The Justice Department posted a solicitation on SAM.gov on Friday asking vendors to provide details about commercially available artificial-intelligence legal assistant platforms capable of document analysis and legal research. The request is framed as a market-research exercise intended to inform future acquisition planning rather than to award a contract at this stage.
The department envisions a pilot involving between twenty and thirty government users. Testing would occur in a vendor’s FedRAMP-authorized cloud or a commercially available environment, using synthetic or publicly available test data rather than live case files, to assess functionality without exposing sensitive information.
A DOJ spokesperson declined to comment on the motivations behind exploring an AI legal assistant or on the timeline for any trial. The SAM.gov posting clarifies that the effort is purely for market research, stating that responses will not be evaluated as offers and will not result in a contract award, and that they will inform acquisition planning.
Among the capabilities the department plans to evaluate are the platform’s ability to synthesize between five thousand and one hundred thousand documents in a single session, to provide authoritative source citations during legal research, to aid attorneys in drafting documents, and to integrate smoothly with existing agency document-management systems.
The pilot’s performance metrics will include platform-provided usage statistics, government-administered output quality reviews, contractor-supplied timing logs, technical demonstrations, government checklist reviews, and anonymous employee feedback surveys. These data points are intended to give a comprehensive view of both technical performance and user satisfaction within the federal environment.
According to the department’s 2025 AI use-case inventory, DOJ has already deployed artificial-intelligence tools from LexisNexis, Westlaw and Bloomberg to support legal research tasks, indicating an existing foundation of AI-enabled resources that the new pilot would build upon.