Comment by gip

7 hours ago

I'm not really understanding why Thomson Reuters is at direct risk from AI. Providing good data streams will still be very valuable?

9 comments

gip

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elemeno  6 hours ago

They’re one of the two big names in legal data - Thomson Reuters Westlaw and RELX LexisNexis. They’re not just search engines for law, but also hubs for information about how laws are being applied with articles from their in house lawyers (PSLs, professional support lawyers - most big law firms have them as well to perform much the same function) that summarise current case law so that lawyers don’t have to read through all the judgements themselves.

If AI tooling starts to seriously chip away at those foundations then it puts a large chunk of their business at risk.

whitej125  6 hours ago

TR will not disappear. But their value to the market was "data + interface to said data" and that value prop is quickly eroding to "just the data".

You can be a huge, profitable data-only company... but it's likely going to be smaller than a data+interface company. And so, shareholder value will follow accordingly.

  • palmotea  6 hours ago

    Seems like they should hold tight to that data (and not license it for short-term profit), so customers have to use their interface to get at it.

yodon  7 hours ago

If customers start asking Claude first, before they ask Thomson Reuters, that's a big risk for the later company.

  • gip  7 hours ago

    Got it, thank you for the insight.

    The assumption is that Claude has access to a stream of fresh, currated data. Building that would be a different focus for Anthropic. Plus Thomson Reuters could build an integration. Not totally convinced that is a major threat yet.