OUP strengthens position as world-leading legal publisher with new product to simplify research process

NISO Member News

Oxford, U.K. | May 14, 2025

Oxford University Press (OUP) has today launched Oxford Law Pro, its latest product supporting legal researchers and legal professionals to improve research outcomes. Powered by a conversational AI research assistant, Oxford Law Pro brings together more than 9,000 journal articles and over 600 award-winning, peer-reviewed books to make legal research more efficient without compromising on accuracy.  

Hosted on Oxford Academic, Oxford Law Pro will enable legal researchers to access high-quality, reliable explanations of what the law is and how it is evolving, as well as commentary from industry experts about the latest complex and highly regulated topics in its Expert Essentials series. Researchers will be able to search across OUP’s portfolio of authoritative legal analysis—spanning books, journals, and short-form content—in key areas such as arbitration, international law, commercial law, competition law, technology regulation, and intellectual property law. 

Oxford Law Pro demonstrates OUP's continued commitment to ensuring innovation and excellence in the legal publishing field, and marks the latest milestone in the publisher’s digital evolution. The launch builds upon OUP law books moving to Oxford Academic in 2024, expanding the reach of its resources in support of its mission, streamlining the research journey across law books and journals, and improving the user experience for legal researchers. OUP is using these new capabilities to enhance its legal content offer and to enable further innovation, such as in AI.  

The AI research assistant rapidly navigates OUP’s quality assured legal research content to deliver precise summaries, source links, and relevancy scores. It only returns trusted OUP sources, allowing researchers and professionals to expand their expertise by interrogating an unrivalled collection of legal research resources. The assistant—developed with technology company, Silverchair—is the newest addition to OUP’s line of AI-powered products for researchers. 

John Campbell, Product Strategy Director for OUP’s Academic division, said: 

‘Oxford Law Pro strengthens OUP’s position as a leading legal publisher and represents the qualities we’re recognized for: leadership, trust, integrity, and peer-reviewed insight. We want to support a responsible and sustainable future for AI tools in the research community, so we only develop tools that solve the problems of our customers and users. 

‘AI tools should work alongside expert human input, identifying the relevant content you need and making your discovery of scholarship quicker, whatever your specialism. With Silverchair, we’ve taken great care in ensuring Oxford Law Pro’s AI assistant is trustworthy thanks to the experts that are tuning and testing it. It’s not simply a black box being put in front of customers; it adheres to our editorial reputation and the excellence they expect from our products.’ 

As a mission-based organization, OUP is taking a responsible approach to developing AI tools to support a sustainable research journey, with a focus on trust and quality. The launch of Oxford Law Pro follows the development of a pilot AI search tool on the Oxford English Dictionary website, and the addition of an AI assistant on Oxford Academic, both introduced to simplify the research journey for users. 

John continues: 

‘Our tools may have different focuses, but together they demonstrate our commitment to improving research outcomes and upholding our mission, to make high-quality research and educational content as widely available as possible.’ 

More about Oxford Law Pro can be found at: https://academic.oup.com/oxford-law-pro 

About This Organization

About Oxford University Press  

Oxford University Press (OUP) is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. OUP is the world's largest university press with the widest global presence.  

It currently publishes thousands of new publications a year, has offices in around fifty countries, and employs approximately 5,000 people worldwide.  

It has become familiar to millions through a diverse publishing program that includes scholarly works in all academic disciplines, bibles, music, school and college textbooks, children's books, materials for teaching English as a foreign language, business books, dictionaries and reference books, and academic journals. 

AI and research at OUP 

OUP is defining a responsible and sustainable future for AI tools and the research community. More can be found at: https://academic.oup.com/pages/artificial-intelligence-ai-and-researchers  

OUP experts

John Campbell is Product Strategy Director for OUP’s Academic division. John works with a talented team driving product and platform strategies for OUP’s journal and scholarly business, covering 500 journals and more than 250 society partners. Technology and AI are driving business transformation but also bringing quality and trust to the forefront of decision-making. Working at the heart of the digital publishing industry for over twenty years, John is focused on meeting high-impact content with the right technology solutions.

Merel Alstein is Head of Acquisition for Law and other areas of professional publishing at OUP. She moved into publishing after finishing her law degree and never looked back. For many years she was the editor responsible for international law before moving into her current position, which focuses on developing OUP’s content strategy in the legal space, as well as other areas of publishing for professionals. She has been involved with Oxford Law Pro from the start.