: Increases knowledge about practice-specific issues from LexisNexis’ Practical Guidance, administrative resources, and exclusive content from Elsevier for medical, insurance, real estate, HR and IP-related sources.
- Integrated Data and Analytics: Uses Verdicts & Settlements data to reveal trends in similar cases so attorneys can better understand the potential value of their cases, then finds expert witnesses who participated in those cases and have experience with the same facts, topics, and issues as those in their case.
“Lexis+ Fact & Issue Finder is designed to help litigators find highly relevant information aligned to specifics of a case,” said Jeff Pfeifer, Chief Product Officer, LexisNexis North America and UK. “Our goal is to supply litigators with highly curated results while alleviating the common fear of not knowing when it’s appropriate to stop researching.”
The press release claims that “Lexis+ Fact & Issue Finder is the “only research solution on the market geared toward fact and issue specificity in litigation.” I believe that Casetext Allsearch technology can also identify factually specific caselaw. The Lexis+ Fact and Issue Finder Dashboard and clustering of content combined with the powerful fact search engine offers a unique workflow solution.
Lexis+ Fact & Issue Finder will be available in Lexis+ for subscribers starting September 1, 2022. Additional content may be necessary to power all feature capabilities. For more information, please visit https://www.lexisnexis.com/community/insights/legal/b/product-features/posts/introducing-fact-issue-finder-on-lexis
