Today, I’m talking with Sean Fitzpatrick, the CEO of LexisNexis, one of the most important companies in the entire legal system. For years — including when I was in law school — LexisNexis was basically the library. It’s where you went to look up case law, do legal research, and find the laws and precedents you would need to be an effective lawyer for your clients. There isn’t a lawyer today who hasn’t used it — it’s fundamental infrastructure for the legal profession, just like email or a word processor.
But enterprise companies with huge databases of proprietary information in 2025 can’t resist the siren call of AI, and LexisNexis is no different. You’ll hear it: when I asked Sean to describe LexisNexis to me, the first word he said wasn’t “law” or “data,” it was “AI.” The goal is for the LexisNexis AI tool, called Protégé, to go beyond simple research, and help lawyers draft the actual legal writing they submit to the court in support of their arguments.
That’s a big deal, because so far AI has created just as much chaos and slop in the courts as anywhere else. There is a consistent drumbeat of stories about lawyers getting caught and sanctioned for relying on AI tools that cite hallucinated case law that doesn’t exist, and there have even been two court rulings retracted because the judges appeared to use AI tools that hallucinated the names of the plaintiffs and cited facts and and quoted cases that didn’t exist. Sean thinks it’s only a matter of time before an attorney somewhere loses their license because of sloppy use of AI.
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So the big promise LexisNexis is making about Protégé is simply accuracy — that everything it produces will be based on the real law, and much more trustworthy than a general purpose AI tool. You’ll hear Sean explain how LexisNexis built their AI tools and teams so that they can make that promise — LexisNexis has hired many more lawyers to review AI work than he expected, for example.
But I also wanted to know what Sean thinks tools like Protégé will do to the profession of law itself, to the job of being a lawyer. If AI is doing all the legal research and writing you’d normally have junior associates doing, how will those junior associates learn the craft? How will we develop new senior people without a pipeline of junior people in the weeds of the work? And if I’m submitting AI legal writing to a judge using AI to read it, aren’t we getting close to automating a little too much of the judicial system? These are big questions, and they’re coming real fast for the legal industry.
I also pressed Sean pretty hard on how judges, particularly conservative judges, are using computers and technology in service of a judicial theory called originalism, which states that laws can only mean what they meant at the time they were enacted. We’ve run stories at The Verge about judges letting automated linguistics systems try and understand the originalist intent of various statutes to reach their preferred outcomes, and AI is only accelerating that trend — especially in an era where literally every part of the Constitution appears to be up for grabs before an incredibly partisan Supreme Court.
So I asked Sean to demo Protégé doing some legal research for me, on questions that appear to be settled but are newly up for grabs in the Trump administration, like birthright citizenship. To his credit, he was game — but you can see how taking the company from one that provides simple research tools to one that provides actual legal reasoning with AI will have big implications across the board.
This one is weedsy, but it’s important.
Okay: LexisNexis CEO Sean Fitzpatrick. Here we go.
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