Vincent AI
Legal research and workflow assistant built on vLex's global legal database of more than one billion documents across 100 plus countries, combining vLex international content with United States primary law from Fastcase. Released October 2023. Ships more than 20 prebuilt workflows across research, litigation, transactions and litigation intelligence, including Ask a Research Question, Build an Argument, Compare Jurisdictions and 50 State Survey, plus judge and opposing counsel profiling across more than 850 million court records. Every research output carries citations to primary sources with direct links and a Cert Citator check confirming whether the cited law remains valid, Cert deriving from Judicata software acquired by Fastcase. Runs a hybrid pipeline combining generative and rules based AI. Vincent Studio adds no code workflow building for enterprise customers. Integrates with Microsoft Word, Outlook and iManage, and with Clio Operate where it inherits the firm's existing permissions, ethical walls and audit trail. vLex was acquired by Clio in June 2025 and the product continues to be sold under the Vincent name.
Capability grades
All 15 axes, graded from public sources on the date shown. Hover a grade to see what the letter means on that axis.
AI Centrality
How much of the product is actually AI. Whether the machine learning is the mechanism the buyer is paying for or a feature layered onto conventional software, and whether the vendor is specific about which is which.
The artificial intelligence is the product. Vincent is an AI assistant sold as such, running more than 20 generative workflows across research, litigation and transactions, with a hybrid pipeline combining generative and rules based components and vector search organising the underlying corpus. The vLex database it retrieves from is the grounding corpus rather than a separate workflow product that would stand without the models, which is the same structure as CoCounsel on Westlaw and is graded the same way.
Citation Accuracy and Hallucination Disclosure
Whether the vendor publishes measured accuracy on citations and assertions, grounds output to primary sources, and says plainly what its system does when it does not know. Legal has a documented public record of fabricated citations reaching filed briefs, so an untested claim of accuracy is not evidence.
Independent measurement, a named verification mechanism and grounding a reader can open. Vincent AI participated in the February 2025 Vals Legal AI Report, opting into six tasks, second only to Harvey, and scored between 53.6 and 72.7 percent, beating the lawyer baseline on document question answering at 72.7 percent, transcript analysis at 64.8 percent and document summarisation at 58.9 percent. Those figures sit on the evaluator's site and the vendor publishes them too. The evaluator recorded something more valuable than the scores: it praised the product for refusing to answer where it lacked sufficient data rather than returning a hallucinated answer, and noted plainly that those refusals lowered its own scores. A product penalised for declining to guess is the clearest evidence on this axis anywhere in the index. Grounding is real and mechanised: every research output carries citations to primary sources with direct links, plus a Cert Citator check confirming whether the cited law remains valid. The vendor claims randomised controlled trials showing 3.67 times more reliability than leading language models, which is a strong claim with no published method located and is recorded rather than relied on. Two limits recorded rather than deducted for. The vendor's own framing of the Vals results, meeting or surpassing human benchmarks in four of five tasks, uses a different denominator from the evaluator, which reports six tasks entered and three above baseline. And vLex agreed to participate in the later Vals legal research study then withdrew before results were published, stating the study was not designed for enterprise AI tools; that withdrawal is a real limit on how much of this product has been independently measured.
Autonomy and Oversight Model
What the system decides on its own, what a lawyer must approve, and whether the vendor documents where the review point sits. A tool that drafts under review and a tool that files without one are different products and different risks.
A real published commitment with genuine review surfaces, short of thresholds. The product is positioned as a first draft assistant, with the vendor's chief strategy officer stating publicly that lawyers still bear responsibility for validating research results even when using an AI assistant. Review surfaces are concrete: a user sees the sources an answer rests on and can exclude specific sources, every output carries citations with direct links and a Cert validity check, and the Clio Operate integration gives every interaction an audit trail with access scoped as narrowly as a single matter. The vendor frames this as giving lawyers a clear path back to the source before an answer reaches a client, negotiation, filing or courtroom. Not located as of 29 Aug 2026: what any workflow does unaided, a threshold at which it stops or escalates, and what the vendor commits to when an output is wrong.
Operational and Outcome Evidence
Named, dated evidence that the product works in production at real firms or legal departments. Case studies with figures and identified customers count. Unattributed testimonials and launch announcements do not.
Scale claims and testimonials stand in for deployment evidence. The vendor states Vincent is trusted by 8 of the 10 top law firms worldwide and publishes an attributed customer testimonial about the relationship, and independent benchmark participation is real. But a share of top firms is a market claim without names, and the Vals result is test set performance rather than a production outcome. Searched the vendor site, the Vincent product pages, the Clio press material and the vLex news section on 29 Aug 2026 and located no named customer paired with figures, a date and an assessable method.
Privilege and Confidentiality Posture
How client confidences are handled: attorney client privilege and work product treatment, segregation of one client matter from another, whether client data trains any model, and what the vendor commits to in writing rather than in marketing.
Substantive published commitments with the best retention answer on the index, held off an A by one limb. Retention is published with a period and customer control: the customer selects the retention window for conversation logs and files, defaulting to one year, after which data is permanently deleted. Segregation is documented at matter level through the Clio Operate integration, which the vendor states inherits the firm's existing permissions, ethical walls and audit trail with access scoped as narrowly as a single matter, and Vincent itself is described as multi tenant with each client's data logically isolated. Role based access control governs internal access. Zero retention agreements are stated with the language model providers, and Clio states no sensitive data is retained by the model. What holds this off an A is the training limb, which the A band names alongside retention and segregation: searched the vendor site, the Vincent pages, the security knowledge base article and the Clio press material on 29 Aug 2026 and located no statement of whether vLex itself may train on customer content. Provider retention and vendor training are different questions and the located material answers only the first.
UPL and Professional Responsibility Posture
Whether the vendor is clear that it supplies a tool rather than legal advice, who its audience is, and how it addresses unauthorized practice of law, competence and supervision duties, and jurisdiction limits. ABA Formal Opinion 512 is the reference point.
A real position on the lawyer's continuing responsibility, published in substance rather than as a disclaimer. The vendor positions Vincent as a first draft assistant and its chief strategy officer has stated publicly that lawyers still bear responsibility for validating their research results even when using an AI assistant, with the Cert validity check framed as giving a clear path back to the source before an answer reaches a client, negotiation, filing or courtroom. The audience is professional throughout, spanning law firms from solo through global, corporate legal departments, courts, government agencies, bar associations and academia, with no consumer surface located. Short of an A because competence and supervision duties are not addressed as such, and because no jurisdiction limits are stated despite coverage across more than 100 countries where professional rules differ materially. Recorded with the sourcing noted: the responsibility statement appears in trade coverage quoting an executive rather than in a standing published policy.
AI Governance and Bias Disclosure
Published governance over model behaviour: who owns it inside the vendor, what is tested before release, and what is disclosed about disparate output across matter types, parties, or populations.
Principles and evaluation are published without a governance mechanism a buyer could audit. Real elements exist: participation in an independent benchmark with results published including unflattering ones, a stated hybrid architecture combining generative and rules based components for reliability, a claimed randomised controlled trial programme, and Vincent Studio described as embedding firm processes into workflows with consistency and governance. Searched the vendor site, the Vincent pages, the security knowledge base and the Clio press material on 29 Aug 2026 and located no published AI governance framework, no AI management certification such as ISO 42001, no named owner of model governance, no pre release testing gate, and nothing on uneven output across matter types, parties or populations.
AI Safety and Data Stewardship
Retention, deletion, access control, and what happens to prompts and documents after they are processed. Whether the vendor states its subprocessors and its incident practice, or leaves the buyer to assume.
Substantive published policy covering most of the ground, at a level of specificity few records here reach. Published in the vendor's security knowledge base: customer selectable data retention for conversation logs and files defaulting to one year with permanent deletion after, role based access control restricting internal access to authorised personnel under documented circumstances, logical isolation per client in a multi tenant application, encryption described, and regular independent assessments with real time monitoring to identify vulnerabilities. A trust centre is published for obtaining certification reports. Zero retention agreements bind the language model providers. Not located as of 29 Aug 2026: a named subprocessor list, and an incident or breach notification practice.
AI Liability and Recourse
What the vendor stands behind contractually when its output is wrong. Indemnities, caps, carve outs, insurance, and whether any of it is published or only reachable through a negotiated agreement.
Searched the vendor site navigation, the Vincent product pages, the security knowledge base, the vLex news section and the Clio press material on 29 Aug 2026. No published indemnity, liability cap, carve out, warranty on output or insurance position was located, and no customer terms of service or master agreement was located as published on the property. Recorded as a pure absence on the surfaces reached. Rebuttable with one link, and worth noting that for a vendor of this scale, now part of a larger public facing company, published terms may well exist somewhere the searches run did not surface.
Practice Systems Integration Depth
How deeply the product reaches into the systems legal work already lives in: document management such as iManage and NetDocuments, Word and Outlook, contract lifecycle management, matter management, e-billing, and court filing systems.
Real integrations exist, are named, and include the legal specific ones that matter. Named: Microsoft Word, Microsoft Outlook, and iManage, the document management system a firm facing research product most needs, plus a deep integration with Clio Operate under which Vincent runs inside the firm's existing permissions, ethical walls and audit trail. That last is integration at the permission layer rather than the file layer, which is materially deeper than a connector. Vincent Studio adds a no code workflow builder for enterprise customers to embed firm processes. Not located as of 29 Aug 2026: per integration documentation describing what each connector moves, in which direction, and what an administrator configures, and no integrations index page was reached.
Deployment Model and Data Residency
Where the software runs and where the data sits. Multi tenant cloud, single tenant, private deployment, on premises, and whether region of residence is a published option or an enterprise conversation.
The tenancy model is stated and residency is not. The vendor publishes that Vincent is a multi tenant application with each client's data logically isolated and secured, which is a clear and honest statement of the deployment model and is more than several records here disclose. Searched the vendor site, the Vincent pages, the security knowledge base and the Clio press material on 29 Aug 2026 and located no hosting provider, no named regions, no customer selectable residency, and no statement of where processing happens as distinct from where data is stored. For a product serving more than 100 countries and marketed on cross border capability, published residency options would be expected and none was located.
Security Certifications and Trust Center
Independent attestation a buyer can pull without a sales call: SOC 2, ISO 27001, penetration test summaries, a trust center with current reports and named scope rather than a badge image.
Certification is named, dated and reachable, which is the combination this axis rewards. SOC 2 certification was obtained in January 2025 and ISO 27001 certification achieved in June 2025, both stated with the month and year rather than as undated badges. A vLex Trust Center is published as the route to obtain the official certification reports for a firm's due diligence, alongside an account representative path, which under the three tier test is a self serve request flow rather than a sales gate. The vendor further states its security systems undergo regular independent assessments and real time monitoring. Short only of naming the auditing firm and stating the audit coverage period, neither of which was located as of 29 Aug 2026.
Model Supply Chain Disclosure
Which models sit underneath, whose they are, where they run, and whether the vendor commits to telling customers when that changes. A legal buyer inherits every dependency it cannot see.
The vendor describes its architecture and the terms binding its providers without naming them. Published: a hybrid pipeline combining generative and rules based AI, vector search organising more than one billion documents, and zero retention agreements with large language model providers. That tells a buyer the commercial terms that govern the model layer, which is the part most vendors omit. What it does not tell them is who is in it. Searched the vendor site, the Vincent pages, the security knowledge base and the Clio press material on 29 Aug 2026 and located no named model provider, no statement of where models run, no subprocessor list, and no commitment to notify customers when the supply chain changes.
Commercial Transparency
Whether a buyer can learn what this costs without entering a sales process: published rates, the unit being charged, what sits behind an enterprise tier, and what implementation adds.
Checked the vendor site navigation, the Vincent product pages, the vLex home page and the Clio press material on 29 Aug 2026. No pricing page was located, no rate is published, no unit of charge is stated and no tier structure appears on the surfaces reached. Every commercial path located terminates in a demo or contact request. No third party pricing figure was located either, beyond a general observation in review material that pricing may be competitive against the two largest incumbents, which is not a figure.
Firm and Practice Coverage
Who the product is actually built for. AmLaw, midlaw, small firm and solo, in house departments, government and courts, and which practice areas are supported rather than merely claimed.
The most complete coverage disclosure on the index. Jurisdictional scope is quantified and specific: more than one billion legal documents across more than 100 countries, United States primary law from Fastcase, and more than 850 million court records underpinning judge, opposing counsel and party profiling. A dedicated Compare Jurisdictions workflow and a 50 State Survey workflow exist precisely because multi jurisdictional coverage is the product's stated strength, and the evaluator independently recorded that support for international matters is a significant strength that may offer utility unmatched by other tools for global firms. Functional coverage is enumerated at more than 20 prebuilt workflows spanning research, litigation, transactions and litigation intelligence. Segment coverage runs from solo and small firms through the Fastcase heritage to global firms, corporate legal departments, courts, government agencies, bar associations and academia. The published limits are real too: the evaluator noted the study covered only a small slice of US capability, and the vendor itself stated that document summary tasks do not draw on its legal database, which is a vendor volunteering where its distinctive asset does not apply.
Legal Signals
What each signal meansA signal records what public sources say on the date shown. It is not a grade and it is not a recommendation. Where a signal reads Not addressed, it means the index did not locate the material in public sources on that date, which is a statement about disclosure rather than about the product.
Client Data in Training
Can material a lawyer puts into this product be used to train a model?
No located term or policy addresses the question either way.
The model provider layer is addressed and the vendor's own position is not. Published: zero retention agreements with the language model providers, and a Clio statement that no sensitive data is retained by the model. Those are retention commitments binding third parties, and retention and training are different questions. Searched the vendor site, the Vincent product pages, the security knowledge base article and the Clio press material on 29 Aug 2026 and located no statement of whether vLex itself may use customer content to train or improve its own systems, either way. Recorded as silent under the rule that a value is never inferred from the absence of a contradiction, and specifically not inferred from a provider side retention term.
Prompt and Output Retention
How long does the product keep what a lawyer typed, and can that be set to zero?
The customer controls the retention window, by product configuration or by contractual instruction, but zero retention is not stated as available.
REGRADED 29 Aug 2026 after the value set was amended; previously recorded at disclosed fixed with the mismatch flagged. The best retention disclosure located anywhere on this index. Published: the customer selects the retention period for conversation logs and files, the default is one year, and after the selected period the data is permanently deleted. That answers all three parts of the buying question this signal asks, whether the window is disclosed, whether the customer controls it, and what happens at the end. Now recorded at customer controlled, which is the value added specifically because this record did not fit the original four. Short of the top value only because no material states that zero retention is a selectable setting, which is a real distinction for a firm that wants nothing persisted at all rather than persisted briefly.
Ethical Walls and Matter Segregation
Does retrieval respect the firm’s ethical walls, or can the model read across them?
Retrieval enforces the source system access model at query time, per user, and the vendor documents it.
First positive value on this signal in the index. In the Clio Operate integration the vendor states Vincent works within the permissions, ethical walls and audit trail already established in that system, with access scopable as narrowly as a single matter or as broadly as the firm and every interaction visible. That is retrieval operating inside the firm's existing access model rather than a parallel model the firm must keep aligned, which is precisely what this signal's positive value describes, and ethical walls are named as such rather than implied. Two limits recorded rather than deducted for. The inheritance is documented for the Clio Operate integration specifically, and no equivalent statement was located for Vincent used standalone or through the iManage connector, where the product's own multi tenant logical isolation and role based access control apply. Per user enforcement at query time is implied by scoping to a single matter but is not stated in those words.
Third Party Request and Subpoena Notice
If someone subpoenas the vendor for a firm’s data, does the firm hear about it first?
No located term or policy addresses third party requests for customer data.
Searched the vendor site, the Vincent product pages, the security knowledge base article and the Clio press material on 29 Aug 2026, and no published customer agreement or data processing agreement was reached. No clause committing to notify a customer of a government or law enforcement request for their data was located, and no transparency report was located. Noted for a reader: the published retention control means a firm can limit how much history exists to be requested, which reduces the exposure without addressing the notification question.
Primary Law Corpus Provenance
Where does the law in this product come from, and does the vendor have the right to use it?
The vendor names its primary law sources and the licence or public domain basis for each, with an update cadence.
Sources are named and the rights basis is stated, which is the positive value. The corpus is identified as vLex's own global legal database combined with United States primary law from Fastcase, both now owned by the same company, and the rights basis is stated directly rather than left to inference: the legal authority underlying Vincent's research is owned rather than licensed from a third party. Scale is quantified at more than one billion documents across more than 100 countries plus more than 850 million court records. Ownership of the corpus is the strongest possible answer to the question this signal asks, because it removes the licence dependency entirely. Short of the full value only on cadence: searched the vendor site, the Vincent pages and the Clio press material on 29 Aug 2026 and located no update frequency or lag for any jurisdiction, and no per jurisdiction completeness statement.
Good Law Verification
Does the product tell you when the authority it just cited has been overruled?
Treatment signals come from a named commercial citator and appear with the authority.
The first product on this index to answer the good law question properly. Every research output carries a Cert Citator check confirming whether the cited law remains valid, surfaced with the authority rather than as a separate step, and Cert is a named citator with a traceable origin: it derives from Judicata software acquired by Fastcase before the vLex merger and is now owned by the same company. Recorded at licensed citator as the closest fit, with one qualification stated rather than hidden: that value describes treatment signals from a named commercial citator, and here the citator is named and commercial but owned by the vendor rather than licensed in, which is a stronger position for a buyer since it cannot be withdrawn by a third party. Coverage limit recorded: Cert is a United States citator and no equivalent treatment mechanism was located for the international corpus, so the good law check does not extend across the 100 plus countries the research product covers.
Refusal and Uncertainty Behaviour
What does the product do when the answer is not in the corpus?
The vendor describes refusal or abstention behaviour in public materials.
Abstention is independently observed and it cost the vendor measured points, which is the strongest evidence on this signal in the index. The February 2025 Vals evaluator explicitly praised Vincent AI for refusing to answer questions where it did not have sufficient data rather than giving a hallucinated answer, and recorded that those refusals negatively affected its scores. A product that accepts a lower benchmark result rather than guess is demonstrating the behaviour this signal exists to find, and the evidence comes from an outside evaluator with nothing to gain from the finding. Recorded at documented rather than the top value because the top value requires the vendor to document an explicit no answer path and that documentation was not located: searched the vendor site, the Vincent product pages and the vLex news section on 29 Aug 2026 and found the behaviour observed by others rather than described by the vendor. A reader should weigh that the behaviour is evidenced but not promised.
Fabricated Citation Record
Does a public court record exist involving output from this product?
No court order, opinion or disciplinary record naming this product has been located as of the date shown. This is a statement about the public record, not a finding about the product.
No court order, opinion or disciplinary record naming this product has been located as of 29 Aug 2026. Instrument searched: the AI Hallucination Cases database maintained by Damien Charlotin, which tracks court decisions worldwide involving AI generated hallucinated content and records the AI tool implicated where it is known. Also checked published 2026 sanctions summaries and secondary sanctions trackers. The entries located name filers, and in some rows other products, rather than this one. This is a statement about the public record on the date shown and not a clearance. Noted for context: an earlier record on this index recorded a fabricated citation matter in which a Casetext or vLex product was named by a filer as a possible source; that entry was recorded as filer conduct rather than a product finding and is not restated here as a finding against this vendor.
Bar Guidance Alignment
Has the vendor engaged in public with the ethics opinions its buyers are bound by?
No located public material engages with bar or ethics guidance.
Searched the vendor site, the Vincent product pages, the vLex news section and the Clio press material on 29 Aug 2026. No engagement with any named ethics opinion or professional guidance was located, including ABA Formal Opinion 512 and state bar guidance. Worth recording as context rather than credit: the company has a substantial bar association presence inherited through Fastcase, which supplied research tools to state bar memberships, so a relationship with bar associations exists without engagement with their AI guidance being published.
Billing and Fee Posture
Does the vendor address what happens to the bill when the work takes an hour instead of six?
No located public material addresses billing, fee or disclosure treatment.
Searched the vendor site, the Vincent product pages, the vLex news section and the Clio press material on 29 Aug 2026. No per matter record of AI assisted work intended for fee purposes was located, and no guidance on billing, fee or client disclosure treatment was located. Time savings are referenced in general terms, such as workflows turning hours of research into minutes, without a quantified savings claim tied to a matter. Recorded as not addressed rather than at the savings claims value because the located framing is capability description rather than a savings figure. Noted for a reader: the Clio Operate integration records every interaction in an audit trail, which is the raw material for such a record without being published as one.
Outside Counsel Guideline Readiness
Can a firm get this vendor through a client’s AI clause without a bespoke negotiation?
The material exists behind a sales conversation or an executed agreement.
A firm can assemble much of what a client AI clause asks for without a bespoke negotiation, though not all of it. Available without an agreement in place: a published trust centre as the route to official SOC 2 and ISO 27001 certification reports for a firm's due diligence, dated certifications, a published retention policy with customer control and permanent deletion, a stated position that language model providers are bound by zero retention agreements, and a statement that the legal authority behind the product is owned rather than licensed. Recorded at on request because the certification reports themselves sit behind a trust centre request or an account representative rather than being published, and because the artifacts this signal specifically names were not located: no subprocessor list, no naming of which model providers see client content, and no client facing consent or notification pack.
Court Disclosure Support
If a judge’s standing order requires an AI disclosure, can the product produce one?
Some elements of the record are available, short of a document level export.
More of a disclosure record exists here than for most, assembled from several published features rather than offered as one. Through the Clio Operate integration every interaction is visible in an audit trail scoped to the matter. Every research output carries citations to primary sources with direct links plus a Cert validity check, so what was relied on and whether it was still good law are both recorded in the work product. A user can see and exclude the sources an answer rests on, which leaves a trace of human intervention. Two elements are missing: no single per document export covering model used, sources retrieved and human verification together was located, and no model is named anywhere in published material so the model used could not be stated. Recorded at partial record on that basis.