The sheer volume of legal matters filed daily in courts across the nation presents a challenge for attorneys engaged in business development and research.
Lexis Snapshot, a highly customizable alert tool generating AI-powered summaries, addresses this challenge directly by enabling attorneys to cut through the noise and be the first to know about and understand relevant new complaints.
Snapshot’s AI summaries have received great customer feedback since the feature launched in November 2023 says CourtLink’s Product Manager, Eric Olson.
Be The First To Spot Challenges And Opportunities
Snapshot shines as a tool for business development, alerting attorneys to legal challenges their current clients might face and flagging new cases that could present opportunities to connect with a new client.
Upon receiving an alert, attorneys can quickly assess their list of new filings based on AI-powered summaries of each complaint that include four key elements: the parties involved, the reason why the case was filed, any alleged damages, and any remedies sought by the plaintiff.
“The case might involve a party the user has never heard of, but they can use this information to prospect and pursue that business by saying ‘You’re being sued, and here’s why’ and addressing that need,” Olson suggests.
By being the first not just to know about a case, but also to have developed a working understanding of it, attorneys competing for new clients can give themselves an essential edge.
Harnessing AI For Increasing Information Access
LexisNexis CourtLink pioneered email alerts of newly filed cases in the legal industry, pulling the most essential facts from new dockets, such as litigant names and jurisdiction, and putting them directly in attorneys’ inboxes.
In those days, users still needed to click through from the alert to a PDF copy of the complaint itself and read the full document — a process that can consume a great deal of valuable time — in order to gain a full understanding of the case.
“For many years, customers have asked us to find a way to provide more information about the cases that they receive in their alerts,” Olson says.
“In these scenarios, users are typically looking for information fast. They want to know why the case was filed, whether it involves a current or prospective client, or is otherwise interesting.”
Last November, LexisNexis met this need for quick access to more information with the introduction of AI-powered Snapshot summaries to CourtLink email alerts.
These alerts can be customized to scan civil lawsuits across all U.S. Federal District Courts for mentions of specific keywords, such as the name of a client’s leading product. The same strategy can also be applied to the AI-generated summaries themselves.
Image courtesy of LexisNexis.
“There’s a lot of information in those complaints that we weren’t able to provide until AI came along,” Olson says. “Now Snapshot alerts come in with these great narratives, and this is hugely useful if you’re an attorney trying to understand whether you want to get involved with a case.”
He adds that LexisNexis’ in-house data science team, with whom he and his colleagues were able to collaborate to refine the summary-generating function, played a key role in enabling this powerful expansion of Snapshot’s capabilities.
Olson also notes that Snapshot summaries are “a very low stress way to get your feet wet with AI,” given the ease with which cautious users can directly access complaints to verify information included in the summary and read for additional details as necessary.
Like all AI-generated text across the LexisNexis suite, Snapshot summaries come clearly marked with a purple label stating that they are the product of generative AI.
Snapshot and CourtLink: A Legal Dynamic Duo
Snapshot alerts are essential to how LexisNexis’ CourtLink docket search and alert tool creates value for attorneys, and introducing the option to include the new AI-generated summaries directly to CourtLink has only increased the value the product pair can deliver.
Image courtesy of LexisNexis.
The duo’s usefulness doesn’t stop at business development for attorneys at law firms, as Product Marketing Manager Lorilee Garritty points out.
“This is a product that everybody is interested in across the board,” she says, suggesting that governments can, for example, use Snapshot to stay on top of relevant litigation, while corporate legal teams can use the tool to spot potential legal challenges against their organization or simply to stay on top of the various legal matters relevant to their industry.
Olson adds that CourtLink, with its high degree of customizability, is an excellent tool for litigation research — a process that AI summaries can streamline significantly.
“Using keywords and filters, you can find those summaries and the dockets themselves much more rapidly, giving you a more context rich search,” he says.
On Friday, April 19, CourtLink will be expanding its Snapshot coverage to include the Delaware Court of Chancery and Delaware Superior Court. Additional state courts will follow. Future plans for Snapshot include potential integrations with other LexisNexis products — the details of which remain under wraps during development — and increasing the level of detail included in summaries.
Visit LexisNexis.com to learn more about Snapshot and schedule a demo.
