Exit Henchman: LexisNexis to Acquire Document Drafting Tech Provider

By acquiring Henchman, LexisNexis will deliver personalized generative AI solutions to customers around the world. Henchman core product functionality will be available to existing and new customers. LexisNexis has immediate plans to utilize Henchman’s technology with its proprietary Retrieval Augmented Generation 2.0 (RAG 2.0) platform in its flagship Lexis+ AI solution, enabling the use of trusted customer data as grounding data for generative AI drafting. Henchman's capabilities will also be added to Lexis^® Create, the Microsoft 365 add-in solution that enables point-of-workflow integration for generative AI drafting in Microsoft Word, Outlook, Teams and Copilot.

Henchman is used by leading law firms and corporations to enrich internal work product, creating a layer of intelligence on contract databases to accelerate drafting tasks.

Henchman interacts with the DMS of a law firm or corporation, indexing the organization’s precedent documents at the clause level, making the data available for contract insights and drafting. Its technology works with legal‐specific DMS providers and general enterprise content management systems and is language agnostic. Henchman’s technology incorporates security and conflict settings that mirror document permissions within the DMS, preserving firm confidentiality and privacy requirements. These benefits are available to customers in days, not months, from deployment of the technology.

Advanced technology processes allow a customer to quickly find key insights from internal data repositories. LexisNexis will incorporate this enhanced document enrichment capability to deliver new generative AI drafting solutions.

“This is an exciting moment for our customers and the LexisNexis and Henchman teams,” said Mike Walsh, CEO, LexisNexis Legal & Professional. “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.”  

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Henchman Co-Founder Gilles Mattelin added

“We see this union with LexisNexis as an extension of our drafting vision to proactively surface valuable and strategic insights for customers – delivering a center 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 organizations.”

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Closing of the transaction is subject to customary regulatory consents and is expected early in the second half of 2024. The terms of the transaction have not been disclosed.

LexisNexis is responsibly developing legal AI solutions with human oversight. LexisNexis, part of RELX, follows the RELX Responsible AI Principles, considering the real-world impact of its solutions on people and taking action to prevent the creation or reinforcement of unfair bias.

Lexis+ AI delivers trusted results with state-of-the-art encryption and privacy technology to keep data secure. Using an extensively enhanced LexisNexis proprietary RAG 2.0 platform, Lexis+ AI responses are grounded in the world’s largest repository of up-to-date legal content which ensures the highest-quality answer with the most up-to-date validated citation references. Uploaded documents are always purged at the end of each session and users can easily manage or delete their prompt conversation history. The solution is continually improving with hundreds of thousands of rated answer samples by LexisNexis legal subject matter experts used for model tuning. LexisNexis employs over 2,000 technologists, data scientists, and subject matter experts to develop, test, and validate its solutions and deliver comprehensive, authoritative information.

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