LexisNexis unveiled Protégé, a natural language AI assistant that translates questions like “What are the top M&A targets in biotech?” into patent analytics insights. The firm positions the new offering as eliminating the need for users to master complex database syntax in the company’s PatentSight+ platform.
The assistant parses a user’s prompt, maps it to PatentSight+ analysis steps and returns charts and tables with the full query it executed so results can be reproduced inside the platform. Answers draw on a harmonized global database of more than 90 million patent family records with ownership normalization, legal-status tracking, and 100+ attributes and measures, including the Patent Asset Index. (The Index weights patents using citation impact and market coverage.)
A range of applications
Initial use cases include landscape scans, benchmarking, licensing-partner discovery, and portfolio-fee optimization. Example prompts cited by LexisNexis range from technical queries like “Who are potential licensing partners for my battery technology?” to strategic business questions such as “What are the top M&A targets in the biotech space?” and “What opportunities do I have to reduce patent portfolio fees?” The tool explicitly targets stakeholders beyond traditional IP teams, including R&D, strategy, and corporate development functions.
Andrew Matuch, President of LexisNexis Reed Tech & Intellectual Property Solutions, positioned the tool as shifting focus from “groundwork” to strategy, stating in a press release it “enables smarter, faster decision-making across the business.” The company emphasizes that outputs are “boardroom-ready visualizations” carrying the same trust and credibility used in litigation, financial reporting, and regulatory filings.
A preview slated for October
A commercial preview opens in October for current PatentSight+ customers and members of the LexisNexis AI Insider program, with general availability targeted for November 2025. Future modules will expand beyond patent analytics to include prosecution data and SEP (Standard Essential Patent) integration, personalized team workflows, advanced technology-definition workflows, and options for custom data integration. The company announced the launch in New York on Sept. 3, 2025, and says demos are planned at events including the IPO Annual Meeting and IP Dealmakers AI+Em Tech (U.S.), the Patent Information Fair and Conference (Tokyo), the China Intellectual Property Annual Conference (Beijing), PATINEX and KINPA (Seoul), and IP Service World (Germany).
Competitive context: IPRally markets natural-language patentability search “in minutes.” NLPatent says it uses proprietary large-language-model systems to understand inventions at a contextual level. Patsnap promotes AI “agents,” including a Patent Drafting AI capability. Open-source options like PQAI offer free natural-language prior-art search. Protégé’s differentiation appears centered on business intelligence outputs rather than document retrieval, leveraging PatentSight+’s established analytics infrastructure and the Patent Asset Index methodology, which has been refined since 2010.
