LexisNexis Legal & Professional, a New York-based company that provides information and analytics, announced on Monday, June 3, that it will buy Henchman, a legal tech company from Ghent, Belgium.
Henchman improves data from Document Management Systems (DMS) to help draft documents faster. Founded in 2020 by Gilles Mattelin, Jorn Vanysacker and Wouter Van Respaille, Henchman has over 170 customers worldwide, including major law firms and companies in the US and Europe.
Co-founder Mattelin, says, “We see this union with LexisNexis as an extension of our drafting vision to proactively surface valuable and strategic insights for customers – delivering a centre of knowledge to legal teams.”
“We believe the combination of our teams and tech will empower customers to make informed decisions faster, generate outstanding work, and drive economic value for their organisations.”
The deal is expected to close early in the second half of 2024, pending customary regulatory approvals. The terms of the transaction have not been disclosed.
Aim of the acquisition
By acquiring Henchman, LexisNexis will offer personalised generative AI solutions to customers worldwide. Henchman’s core features will be available to both existing and new customers.
LexisNexis plans to integrate Henchman’s technology with its Retrieval Augmented Generation 2.0 (RAG 2.0) platform in the Lexis+ AI solution. This will use customer data for generative AI drafting.
Henchman’s capabilities will also be added to Lexis Create, a Microsoft 365 add-in that allows generative AI drafting within Microsoft Word, Outlook, Teams, and Copilot.
Law firms and corporations use Henchman to improve internal work products and speed up drafting tasks. It works with a company’s DMS to index documents at the clause level, providing insights and aiding in contract drafting.
Henchman’s technology is compatible with both legal-specific DMS and general content management systems and supports multiple languages. It maintains security and privacy by mirroring document permissions from the DMS.
Customers can start benefiting from Henchman’s technology within days of deployment.
Advanced technology from Henchman allows customers to quickly find key insights from their internal data. LexisNexis will use this enhanced document enrichment to create new generative AI drafting solutions.
Mike Walsh, CEO at LexisNexis Legal & Professional, says, “This is an exciting moment for our customers and the LexisNexis and Henchman teams. We’re continuously engaging with customers to determine where AI can deliver the most value.”
“Now, we’ll be able to address one of our legal customers’ top requests – to have searchable internal firm data, combined with our current drafting and AI offerings, allowing legal professionals to rapidly extract language and insights, and generate higher quality work using both internal data and LexisNexis solutions together.”
Brief about LexisNexis Legal & Professional
LexisNexis Legal & Professional offers legal, regulatory, and business information and analytics to help customers boost productivity, make better decisions, achieve improved outcomes, and promote the rule of law globally.
The company develops legal AI solutions with human oversight, adhering to the RELX Responsible AI Principles to avoid creating or reinforcing unfair bias. It was the first to offer legal and business information online through its Lexis and Nexis services.
Lexis+ AI provides reliable results with advanced encryption and privacy technologies to secure data. It uses the enhanced LexisNexis RAG 2.0 platform, drawing on the world’s largest repository of current legal content to ensure high-quality answers and up-to-date citations.
Uploaded documents are purged after each session, and users can manage or delete their prompt history. The solution is continually improved with input from hundreds of thousands of rated answer samples by LexisNexis legal experts.
Over 2,000 technologists, data scientists, and experts work on developing, testing, and validating these solutions to deliver comprehensive, authoritative information.
The company serves customers in over 150 countries and employs 11,800 people worldwide. LexisNexis is part of RELX, a global provider of information-based analytics and decision tools for professional and business clients.
Read the orginal article: https://siliconcanals.com/news/lexisnexis-to-acquire-henchman/
