LexisNexis Begins MENA Rollout of Legal AI Platform in the UAE
Lexis+ with Protégé arrives first in the UAE, 16 years after the company's first legal research product in the region.
Nadia Mansour Nadia Mansour covers fintech across the UAE and MENA for Anecdoted -- digital banking, payments licences and the startups building around them. nadia@anecdoted.com
LexisNexis is taking its AI-assisted legal research platform, Lexis+ with Protégé, into the Middle East and North Africa, starting in the UAE. The company positions the tool around the routine work of a law practice: locating and interpreting authority, working through documents, and producing written output.
Users ask questions in ordinary language and receive answers drawn from LexisNexis sources. For larger assignments such as due diligence, the system splits the job into smaller stages, and a lawyer can check each stage before moving on. The platform also drafts contracts and memoranda, and accepts a firm's own files for issue-spotting and timeline building. Case decisions can be translated and summarised in Arabic and English.
On confidentiality, the company said client data does not feed into the training of public AI models.
The rollout lands 16 years after LexisNexis first sold a legal research product in the region. Legal practitioners based in the region helped build the platform and put it through testing, and that testing is still under way.
Jurisdictional coverage
Material available through the platform spans federal UAE law and the seven individual emirates, alongside regulations and court decisions. LexisNexis argues the structure matters because the region stacks federal rules, emirate-level rules and free-zone regimes on top of one another, and mixes civil-law and common-law traditions inside a single market.
Trust as the obstacle
The company treats trust rather than adoption as the harder problem for legal AI in MENA. General-purpose tools, it says, often fall short on showing where an answer came from and on keeping client material confidential — two things legal work cannot do without.
Lara Salem, Head of Content Strategy at LexisNexis Middle East, framed the problem as one of jurisdiction:
"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."
Eric Bonnet-Maes, chief executive of LexisNexis, described the shift he sees across the region:
"MENA is moving decisively from exploring the potential of AI to putting it to work across high-value, professional environments."
LexisNexis says it continues to run the platform past local legal professionals and intends to publish validated performance figures for the region once they exist. It has not said when those figures will be ready.
