LexisNexis marks 16 years in MENA with launch of Lexis+ with Protégé

LexisNexis, a global leader in legal intelligence and AI solutions, announced the launch of Lexis+ with Protégé in the Middle East – a fully localised, secure and agentic legal AI platform grounded in authoritative regional legal intelligence. Built for legal professionals across the Middle East & North Africa (MENA) region, the platform is designed to bring greater speed, confidence and control to legal research, analysis and drafting.

Sixteen years after bringing its first regional research solution to the legal professionals across the Middle East, LexisNexis is expanding its regional offering with the commercial availability of Lexis+ with Protégé in MENA, starting with the UAE.

Lara Salem, head of content strategy, LexisNexis Middle East, said, “Our subject-matter experts were clear: an AI assistant is only as useful as the content behind its output. For legal teams in MENA, that means answers informed by the relevant jurisdiction, legal hierarchy and terminology. Lexis+ with Protégé brings that content together with AI workflows to support the way lawyers research, analyse and draft.”

Built for the way MENA legal professionals work

Lexis+ with Protégé is designed for the everyday demands of legal practice across the region

• Conversational legal research grounded in regional authority: Complex legal questions in natural language are answered with relevant LexisNexis trusted legal sources
• Agentic legal workflows: Protégé breaks complex assignments into structured, reviewable steps and supports multi-stage work such as research synthesis, legal comparisons, due diligence, compliance review and checklist preparation.
• AI-assisted drafting: Legal professionals can generate and refine contracts, clauses, memoranda, legal correspondence and client communications, drawing on LexisNexis content and, where authorised, their own organisational precedents.
• Document upload, analysis and summarisation: Users can securely analyse their own matter documents, extract key issues, generate timelines and compare materials
• Regional and bilingual legal support: The platform is grounded in legal content from across MENA with translation and summarisation capabilities for case decisions that help professionals work across Arabic and English source materials while accounting for jurisdiction-specific legal terminology.
• Secure access to legal and general AI: Professionals can draw on AI optimised for authoritative legal work alongside leading general-purpose models for broader reasoning, all within the secure LexisNexis environment
• Privacy and responsible AI by design: Customer information is protected through encryption and enterprise-grade security, and customer data is never used to train public AI models or to improve performance for other customers

Eric Bonnet-Maes, CEO, LexisNexis, said, “MENA is moving decisively from exploring the potential of AI to putting it to work across high-value, professional environments. This launch draws on more than a decade and a half of investment in the region and reflects something we believe in beyond the commercial case: that helping legal professionals access reliable information helps build a stronger legal community, and a stronger legal community helps build transparency. We believe in giving legal professionals across MENA a more trusted way to adopt agentic AI is our contribution to that.”

Grounded in regional law, not just powerful language models

LexisNexis positions authoritative regional legal intelligence, paired with jurisdiction-aware agentic workflows, as the platform’s core differentiator. General-purpose AI tools can produce fluent responses, but legal professionals need answers that reflect the correct jurisdiction, legal hierarchy, language and source – a distinction that matters across MENA’S mix of federal and emirate-level legislation, national regulations, free-zone regimes, civil-law and common-law systems, Arabic source materials and differing citation conventions. That extends to how the platform deals with the complexities in the Arabic language across the different countries, generating text that reflects jurisdiction-specific legal terminology rather than a single standardised vocabulary.

Lexis+ with Protégé is designed to link users back to underlying sources, allowing its agentic capabilities to support more complex legal work while keeping the professional in control.

Available across MENA from launch

Lexis+ with Protégé is commercially available from launch to customers across MENA markets. It brings localised MENA content together with access to global content through the same product sign-in. The platform draws on authoritative legal materials from across MENA, including UAE federal law and all seven emirates, alongside legislation, regulations, official gazette materials, case decisions, legal news and analysis, expert commentary and Practical Guidance.

Meeting a shift from AI experimentation to production-level legal work

Legal teams across MENA are navigating rapidly changing regulations, rising workloads and matters that increasingly cross jurisdictions and languages, while general-purpose AI tools often lack the source transparency, confidentiality protections and governance legal work demands. LexisNexis views the launch as addressing a shift already underway in the region: legal AI adoption is no longer the primary hurdle – trust is. Lexis+® with Protégé™ combines authoritative regional law, expert practical guidance, organisational knowledge and AI-powered research, analysis and drafting, without a trade-off between speed, security and trust.

Globally, independent economic studies commissioned by LexisNexis® project a 344 per cent three-year ROI for a composite large law firm and a 284 per cent three-year ROI for a composite corporate legal department using the platform underpinning Lexis+ with Protégé, according to Forrester Consulting’s Total Economic Impact studies of LexisNexis Lexis+ AI for Large Law Firms and Corporate Legal Departments.¹ LexisNexis is testing the localised solution with regional legal professionals and will share validated regional performance data as it becomes available.

In the photograph: Eric Bonnet-Maes, CEO, LexisNexis (left) and Lara Salem, head of content strategy (right)

Source:

1. Forrester Consulting, commissioned by LexisNexis, “The Total Economic Impact™ of LexisNexis Lexis+ AI for Large Law Firms” (344% ROI over three years) and “The Total Economic Impact™ of LexisNexis Lexis+ AI for Corporate Legal Departments” (284% ROI over three years). Results are based on composite organisations and individual results may vary.