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LexisNexis said in a statement that it launched Lexis+ with Protégé across the Middle East and North Africa on October 1, 2026. The platform is a fully localised, secure and agentic legal AI solution grounded in authoritative regional intelligence, built and tested with input from MENA legal professionals. The rollout marks 16 years since the company introduced its first research product in the region in 2010, following sustained investment that has produced one of the area’s most comprehensive legal content frameworks.
According to the company’s release, users can ask questions in plain language to receive answers drawn from verified sources, with the system summarising and translating Arabic and English case decisions while breaking larger tasks such as due diligence into auditable steps. The platform also supports drafting of contracts and memoranda and allows upload of documents to identify issues or construct timelines. Customer data is never employed to train public AI models, an element the company highlighted as central to its design for professional environments.
The LexisNexis statement noted that the solution aggregates legislation, regulations, official gazette material, judgments, legal news, expert commentary and practical guidance from across MENA, including full coverage of UAE federal and emirate-level rules as well as Omani law. It provides seamless access to both regional and global content through a single sign-in and became commercially available immediately upon launch in every MENA market. This structure addresses the layered legal landscape that mixes civil and common law elements with free-zone regulations.
Eric Bonnet-Maes, CEO of LexisNexis, said in the statement, “MENA is moving decisively from exploring the potential of AI to putting it to work across high-value, professional environments. This launch draws on more than a decade and a half of investment in the region and reflects something we believe in beyond the commercial case: that helping legal professionals access reliable information helps build a stronger legal community, and a stronger legal community helps build transparency.” The comments were issued as Oman convened the Legal Tech Summit 2026 to explore regulatory pathways for courtroom AI.
A company announcement from June 2026 detailed a multi-million-dollar regional investment to extend and localise the platform, building on more than 15 years of content development and practitioner collaboration. The MENA deployment follows the global evolution of Lexis+ with Protégé unveiled in May 2026, which introduced expanded agentic drafting, collaboration features and enterprise controls. LexisNexis has framed the regional version as responding directly to practitioner feedback on the need for jurisdiction-specific intelligence rather than generic models.
A 6Wresearch assessment of the Middle East legal AI market projected expansion through 2032 across applications including legal research, compliance monitoring, document drafting and contract management among law firms and corporate legal teams. The report identified demand drivers such as digital transformation in judicial systems and rising adoption of technology to manage regulatory complexity. The new platform enters this environment at a time when MENA governments are advancing AI governance frameworks, according to an overview published by Regulations.ai that highlighted dedicated oversight bodies in Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
