This article is Part 4 in a series written by Morgan Maguire, Co-Founder and CEO. Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 cover LexSelect’s origins, development approach, and vision for legal AI. In this final installment, we introduce the foundation for LexSelect’s next chapter: our new parsing engine.
Tackling the bottleneck in legal AI
Picture this: It’s late at night, you’re deep into preparing a brief, and suddenly your client emails you a key document—an 80-year-old trust agreement. Scanned a decade ago, it's barely legible and completely unsearchable. You’ve been here before: firing up Adobe Acrobat or another PDF viewer, running OCR, and praying for decent results. But the output is patchy. Formatting is off. Paragraphs break mid-sentence. You give up and start typing sections manually—frustrated, exhausted, and wondering why you went to law school just to spend hours retyping text.
Now imagine a different outcome. You drop that scanned trust agreement into the LexSelect Microsoft Word add-in. Within seconds, accurate text is generated and instantly inserted into your brief to match your styling with an automatically generated citation—without ever leaving Word. A tedious, low-value task that was costing you valuable minutes for each excerpt of text is now reduced to a few seconds, resulting in hours of saved time and anguish.
Introducing LexSelect’s new parsing engine
LexSelect’s new parsing engine enables you to instantly turn the messiest scanned PDFs into structured, usable text—directly inside Microsoft Word.
Immediate benefits: game-changer for legal professionals
Built-in OCR: instant accessibility
Effortlessly generate and extract accurate text from scanned PDFs and images directly within Word. No more external apps, cumbersome uploads, or complicated workflows—simply upload documents through the LexSelect Word add-in and start working immediately.
Centralized workflow: never leave Word
With the parsing engine embedded directly into the Microsoft Word experience, you no longer need to shuffle documents between tools. Upload, review, extract, and cite—without switching apps. The message is simple: Never leave Word. Just upload your documents and get to work.
Advanced layout handling: preserving authenticity
Beyond OCR, our engine understands document structure. It maintains formatting, line spacing, indentation, and layout integrity—preserving the visual and contextual cues essential in legal workflows. That means no more broken sentences or formatting glitches.
Prioritized parsing: speed and reliability
We’ve also invested in performance. The parsing engine dynamically allocates resources to optimize for fast, accurate processing. Users experience minimal load times, allowing them to stay in the flow. The same architecture positions us to scale from one document to thousands.
Bridging to broader vision: addressing AI’s bottleneck
The parsing engine doesn’t just make legal workflows faster—it lays the foundation for our broader platform strategy. LexSelect is evolving from a tool into infrastructure, unlocking value far beyond Word.
Legal AI adoption is accelerating. According to recent studies, 79% of legal professionals already use AI tools. At the same time, 81% of law firms say reducing administrative tasks is a top priority, with a focus on efficiency (35%) and cutting costs through technology (52%).
Yet despite this enthusiasm, a major bottleneck remains: unstructured data. The accuracy of AI tools drops sharply—sometimes below 60%—when working with complex, messy PDFs and other unstructured data. The result? Missed insights, unreliable outputs, and stalled adoption in critical workflows.
Solving the unstructured data problem, particularly in the legal context, isn’t just a matter of applying existing OCR tools or generalized data extraction software. Legal documents are complex, and document schemas vary dramatically—from scanned typewritten contracts and historical agreements to multi-column transcripts and highly technical patent filings. Generalized, open-source platforms typically struggle to consistently interpret these complexities, and building a specialized, high-accuracy parsing engine requires deep domain expertise and sustained engineering effort. LexSelect’s parsing engine, refined over thousands of hours and tens of thousands of lines of code, uniquely addresses these challenges with precision specifically tuned for legal workflows.
LexSelect’s engine addresses these challenges head-on by transforming unstructured documents into structured, machine-readable data that AI can reliably interpret. This structured layer solves the garbage-in, garbage-out problem, significantly enhancing the accuracy and efficiency of downstream workflows and unlocking the full potential of automation and generative AI.
By improving accuracy and reducing ambiguity, structured data increases trust in AI outputs—making it possible to safely deploy generative tools in workflows where precision is non-negotiable.
Realizing the vision: API licensing and partnership opportunities
The parsing engine isn’t just an enhancement to our existing end-user product—it’s the first step in transforming LexSelect into a foundational platform, enabling enhanced third-party integrations and driving industry-wide improvements in efficiency and accuracy.
We’re excited to introduce this new technology, which is already driving active pilots with partners. By offering structured outputs through our API, LexSelect’s parsing engine unlocks new possibilities for integration across a wide range of downstream systems and use cases, including:
• Generative AI: feeding structured, context-rich data into retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines to boost accuracy, traceability, and usability of LLM-powered tools.
• Research databases: converting legacy PDFs into structured formats like HTML or Markdown to unlock frontend features and improve user experiences.
• eDiscovery: automated metadata tagging and classification of unstructured documents to speed up and decrease the costs of discovery processes.
• Document workflows: dynamically identify and extract data from unstructured documents to automate the population of fields in CRMs, analytics dashboards, and DMS systems.
• Practice management: streamlining data import and integration for case files, evidence, and client records.
• Due diligence: automating the extraction of key data from contracts and reports in M&A and compliance workflows.
Beyond law, the use cases for the technology extend to adjacent industries—finance, healthcare, insurance—where unstructured documents are embedded in critical risk, regulatory, and operational workflows.
Future vision: powering legal workflows across every layer
For lawyers: Grammarly for legal
We envision LexSelect evolving into a real-time assistant for legal work—more than just data extraction. Think contextual summarization, event recognition, insight generation, and knowledge retrieval embedded into your daily workflow. Legal professionals will be able to draw on institutional memory, firm-wide precedent, and document insights as naturally as spellcheck.
For partners: structured data as infrastructure
At the ecosystem level, structured data is no longer a nice-to-have. It’s essential infrastructure. Our modular, API-driven approach gives partners the flexibility to customize how data flows into their systems—boosting accuracy, reducing costs, and supporting rapid product development. LexSelect becomes the connective tissue between unstructured data repositories and the broader technology stack.
The foundation for what’s next
LexSelect’s new parsing engine marks a significant milestone and delivers immediate value—faster, cleaner, more intuitive workflows for legal professionals. It also lays the groundwork for a broader shift in how unstructured data is understood and utilized, and sets the stage for transformative, API-driven innovations across the legal ecosystem and beyond.
We’re proud of this milestone—but it’s only the very beginning.
Try it. Partner with us.
Try LexSelect on your messiest PDF. See how it handles the documents you once thought were unusable.
If you’re building products that rely on PDFs and other unstructured content—let’s talk. We’re actively exploring pilot programs and partnerships.
Let’s transform your unstructured data into building blocks for innovation. Connect with me on LinkedIn or email me at morgan@lexselect.io.
This article is Part 4 in a series written by Morgan Maguire, Co-Founder and CEO. Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 cover LexSelect’s origins, development approach, and vision for legal AI. In this final installment, we introduce the foundation for LexSelect’s next chapter: our new parsing engine.
Tackling the bottleneck in legal AI
Picture this: It’s late at night, you’re deep into preparing a brief, and suddenly your client emails you a key document—an 80-year-old trust agreement. Scanned a decade ago, it's barely legible and completely unsearchable. You’ve been here before: firing up Adobe Acrobat or another PDF viewer, running OCR, and praying for decent results. But the output is patchy. Formatting is off. Paragraphs break mid-sentence. You give up and start typing sections manually—frustrated, exhausted, and wondering why you went to law school just to spend hours retyping text.
Now imagine a different outcome. You drop that scanned trust agreement into the LexSelect Microsoft Word add-in. Within seconds, accurate text is generated and instantly inserted into your brief to match your styling with an automatically generated citation—without ever leaving Word. A tedious, low-value task that was costing you valuable minutes for each excerpt of text is now reduced to a few seconds, resulting in hours of saved time and anguish.
Introducing LexSelect’s new parsing engine
LexSelect’s new parsing engine enables you to instantly turn the messiest scanned PDFs into structured, usable text—directly inside Microsoft Word.
Immediate benefits: game-changer for legal professionals
Built-in OCR: instant accessibility
Effortlessly generate and extract accurate text from scanned PDFs and images directly within Word. No more external apps, cumbersome uploads, or complicated workflows—simply upload documents through the LexSelect Word add-in and start working immediately.
Centralized workflow: never leave Word
With the parsing engine embedded directly into the Microsoft Word experience, you no longer need to shuffle documents between tools. Upload, review, extract, and cite—without switching apps. The message is simple: Never leave Word. Just upload your documents and get to work.
Advanced layout handling: preserving authenticity
Beyond OCR, our engine understands document structure. It maintains formatting, line spacing, indentation, and layout integrity—preserving the visual and contextual cues essential in legal workflows. That means no more broken sentences or formatting glitches.
Prioritized parsing: speed and reliability
We’ve also invested in performance. The parsing engine dynamically allocates resources to optimize for fast, accurate processing. Users experience minimal load times, allowing them to stay in the flow. The same architecture positions us to scale from one document to thousands.
Bridging to broader vision: addressing AI’s bottleneck
The parsing engine doesn’t just make legal workflows faster—it lays the foundation for our broader platform strategy. LexSelect is evolving from a tool into infrastructure, unlocking value far beyond Word.
Legal AI adoption is accelerating. According to recent studies, 79% of legal professionals already use AI tools. At the same time, 81% of law firms say reducing administrative tasks is a top priority, with a focus on efficiency (35%) and cutting costs through technology (52%).
Yet despite this enthusiasm, a major bottleneck remains: unstructured data. The accuracy of AI tools drops sharply—sometimes below 60%—when working with complex, messy PDFs and other unstructured data. The result? Missed insights, unreliable outputs, and stalled adoption in critical workflows.
Solving the unstructured data problem, particularly in the legal context, isn’t just a matter of applying existing OCR tools or generalized data extraction software. Legal documents are complex, and document schemas vary dramatically—from scanned typewritten contracts and historical agreements to multi-column transcripts and highly technical patent filings. Generalized, open-source platforms typically struggle to consistently interpret these complexities, and building a specialized, high-accuracy parsing engine requires deep domain expertise and sustained engineering effort. LexSelect’s parsing engine, refined over thousands of hours and tens of thousands of lines of code, uniquely addresses these challenges with precision specifically tuned for legal workflows.
LexSelect’s engine addresses these challenges head-on by transforming unstructured documents into structured, machine-readable data that AI can reliably interpret. This structured layer solves the garbage-in, garbage-out problem, significantly enhancing the accuracy and efficiency of downstream workflows and unlocking the full potential of automation and generative AI.
By improving accuracy and reducing ambiguity, structured data increases trust in AI outputs—making it possible to safely deploy generative tools in workflows where precision is non-negotiable.
Realizing the vision: API licensing and partnership opportunities
The parsing engine isn’t just an enhancement to our existing end-user product—it’s the first step in transforming LexSelect into a foundational platform, enabling enhanced third-party integrations and driving industry-wide improvements in efficiency and accuracy.
We’re excited to introduce this new technology, which is already driving active pilots with partners. By offering structured outputs through our API, LexSelect’s parsing engine unlocks new possibilities for integration across a wide range of downstream systems and use cases, including:
• Generative AI: feeding structured, context-rich data into retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines to boost accuracy, traceability, and usability of LLM-powered tools.
• Research databases: converting legacy PDFs into structured formats like HTML or Markdown to unlock frontend features and improve user experiences.
• eDiscovery: automated metadata tagging and classification of unstructured documents to speed up and decrease the costs of discovery processes.
• Document workflows: dynamically identify and extract data from unstructured documents to automate the population of fields in CRMs, analytics dashboards, and DMS systems.
• Practice management: streamlining data import and integration for case files, evidence, and client records.
• Due diligence: automating the extraction of key data from contracts and reports in M&A and compliance workflows.
Beyond law, the use cases for the technology extend to adjacent industries—finance, healthcare, insurance—where unstructured documents are embedded in critical risk, regulatory, and operational workflows.
Future vision: powering legal workflows across every layer
For lawyers: Grammarly for legal
We envision LexSelect evolving into a real-time assistant for legal work—more than just data extraction. Think contextual summarization, event recognition, insight generation, and knowledge retrieval embedded into your daily workflow. Legal professionals will be able to draw on institutional memory, firm-wide precedent, and document insights as naturally as spellcheck.
For partners: structured data as infrastructure
At the ecosystem level, structured data is no longer a nice-to-have. It’s essential infrastructure. Our modular, API-driven approach gives partners the flexibility to customize how data flows into their systems—boosting accuracy, reducing costs, and supporting rapid product development. LexSelect becomes the connective tissue between unstructured data repositories and the broader technology stack.
The foundation for what’s next
LexSelect’s new parsing engine marks a significant milestone and delivers immediate value—faster, cleaner, more intuitive workflows for legal professionals. It also lays the groundwork for a broader shift in how unstructured data is understood and utilized, and sets the stage for transformative, API-driven innovations across the legal ecosystem and beyond.
We’re proud of this milestone—but it’s only the very beginning.
Try it. Partner with us.
Try LexSelect on your messiest PDF. See how it handles the documents you once thought were unusable.
If you’re building products that rely on PDFs and other unstructured content—let’s talk. We’re actively exploring pilot programs and partnerships.
Let’s transform your unstructured data into building blocks for innovation. Connect with me on LinkedIn or email me at morgan@lexselect.io.
This article is Part 4 in a series written by Morgan Maguire, Co-Founder and CEO. Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 cover LexSelect’s origins, development approach, and vision for legal AI. In this final installment, we introduce the foundation for LexSelect’s next chapter: our new parsing engine.
Tackling the bottleneck in legal AI
Picture this: It’s late at night, you’re deep into preparing a brief, and suddenly your client emails you a key document—an 80-year-old trust agreement. Scanned a decade ago, it's barely legible and completely unsearchable. You’ve been here before: firing up Adobe Acrobat or another PDF viewer, running OCR, and praying for decent results. But the output is patchy. Formatting is off. Paragraphs break mid-sentence. You give up and start typing sections manually—frustrated, exhausted, and wondering why you went to law school just to spend hours retyping text.
Now imagine a different outcome. You drop that scanned trust agreement into the LexSelect Microsoft Word add-in. Within seconds, accurate text is generated and instantly inserted into your brief to match your styling with an automatically generated citation—without ever leaving Word. A tedious, low-value task that was costing you valuable minutes for each excerpt of text is now reduced to a few seconds, resulting in hours of saved time and anguish.
Introducing LexSelect’s new parsing engine
LexSelect’s new parsing engine enables you to instantly turn the messiest scanned PDFs into structured, usable text—directly inside Microsoft Word.
Immediate benefits: game-changer for legal professionals
Built-in OCR: instant accessibility
Effortlessly generate and extract accurate text from scanned PDFs and images directly within Word. No more external apps, cumbersome uploads, or complicated workflows—simply upload documents through the LexSelect Word add-in and start working immediately.
Centralized workflow: never leave Word
With the parsing engine embedded directly into the Microsoft Word experience, you no longer need to shuffle documents between tools. Upload, review, extract, and cite—without switching apps. The message is simple: Never leave Word. Just upload your documents and get to work.
Advanced layout handling: preserving authenticity
Beyond OCR, our engine understands document structure. It maintains formatting, line spacing, indentation, and layout integrity—preserving the visual and contextual cues essential in legal workflows. That means no more broken sentences or formatting glitches.
Prioritized parsing: speed and reliability
We’ve also invested in performance. The parsing engine dynamically allocates resources to optimize for fast, accurate processing. Users experience minimal load times, allowing them to stay in the flow. The same architecture positions us to scale from one document to thousands.
Bridging to broader vision: addressing AI’s bottleneck
The parsing engine doesn’t just make legal workflows faster—it lays the foundation for our broader platform strategy. LexSelect is evolving from a tool into infrastructure, unlocking value far beyond Word.
Legal AI adoption is accelerating. According to recent studies, 79% of legal professionals already use AI tools. At the same time, 81% of law firms say reducing administrative tasks is a top priority, with a focus on efficiency (35%) and cutting costs through technology (52%).
Yet despite this enthusiasm, a major bottleneck remains: unstructured data. The accuracy of AI tools drops sharply—sometimes below 60%—when working with complex, messy PDFs and other unstructured data. The result? Missed insights, unreliable outputs, and stalled adoption in critical workflows.
Solving the unstructured data problem, particularly in the legal context, isn’t just a matter of applying existing OCR tools or generalized data extraction software. Legal documents are complex, and document schemas vary dramatically—from scanned typewritten contracts and historical agreements to multi-column transcripts and highly technical patent filings. Generalized, open-source platforms typically struggle to consistently interpret these complexities, and building a specialized, high-accuracy parsing engine requires deep domain expertise and sustained engineering effort. LexSelect’s parsing engine, refined over thousands of hours and tens of thousands of lines of code, uniquely addresses these challenges with precision specifically tuned for legal workflows.
LexSelect’s engine addresses these challenges head-on by transforming unstructured documents into structured, machine-readable data that AI can reliably interpret. This structured layer solves the garbage-in, garbage-out problem, significantly enhancing the accuracy and efficiency of downstream workflows and unlocking the full potential of automation and generative AI.
By improving accuracy and reducing ambiguity, structured data increases trust in AI outputs—making it possible to safely deploy generative tools in workflows where precision is non-negotiable.
Realizing the vision: API licensing and partnership opportunities
The parsing engine isn’t just an enhancement to our existing end-user product—it’s the first step in transforming LexSelect into a foundational platform, enabling enhanced third-party integrations and driving industry-wide improvements in efficiency and accuracy.
We’re excited to introduce this new technology, which is already driving active pilots with partners. By offering structured outputs through our API, LexSelect’s parsing engine unlocks new possibilities for integration across a wide range of downstream systems and use cases, including:
• Generative AI: feeding structured, context-rich data into retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines to boost accuracy, traceability, and usability of LLM-powered tools.
• Research databases: converting legacy PDFs into structured formats like HTML or Markdown to unlock frontend features and improve user experiences.
• eDiscovery: automated metadata tagging and classification of unstructured documents to speed up and decrease the costs of discovery processes.
• Document workflows: dynamically identify and extract data from unstructured documents to automate the population of fields in CRMs, analytics dashboards, and DMS systems.
• Practice management: streamlining data import and integration for case files, evidence, and client records.
• Due diligence: automating the extraction of key data from contracts and reports in M&A and compliance workflows.
Beyond law, the use cases for the technology extend to adjacent industries—finance, healthcare, insurance—where unstructured documents are embedded in critical risk, regulatory, and operational workflows.
Future vision: powering legal workflows across every layer
For lawyers: Grammarly for legal
We envision LexSelect evolving into a real-time assistant for legal work—more than just data extraction. Think contextual summarization, event recognition, insight generation, and knowledge retrieval embedded into your daily workflow. Legal professionals will be able to draw on institutional memory, firm-wide precedent, and document insights as naturally as spellcheck.
For partners: structured data as infrastructure
At the ecosystem level, structured data is no longer a nice-to-have. It’s essential infrastructure. Our modular, API-driven approach gives partners the flexibility to customize how data flows into their systems—boosting accuracy, reducing costs, and supporting rapid product development. LexSelect becomes the connective tissue between unstructured data repositories and the broader technology stack.
The foundation for what’s next
LexSelect’s new parsing engine marks a significant milestone and delivers immediate value—faster, cleaner, more intuitive workflows for legal professionals. It also lays the groundwork for a broader shift in how unstructured data is understood and utilized, and sets the stage for transformative, API-driven innovations across the legal ecosystem and beyond.
We’re proud of this milestone—but it’s only the very beginning.
Try it. Partner with us.
Try LexSelect on your messiest PDF. See how it handles the documents you once thought were unusable.
If you’re building products that rely on PDFs and other unstructured content—let’s talk. We’re actively exploring pilot programs and partnerships.
Let’s transform your unstructured data into building blocks for innovation. Connect with me on LinkedIn or email me at morgan@lexselect.io.
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