As reported elsewhere, vLex, a legal research and database provider, recently announced significant enhancements to its AI tool, Vincent. These upgrades are designed to provide lawyers and legal professionals with enhanced practical solutions, address knowledge gaps, and offer valuable insights.
With the release, vLex is offering significant new workflows. The new features will be particularly helpful for litigators. What I like about the vLex products is that they seem to offer options in ways that can help litigators with real-world problems and improvements. The new enhancements seem to be consistent with this approach.
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These new features include:
• Multimodal support for audio and video, which will create transcripts and allow users to query and analyze recordings.
• Enhanced AI capabilities for vLex’s Docket and Docket Alarm platforms, improving legal research, analysis, and case tracking.
• A new Build an Argument feature can assist lawyers in identifying legal issues, analyzing arguments, and providing relevant case law.
• Expansion to four additional countries—Hong Kong, Italy, Peru, and Ecuador have been added to Vincent, bringing the total coverage to 17 countries.
Additionally, vLex will open a beta for Vincent Studio, a platform allowing interested law firms to build their own workflow tools by integrating their internal data with vLex’s technology.
According to Ed Walters, vLex’s Chief Strategy Officer, “I think we’ve worked to make Vincent the best tool in this market—comprehensive, transparent, secure, and, most importantly, useful.”
Vincent Studio Beta: Unlocking Internal Knowledge
The beta opportunity is a game-changer. Vincent Studio will allow law firms to begin safely integrating Vincent with their own internal data, something that has historically been a challenge. As I’ve written before, law firms hold a wealth of knowledge in past documents, but accessing that information has always been difficult. As Mark Twain wrote, “There’s gold in them thar hills.” As with gold, the trick is getting that valuable material back out.
Like most lawyers, after closing a file, I wanted to put it away and never look at it again. As a result, valuable work was effectively lost or, at best, difficult to retrieve. Lawyers don’t want to spend nonbillable time getting the information into a system that can be searched and accessed. They don’t want to spend time retrieving that material later; re-inventing the wheel (and billing for doing it) is often easier and more reliable.
They can pull their data, use our data and tools, and build something that really works for their firm or corporate legal department
The Vincent Studio beta holds out the promise that past work efforts can now be preserved and easily found using natural language inquiries. The Studio will enable firms to develop best practices based on their own historical successes. It creates a knowledge base for the firm of its own materials.
The new beta tool would enable instantaneous retrieval, resulting in the generation of better-quality documents, documents bearing the firm’s unmistakable aura and culture, and better associates’ training. Firms that want to invest in a viable, robust past efforts system would have better tools to create and use that system.
Walters explains, “They can pull their data, use our data and tools, and build something that really works for their firm or corporate legal department.”
Multimodal Capabilities: A Practical Tool
The new multimodal feature has some significant practical benefits for litigators. Vincent can now transcribe and analyze video or audio recordings, providing:
• Automatic transcripts of things like oral arguments, depositions, and client interviews.
• Summarization and timeline creation, helping lawyers quickly digest key points.
• Natural language queries, enabling users to ask questions like, “What did the court focus on?” or “Which cases were cited?”
• Judicial sentiment analysis, providing insights into how receptive a judge was to specific arguments.
Walters walked me through how the tool could be applied to an oral argument to provide transcript references, the case law cited and an analysis of the arguments. While the oral argument feature is impressive, I see even greater value in witness and client interviews, expert witness review, deposition prep, and client reports. It will enable quick location of relevant testimony. It could be valuable in depo prep, particularly in role playing, where a lawyer is trying to teach a witness how to respond to questioning. It could also be helpful in direct prep.
Walters adds, “You can add transcription, ask questions about it, summarize it, and get the next steps moving in that case. If I’m talking about patent infringement with an expert, I don’t want that information reaching the public web or OpenAI’s training data.” Vincent ensures that sensitive information remains private.
Docket Alarm Enhancements: Strategic Intelligence
Vincent’s docket alarm feature now extends across federal courts and 39 states, offering sophisticated legal analytics. Litigators can use it to do things like:
• Profile lawyers and judges, gaining insights into their case history, motion success rates, and litigation experience.
• Analyze opposing parties, understanding their litigation patterns and tendencies.
• Identify experts and witnesses where public data is available.
• Provide support to in-house counsel and help them find the best lawyer with the experience that’s needed.
This kind of strategic intelligence is invaluable. With natural language processing, litigators can now ask things like, How often does this lawyer win summary judgment? or What’s the average duration of this judge’s cases? How knowledgeable is the judge about a certain area of law? This kind of transparency would previously take too much time to justify in most cases. The new tools elevate legal analytics to a whole new level.
Vincent’s not a sycophant. It doesn’t tell you what you want to hear—it tries to give you a complete picture of the law
Build an Argument: Testing Legal Theories
One of Vincent’s most intriguing features is Build an Argument, which, among other things, allows users to input a set of facts and then obtain an analysis of their legal impact. Most cases have disputed facts. Lawyers can input their version of events, then switch to the opposing side’s version and see how the legal analysis shifts.
This feature will help litigators determine which facts truly matter and where they need to focus their evidence-gathering efforts.
Perhaps most importantly, according to Walters, “Vincent’s not a sycophant. It doesn’t tell you what you want to hear—it tries to give you a complete picture of the law.” Too often, associates feel under pressure to try to support a partner’s theory when they should be challenging it. Even experienced lawyers often tell in-house counsel the best-case scenario instead of an unvarnished version. Vincent provides an unbiased, thorough legal assessment.
Practical AI That Works
For litigators, Vincent isn’t just another AI tool—the recent enhancements offer practical solutions to real-world challenges. These enhancements make a measurable impact, whether it’s unlocking internal firm knowledge, analyzing depositions, tracking court patterns, or stress-testing legal arguments.
It’s an unfortunate fact that legal tech in general and legal AI tech in particular often promises the world but fall short on execution. Like most of the vLex tools, the new Vincent tools appear to focus on usability, transparency, and practical benefits rather than pie in the sky promises.
By closing knowledge gaps and offering actionable insights, these tools have the potential to make litigators’ work easier and enable them to do things that could never be done before. The tools could fundamentally change how litigators approach their work.
And if the beta of Vincent Studio is any indication, we may be on the verge of seeing a powerful AI platform that uses public data as well as the valuable internal data of law firms.