Thomson Reuters has acquired a UK-based AI start-up that was founded by an Allen & Overy Shearman trainee two years ago.
The target – Safe Sign Technologies – focuses on legal-specific use cases for large language models.
This deal is part of an $8bn budget Thomson Reuters announced it had to spend on AI-focused deals earlier this year, according to CEO Steve Hasker, and is the legal content company’s next step into AI.
Thomson Reuters already offers a genAI assistant known as CoCounsel AI Assistant, which it hopes to supercharge with this acquisition.
Safe Sign was set up by members from Cambridge, DeepMind, Harvard and MIT. It was founded in February 2022 by Alexander Kardos-Nyheim, a law graduate from Cambridge and trainee at A&O Shearman. It is understood that Kardos-Nyheim spent just over two years at the firm, leaving this week.
Jonathan Schwartz is a co-founder of Safe Sign, with a background in robotics and computer science.
The acquisition is part of a wider race that sees technology as instrumental in helping them keep ahead of what providing knowledge and information to lawyers will look like.
It comes as legal information providers start to rethink their strategies as genAI looks more and more capable of replacing simple tools that have traditionally found information and legal guidance for lawyers, and at reduced costs.
Commenting on the acquisition, Joel Hron, chief technology officer at Thomson Reuters says: “The academic and industry sectors of the UK have been leaders in the AI field for years, and this investment in Safe Sign Technologies as a big vote of confidence in that continued leadership for years to come.
“We have ambitious plans for investing in Safe Sign Technologies in the UK and growing our talent from UK’s data science community.”
