Generative AI Tools for USD Law Faculty

While people can interact with GPT-5 directly, what will eventually be more common is interaction with GPT teamed up with other software. Lexis, Westlaw, and Bloomberg are all developing generative AI tools incorporating GPT while also adding layers both before and after GPT to adjust for accuracy and verification. These legal research generative AI products are designed for accuracy versus ChatGPT which is designed for language fluency. With these added layers, prompt engineering is less important, but knowing generally how AI works, as well as its strengths and limitations, will still benefit the user. 

Potential use cases (some of these perform better than others but since these products are still very young it's hard to say which):

• Define legal concepts
• Review documents/assist in eDiscovery
• Generate summaries
• Create deposition outlines 
• Generate client letters, contracts, briefs, and patent applications
• Identify relevant case law
• Contract review and analysis 
• Due diligence
• Predict legal outcomes 
• Basic legal advice chatbots
• Compliance and regulatory monitoring 

More resources

1. LexisNexis, Generative AI for Lawyers: What It Is, How It Works, and Using It for Maximum Impact (May 2023)
2. Jan Van Hoecke, What Are the Practical Use Cases for Generative AI in Legal?, Lawyer Monthly (May 2023)

3. Mohar Chatterjee, How lawyers use AI, Politico (May 2023)

Legal research vendors have worked aggressively to build products that limit hallucinations and increase accuracy. First, most have developed specialized models trained on narrower, domain-specific datasets. The idea is that "good data," and only good data, is allowed in the system.  Secondly, most vendors are using retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) which takes the user’s question and passes it through a database that then adds to the user's question as “context” that is then sent through the model. Third, some products may also use vector embedding as a way to identify concepts, by way of assigning phrases or even entire documents, as numerical vectors.  Coupled with RAG, this increases precision and relevancy.  Lastly but certainly not least, almost all vendors incorporate human feedback on responses.  

It is true that these methods have reduced the risk of fake cases as seen in the Avianca case.  However these systems may still hallucinate with false sources or produce flawed outputs due to human user error, prompt misinterpretation, or missed issues. 

A 2024 benchmarking study indicated that legal generative AI models do reduce errors compared to general-purpose AI models like GPT-4, but that these models still hallucinate at an alarming rate. In fact, the Lexis+ AI system produced incorrect information more than 17% of the time, while Westlaw’s AI-Assisted Research and Ask Practical Law AI hallucinated more than 33% of the time.

Lexis+AI released Lexis Protégé to USD in February 2025, taking the place of Lexis AI Assistant. According to Lexis, Protégé can: 

• Draft full, tailored transactional documents, as well as litigation motions, briefs and complaints, and check its own work before turning it over for human review.
• Suggest legal workflow actions based on the type of documents uploaded – e.g., draft a legal memo, summarize, draft an argument – and dynamically generate follow-up prompts that are personalized to the lawyer’s workflow.
• Provide prompt assistance, suggesting refinements to queries to help the user more precisely accomplish their goals.
• Allow users to securely upload and save tens of thousands of legal documents to Protégé Vault, where users can perform various AI tasks to summarize, draft, research and more.
• Draft deposition questions based on fact patterns, descriptions of witnesses, and other relevant information.
• Draft discovery documents, including interrogatories, requests for production of documents, and requests for admissions.
• Generate graphical timelines of events from uploaded documents.
• Answer questions about or summarize large, complex documents of up to 1 million characters or approximately 300 pages.
• Conduct systematic analyses of transactional documents.
• Review an uploaded motion or argument and find similar motions and arguments in the LexisNexis system to help the user refine their argument, find stronger authority, and identify potential weaknesses.
• Link quotes in litigation filings back to source documentation to confirm accuracy.

Protégé is trained on both primary law (statutes, cases, constitutions, state and federal rules, and select administrative agency decisions and regulations) as well as a limited amount of secondary sources owned by Lexis (Matthew Bender, certain treatises, and Practical Guidance). 

In August 2025, Lexis announced future product Protégé General AI, expanding the agentic capabilities of the current Protégé model to allow users to access other models including OpenAI’s GPT-5, GPT-4o, and o3, as well as Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4, all within the company’s existing Lexis+ AI workflow with a simple toggle function.  models Expanding the Agentic Capabilities of its AI Assistant to General AI Models Such As GPT-5. Approximately 200 law firms, corporate legal departments, and law schools (though not including USD) are participating in the customer preview program, which has already begun. General availability is expected later this year.

Bob Ambrogi, LexisNexis Launches Protégé General AI, Expanding the Agentic Capabilities of its AI Assistant to General AI Models Such As GPT-5 (August 11, 2025)

As of January 1, 2025 all USD law faculty and students have access to Westlaw CoCounsel: Your Generative AI Legal Assistant.  Access Westlaw CoCounsel through the law school portal or Westlaw main landing page.Westlaw CoCounsel includes access to several different tools: 

• CoCounsel Core
  • Review documents
  • Search a database of documents
  • Summarize law review articles and cases.
  • Contract policy compliance 
  • Compare documents 
  • Prepare for a deposition 
  • Timeline of events in a case
  • Draft (note that since CoCounsel is not fully integrated with Westlaw Precision's research capabilities, drafting from scratch is not recommended. Instead, one should draft using uploaded documents.)
• Westlaw Precision with CoCounsel 
  • AI-Assisted research
  • Quick Check AI 
  • Jurisdictional survey AI - compare legal issues across multiple jurisdictions
  • Claims Explorer - identify potential claims based on fact patterns
• Practical Law Dynamic Tool Set with CoCounsel 
  • Search and summarize within Practical Law
  • Additional Practical Law skills
• CoCounsel Drafting 
  • Plugin for Microsoft Word to assist with finding, drafting, reviewing, and summarizing of existing documents. 

A fifth tool, HighQ Contract Express Legal Tracker is currently not available in our academic subscription. 

Upcoming tools & updates:

CoCounsel Legal-  a new platform that combines agentic workflows hat handle multi-step legal tasks. These workflows combine practical legal expertise with AI capabilities to guide users through multi-step processes such as drafting complaints, creating employee policies, and conducting jurisdictional surveys.

Deep Research- an AI system that conducts comprehensive legal research by creating research plans, executing them iteratively, and delivering comprehensive reports with transparent reasoning.

Westlaw Advantage a platform update to Westlaw Precision, billed as the "final" version of Westlaw. 

Bloomberg Law has launched two new generative AI-powered research tools – Bloomberg Law Answers and Bloomberg Law AI Assistant.  Both tools are available to current Bloomberg Law subscribers at no additional cost.

• Bloomberg Law Answers, which provides a quick answer to your search question using relevant legal documents, including Federal and State Court Opinions, U.S. Code, CFR, State Statutes and Regulations, Practical Guidance, Bloomberg Law News, and secondary sources like books and manuals.  The Bloomberg Law Answers feature will now appear at the top of your search results, but only if you opt in to activating the feature.
• AI Assistant, a chat-based tool that allows you to summarize and ask questions about documents you’re viewing, including Court Opinions, Court Rules, U.S. Code and CFR sections, State Statutes, Regulations, Session Laws, and Constitutions, as well as select secondary sources. AI Assistant functions as a document-specific tool that appears in a side panel when viewing those primary or secondary sources.  Bloomberg Law plans to eventually release an expanded version of its AI assistant that will enable queries beyond document-specific interactions to broader research capabilities. This feature will incorporate tools such as jurisdictional comparisons, chart building, and citation treatments, according to Puglia.

Bob Ambrogi, Bloomberg Law Rolls Out Two AI-Powered Legal Research Tools, Emphasizing Accuracy and Source Attribution (Jan. 30, 2025)

Legal research behemoths Lexis, Westlaw, and Bloomberg are in an arms race to bring generative AI tools to their platforms.  For each of these companies the primary concern is "good data in, good data out."  

• AI can only “learn” from the data it can access.  For Westlaw, Lexis, and Bloomberg this will mean they are constrained to things they own and things they have permission to load. It will take many months if not years to sort out permissions to law journal and news sources.  For obvious reasons sensitive company or customer data cannot be loaded. 
• Bad training data can create bias or result in hallucinations.
• After loading good data, who owns it? There is a risk that proprietary information could become part of open platform service if the information isn't walled off.. 
• “Fine-tuning” the data going into the model, and its responses, is a challenge requiring many hours of human supervision. 
• Regulators will need to emphasize the need for “explainable” AI. 

More resources on how vendors are fine-tuning their generative AI models: 

1. Ken Crutchfield, How Generative AI Works (Part IV), Above the Law (August 2023).
2. Sean Harrington, The Case for Large Language Model Optimism in Legal Research, SSRN (June 2023).
3. How Do Domain-Specific Chatbots Work? An Overview of Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), Scriv.AI (August 2023).

The PDF below shows all the legal tech companies currently working on generative AI tools as of June 2024.