Welcome to Attorney Intelligence, where we break down the biggest advancements in AI for legal professionals every week.

This week, the legal AI world was buzzing about Harvey’s much-vaunted integration with LexisNexis. But the end result might not be quite what it was hyped up to be.

According to multiple sources who've seen the demo, what was billed as a game-changing partnership looks more like an API call dressed up in marketing speak.

In this week's Attorney Intelligence, we'll explore:

1. Why every legal AI company is desperate for data access

2. What Harvey's "integration" actually does

3. How this type of integration worked at Apple

4. What the data gatekeepers really want

5. How this finally gets solved

Let's get into in.

Everyone Wants the Keys to the Kingdom

Legal AI companies face an existential problem: lawyers won't trust AI that can't cite real cases.

Harvey, Legora, and every other legal AI startup can build beautiful interfaces, integrate with Word, and promise to revolutionize legal work. But without access to primary sources, they're limited to working with internal documents. Useful, but hardly transformative.

The real power in legal research lies with three companies: Thomson Reuters (Westlaw), LexisNexis, and vLex. They control the comprehensive databases of case law, statutes, regulations, and — crucially — the editorial enhancements like headnotes and citations that make legal research actually work.

vLex was recently taken off the table in their $1B acquisition by Clio.

This is why Harvey's partnership with Lexis was supposed to be such a big deal. Finally, a leading AI platform would have access to one of the remaining "big two” legal databases.

The reality? Not even close.

A Chatbot Playing Courier

So what does Harvey's vaunted Lexis integration actually do?

1. You type a legal research query into Harvey

2. Harvey forwards your query to Lexis AI

3. Lexis AI searches Lexis's database and generates an answer

4. Harvey displays that answer in its interface

That's it. Harvey doesn't get to touch the underlying data. It can't train on Lexis's corpus. It can't even see how Lexis generates its answers.

This isn't a game changer — it's API routing. Harvey has essentially become a nice UI wrapper for Lexis's own AI product.

Why The Partnership Is Mostly Posturing

To put it simply, if Harvey is stuck sipping through the straw of Lexis AI, its product can never be better than what Lexis can to give it.

And nothing about Lexis suggests to me that their AI tool will be at the forefront.

With a proper “open the gates” integration, we'd see:

• Unified reasoning across Harvey's AI and Lexis's data

• The ability to train custom models on case law

• Seamless blending of internal knowledge and public law

• A single AI brain with access to everything

Instead, we got a forwarding service.

Don’t get me wrong, this is still a positive for Harvey’s product overall. But it’s not even close to the silver bullet we thought it might be. So far, it’s looking more like a clever marketing play than a technical game changer.

The Siri Déjà Vu

Last year at the launch of Apple Intelligence, Apple announced they had "integrated" ChatGPT into Siri.

Anyone who owns an iPhone knows how that turned out.

Siri has become a forwarding service for the ChatGPT API. Ask Siri something complex, and it says "I'll need to use ChatGPT for that" — then passes your question along like a digital middleman.

I’ll admit to being very excited when this was announced. But it didn’t take long using it to expose the integration for what it really was.

The Moat Protectors Won't Share

Why won't Lexis give Harvey real access? Simple: data is their only moat.

LLMs are commoditizing fast. Anyone with a credit card can start building on top of them.

But legal databases? Those take decades to build. The headnotes, key numbers, and Shepard's signals represent millions of hours of attorney work that can't be replicated overnight.

And Lexis simply doesn’t have adequate skin in the game to throw open the gates.

Their equity investment in Harvey is <1% of the company, due to Harvey’s massive $5B valuation.

Meanwhile Lexis’s own business would be put at massive risk by letting Harvey have everything. Once the genie is out of the bottle, there’s no putting it back.

So Lexis keeps the vault locked: no corpus access, no training data, no editorial logic. Harvey gets the scraps — an API key to query Lexis's own AI.

How This Finally Gets Solved

There’s an incredible amount of pressure (and dollars) driving Harvey, Legora and the other legal AI companies to acquire case data.

There are only two realistic solutions, and neither of them are pretty.

Option 1: Buy your way in. The cheapest option, vLex, was just taken off the table by Clio. Since Lexis and Westlaw are too large to acquire, this probably involves a very large, expensive partnership that ties the financial fates of the two companies. I would not be surprised to see Harvey pursue this path.

Option 2: Build your own. There are many smaller vendors who have some portion of the total data. An enterprising startup with lots of time and money could buy or license a few of these, and cobble together the rest. This is the path I’d expect Legora to pursue.

Whoever solves this first will have a meaningful edge in the legal AI wars.

Legal Bytes

Here are the latest updates in legal tech and AI:

NetDocuments announces ndConnect partnership with Harvey and Legora. The program lets lawyers push documents straight from NetDocuments into those AI tools and save the AI work-product back.

The “Biglaw AI Apocalypse” saga widens after multiple filings cite hallucinated cases, fanning calls for stricter tech-competence rules. Plaintiffs uncovered a litany of fake citations beyond the first rogue brief.

Andrew Yang tells Above the Law “AI is replacing Biglaw associates,” sparking fierce debate over malpractice risk and fee models.