Three Ways State and Local Attorneys Are Gaining Powerful Legal Research Advantages

Government legal professionals in U.S. states, cities and counties are facing economic and political challenges like never before as they strive to protect consumers’ rights, safeguard public resources, and mitigate crime.

How can state attorneys general, district attorneys, public defenders, and municipal attorneys best ask the right question in a deposition, find the right precedent, or hit on the right argument to achieve their objective? Furthermore, how can they continue to advance their expertise to uphold the rule of law for their communities and citizens — when technology initiatives are an extravagance and funding is scant?

The answer is by employing faster, innovative, and efficient legal research and analytics services that deliver greater value for the public dollar. As government attorneys look at renewing their legal research contracts or upgrading their services to meet public arena challenges and issues, many agencies and offices are considering more advanced platforms to future-proof their legal research needs.

Advanced Research, Practical Guidance, and Brief Analysis in a Single Service

Legal motions are strengthened when state and local attorneys gain access to the same powerful search engines, data-driven dashboards, and work productivity tools as their glamorous counterparts in large law firms and corporate corner offices.

In 2020, LexisNexis debuted Lexis+™, a feature-rich, premium legal solution. Lexis+ unites advanced research, practical guidance, brief analysis and enhanced tools with an intuitive user experience to deliver data-driven insights, greater efficiency and better outcomes in a one-stop ecosystem. Lexis+ empowers all legal workflows — from search to strategy, start to finish, delivering three important benefits:

1. Confidence - Practice with confidence with the leading data-driven insights, surfacing the most accurate results from the most comprehensive collection of legal information, tailored to attorneys’ needs.
2. Simplicity - Leverage the simplicity of the most modern user experience in the industry to quickly and easily answer legal questions, develop winning strategies, and accomplish tasks with greater clarity.
3. Efficiency - Practice with unprecedented efficiency with the all-in-one integration of legal workflows and no disruption to your line of thinking as you navigate research, strategy, and task completion.

 

Lexis+ was designed for the ways that government attorneys work, with deeply integrated product components, cutting-edge technologies and modern design elements that put the LexisNexis applications, content and data they need right at their fingertips. Regardless of where or how legal pros start research or tasks, they will be guided to the information that best addresses their legal question.

Lexis+ delivers on state and local government attorneys’ need for legal solutions that look and work more like the modern technology products they use in their personal lives. Dramatic visual styling and simplified interface design set a new standard for ease of use. Striking imagery, bold colors and typography improve readability, reduce visual clutter and emphasize essential information and tasks. An experience dock creates the integrated starting point for core legal tasks and enables seamless switching between product experiences and workflows.

New and intuitive features, such as Search Tree, Code Compare and Shepard's® At Risk, make it easy for practitioners to access the information and insights they need, control their search experience and provide better counsel.

Deep-Dive into Lexis+ Key Capabilities

Developed with feedback from more than 2,000 customer interactions, Lexis+ provides enhanced tools and exclusive new features that are not available anywhere else, including:

 

• Brief Analysis: Extracts citations and legal concepts, recommends other relevant cases and briefs, identifies relevant passages and takes users directly to them, and showcases their Shepard’s treatment — all within a unique dashboard.
• Practical Guidance: Fully integrated practical guidance experience, with practice notes, checklists, annotated forms, drafting tools and industry insights from thousands of leading practitioners that is easily accessible from its home page and within legal research results.
• Lexis Answers®: Responds to natural language search queries with the best, most relevant answer, taking users directly to its location within the document. Completely redesigned with the latest machine learning capabilities, Lexis Answers offers expanded and more relevant answers across wider question categories and automatic jurisdiction detection.
• Shepard's At Risk: Alerts attorneys to cases that are at risk of being overruled because the opinions they cite have been negatively treated.
• Code Compare: Quickly identify changes in the law or legislative intent by comparing two versions of a statute section side-by-side, including current, future and archival versions dating back to the early 1990s.
• Legislative Outlook: Predicts the passage of pending bills at the federal and state level.
• More powerful search capabilities that give practitioners more control over the user experience, including:
  • Search Tree: Graphically depicts Boolean searches and highlights the impact of each keyword on search results, enabling users to refine searches for the best results.
  • Missing and Must Include: Forces natural language searches to include specific keywords, like Google.
  • Search Term Maps: Visually depicts clusters of search terms within search results and documents across 35 major content types for fast, easy navigation, trend identification and direct access to relevant information.
  • Ravel View: Data visualization technology illuminates key relationships between cases found in text-based search results. Improved offering features new map anchoring capabilities and display improvements.

 

LexisNexis continues to add new features, content and product integrations to Lexis+, including analytics from Lex Machina, news from Law360 and additional enhancements to the Practical Guidance offering. State and local attorneys also have the option to choose the Lexis® service, the standard legal research platform. Both platforms integrate with essential solutions required for government legal work — including Lexis® for Microsoft Office® and LexisNexis Public Records.

State and local government attorneys rely on technologies that make them more effective, efficient and informed practitioners. LexisNexis solutions help improve attorneys’ productivity, workflows and their ability to deliver timely and strategic counsel to their colleagues and citizens.

For more information on Lexis+ features and to register for a complimentary trial, please visit www.lexisnexis.com/lexisplus.

Uphold the Rule of Law in the Community

LexisNexis state and local government legal research and analytics solutions support legal professionals’ critical mission. LexisNexis provides confidence, efficiency and value in legal research and analytics solutions to help public officials and agencies uphold the rule of law. Partner with LexisNexis and benefit from trusted advisers, thorough onboarding and implementation, training, professional learning via CLE, and proactive and responsive service and support. Learn more at LexisNexis.com/SLG.

About LexisNexis Legal & Professional

LexisNexis Legal & Professional is a leading global provider of legal, regulatory and business information and analytics that help customers increase productivity, improve decision-making and outcomes, and advance the rule of law around the world. As a digital pioneer, the company was the first to bring legal and business information online with its Lexis® and Nexis® services. LexisNexis Legal & Professional, which serves customers in more than 150 countries with 10,600 employees worldwide, is part of RELX, a global provider of information-based analytics and decision tools for professional and business customers.