Sean Fitzpatrick promises his AI won’t get you in trouble with a judge.
Today, I’m talking with Sean Fitzpatrick, the CEO of LexisNexis, one of the most important companies in the entire legal system. For years — including when I was in law school — LexisNexis was basically the library. It’s where you went to look up case law, do legal research, and find the laws and precedents you would need to be an effective lawyer for your clients. There isn’t a lawyer today who hasn’t used it — it’s fundamental infrastructure for the legal profession, just like email or a word processor.
But enterprise companies with huge databases of proprietary information in 2025 can’t resist the siren call of AI, and LexisNexis is no different. You’ll hear it: when I asked Sean to describe LexisNexis to me, the first word he said wasn’t “law” or “data,” it was “AI.” The goal is for the LexisNexis AI tool, called Protégé, to go beyond simple research, and help lawyers draft the actual legal writing they submit to the court in support of their arguments.
That’s a big deal, because so far AI has created just as much chaos and slop in the courts as anywhere else. There is a consistent drumbeat of stories about lawyers getting caught and sanctioned for relying on AI tools that cite hallucinated case law that doesn’t exist, and there have even been two court rulings retracted because the judges appeared to use AI tools that hallucinated the names of the plaintiffs and cited facts and and quoted cases that didn’t exist. Sean thinks it’s only a matter of time before an attorney somewhere loses their license because of sloppy use of AI.
