Thomson Reuters Q2 2026 Earnings Call Transcript

Quartr
Provided by Quartr
August 5, 2026

Key Takeaways

  • Positive Sentiment: Revenue outlook raised: Thomson Reuters reported 8% total organic revenue growth in Q2, with Big Three growth accelerating to 10%, and raised its full-year total and organic revenue outlook to approximately 8%. Big Three guidance was increased to 9.5%–10%.
  • Positive Sentiment: AI momentum continued: CoCounsel surpassed one million users, with rising usage and strong early feedback on its next-generation legal product. The company plans to use its proprietary Thomson large language model to improve speed, scalability, and costs, while exploring sovereign-AI and standalone commercialization opportunities.
  • Positive Sentiment: Portfolio optimization and capital returns: Thomson Reuters agreed to sell a 51% stake in Global Print to KKR for approximately $500 million, which management expects to be 60–70 basis points accretive to organic growth and roughly margin-neutral after closing. Share repurchases and other capital-return actions have reduced the share count by approximately 3%.
  • Negative Sentiment: Tax, Audit & Accounting execution was weaker than expected: Transactional growth fell short because of timing and go-to-market challenges, prompting leadership and talent changes. Management expects improvement in the second half, aided by new AI offerings and revenue-recognition normalization.
  • Neutral Sentiment: Near-term margin pressure remains: Q3 adjusted EBITDA margin is expected to be approximately 36%, affected by $19 million of severance, continued innovation and automation investment, marketing spending, and M&A dilution. Management maintained its full-year margin outlook of approximately 40%, relying on fourth-quarter savings and operating leverage.
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Earnings Conference Call
Thomson Reuters Q2 2026
00:00 / 00:00

There are 16 speakers on the call.

Operator

Good day everyone, welcome to the Thomson Reuters second quarter earnings call. Today's conference is being recorded. At this time, I'd like to turn the conference over to Mr. Gary Bisbee, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Speaker 1

Thanks, Jennifer. Good morning, thanks everybody for joining us today for our second quarter 2026 earnings call. I'm joined by our CEO, Steve Hasker, and our CFO, Gary Bischoping. Steve and Gary will discuss our results, then we'll take your questions following the prepared remarks. To enable us to get to as many questions as possible, we would appreciate if you'd limit yourself to one question and one follow-up each when we open the phone line. Throughout today's presentation, when we compare performance period on period, we discuss revenue growth before currency as well as on an organic basis. We believe this provides the best basis to measure the underlying performance of the business. Today's presentation contains forward-looking statements and non-IFRS and other supplementary financial measures, which are discussed on this special note slide.

Speaker 1

Actual results may differ materially due to a number of risks and uncertainties discussed in reports and filings that we provide to regulatory agencies. You may access these documents on our website or by contacting our investor relations department. Let me now turn it over to Steve Hasker.

Speaker 2

Thank you, Gary, thanks to all of you for joining us today. Our strong start to 2026 continued in the second quarter, with revenue growth ahead of our prior expectations and margins in line. Total company organic revenues rose 8%, with the Big Three accelerating to 10% organic growth, up from 9% in recent quarters. The acceleration was driven by legal professionals and corporates, which both also accelerated to 10%, up from 9% last quarter. We are raising our full-year 2026 outlook for total and organic revenue growth to approximately 8%, or the high end of the prior 7.5%-8% range. We're also raising our Big Three total and organic revenue outlooks to a range of 9.5%-10%, up from the prior approximately 9.5%. We continue to forecast margins rising year-over-year to approximately 40%.

Speaker 2

On July 14th, we were pleased to announce the signing of a definitive agreement with KKR to form a joint venture to operate the Global Print business, where we will sell a 51% stake for approximately $500 million. We're excited about this transaction, which will sharpen our focus on content-powered AI solutions serving fiduciaries while setting up an independent business to serve our customers' print needs. The transaction provides attractive proceeds to TR and will be modestly accretive to organic revenue growth. Gary will provide additional details in a few minutes. We continue to invest heavily and remain encouraged by the growing success of our innovation engines. Commercial momentum across our AI-enabled offerings continues to build, and our pipeline of features and offerings in development continues to grow.

Speaker 2

In a moment, I'll provide an update on Thomson, our proprietary large language model, which we see as an increasingly important tool to deliver accurate and cost-effective AI solutions. In addition, I'll highlight the successful completion of the next-generation CoCounsel Legal beta, the introduction of AI-driven capabilities into ONESOURCE, and our excitement about a next-generation version of CoCounsel for Tax & Audit currently in development. To support our product investments, last month, we launched "The CoCo", our largest brand campaign in more than a decade, to accelerate awareness and demand for CoCounsel. The campaign reinforces our differentiated position in professional AI by highlighting what our customers value most: trusted, fiduciary-grade AI grounded in authoritative content, domain expertise, and the accountability required in professional workflows. Our capital capacity and liquidity remain a key asset that we are focused on deploying to create shareholder value.

Speaker 2

We made solid progress on this during the quarter. In May, we executed a $605 million return of capital, and on July 21st, we completed the $600 million share repurchase program announced in February. Together, these transactions have reduced our share count by approximately 3%. We remain committed to a balanced capital allocation approach, and we continue to assess a number of inorganic opportunities. With approximately $9 billion of estimated capital capacity through 2028, we are positioned to be both aggressive and opportunistic. Turning to the second quarter results by segment. The Big Three segments accelerated to 10% organic revenue growth, up from 9% in recent quarters. Legal organic revenue accelerated to 10%, driven by continued strong law firms' momentum and improved government growth. Legal, excluding government, continued to grow at the 11% pace we saw in Q1, driven by momentum from Westlaw and CoCounsel Legal.

Speaker 2

Corporates' organic revenue accelerated sequentially to 10%, driven by offerings in our legal, tax, and risk portfolios and the segment's international businesses. Pagero was particularly strong and continues to drive market share gains for Thomson Reuters in the transactional compliance space. A recent significant Pagero win with Google is one example. Tax, Audit & Accounting organic revenues grew 8%, driven by CoCounsel for Tax & Audit, our Latin American business, and SafeSend. Reuters' organic revenues rose 4%, driven by growth in the agency business and our contract with LSEG. Lastly, Global Print organic revenues declined 3% year-on-year, in line with our expectations. In summary, we're pleased with the building revenue momentum we've delivered in the first half of 2026. I'll now discuss our continued portfolio evolution and provide several product innovation updates. The Global Print transaction I mentioned earlier continues the positive evolution of our portfolio.

Speaker 2

As you know, we have invested heavily in innovation in recent years, both organic and through strategic M&A. We've also pursued targeted divestitures, including Elite, FindLaw, and now a majority stake in Global Print. These efforts leave us with a stronger, more focused, and more strategically aligned portfolio with improved growth prospects versus the TR of just a few years ago. Adjusting our last 12 months' performance for the Global Print transaction, the Big Three segments would contribute 87% of our revenue, up from 81% in 2023. Our Big Three revenue growth has accelerated from 7% in 2023 to 9% on a last 12 months basis, and we remain focused on building upon the 10% growth this quarter. Total TR improved from 6% in 2023 to 8% on a last 12 months basis.

Speaker 2

The quality of our revenue mix has also improved, with recurring revenue rising to 86% of total on an as-adjusted basis, up six percentage points from 2023. When including repeat transactional revenue, we have good visibility into over 90% of our annual revenue. Looking forward, our focus remains on driving an accelerating pace of innovation as we deliver authoritative content-powered AI solutions that provide producer-grade outcomes for our professional customers and markets. Let me close with a few thoughts on our innovation roadmap. If this chart looks familiar, it is an updated version of one we shared a year ago. Like last year, we are delivering a significant portfolio of innovation in 2026, including new offerings, additional capabilities, and geographic expansion. Let me share a few highlights.

Speaker 2

In June, due to the strength of customer feedback, we completed the beta for the new generation version of CoCounsel Legal ahead of schedule and began providing early access to all existing CoCounsel Legal customers. Customer usage is ramping, and we remain on track for the broader launch by the end of this month. Outside of Legal, we have added several AI features into our ONESOURCE portfolio, including touchless compliance, which automates the creation of U.S. sales and use tax returns, and AI research for global trade, which leverages our authoritative content to simplify trade research. Pagero has continued its geographic coverage expansion with the addition of five more countries, including France, Poland, and Belgium, building on its market leadership position. We are working on an agentic next-generation version of CoCounsel for Tax & Audit, expected this fall. Let me now provide an exciting update on Thomson.

Speaker 2

As a reminder, in mid-2024, we made a modest but highly strategic acquisition of SafeSign Technologies, a startup that was developing legal-specific large language models. Over the last two years, highly talented teams from SafeSign and TR Labs have continued the development of these models, leveraging TR content and expertise along the way. They recently completed development of the first production-ready version of the model, which we call Thomson. Joel Hron, our Chief Technology Officer, recently issued a blog post discussing the results of a detailed benchmarking study of Thomson. Despite relatively modest investment of approximately $40 million and training Thomson on less than 10% of our legal content to date, the benchmarking study indicates that Thomson delivers results on par with the latest versions of the leading frontier models on a broad range of general domain tasks.

Speaker 2

As expected, Thomson performs strongly for legal tasks, with further improvement potential as we add more TR legal content. This best-in-class performance is delivered at a meaningfully lower cost and in many cases, at significantly reduced latency versus third-party models. One might ask how we can deliver results on par with frontier models at a fraction of the cost. The answer lies with our content and our expertise. When building on leading open-source models, the quality and sophistication of training data matters far more than the volume of data used. Our deep repositories of expert-curated or authoritative content across Westlaw, Practical Law, and Reuters are a key advantage, as are our attorney editors and practice experts. The benchmarking results embolden our strategy for Thomson and provide growing confidence in its potential.

Speaker 2

We are on track to power tabular analysis, a bulk document review tool in CoCounsel Legal with Thomson later this month. We see an opportunity to port over a broader range of capabilities in the future to leverage Thomson's cost and speed advantages. In addition, initial conversations with our largest and most sophisticated customers indicate potential for additional commercialization opportunities. The success to date with Thomson demonstrates the value of our content, expertise, and talent in this AI environment. It also provides important optionality for TR as we work to deliver market-leading and cost-effective AI solutions for our professional markets. I'll now turn it over to Gary for a review of our financial results.

Speaker 3

Thanks, Steve. As a reminder, throughout my remarks, I will talk to revenue growth before currency and on an organic basis. Second quarter organic revenues grew 8%. Organic recurring and transactional revenue grew 9% and 11% respectively, while print revenues declined 3%. Adjusted EBITDA increased 10% to $745 million, with a margin of 38.1%. Moving to the Big Three, organic revenue growth accelerated to 10% in the second quarter, improving from the 9% pace in recent quarters. Legal professionals organic revenue accelerated to 10%, as underlying law firm momentum continued and government growth improved sequentially. Key drivers from a product perspective remain Westlaw and CoCounsel Legal. Legal professionals excluding government again grew 11%, matching the first quarter growth rate and up 9% in the second half of 2025. The strength was broad-based with our large, mid, small law, and international subsegments all at or near record growth rates.

Speaker 3

Government growth improved to 5% year over year from 1% in Q1. Though I anticipate a softer growth rate in Q3 as certain transactional revenue in the quarter is not expected to recur at the same level. Our corporate segment accelerated to 10% organically, up from 9% in recent quarters. Recurring revenue grew 9%, and transactions revenue grew by an impressive 24%. Pagero, Indirect Tax, CLEAR, CoCounsel Legal, and our international businesses were key contributors. Tax, audit, and accounting organic revenue increased 8%. Recurring and transactional revenues grew 9% and 6%, respectively. Our Latin American business CoCounsel for Tax and Audit, SafeSend, and the Cloud Audit Suite of offerings were key drivers. The tax, audit, and accounting second quarter transactional growth rate fell short of our expectations, due in part to timing, but also due to go-to-market execution challenges.

Speaker 3

We have made several talent additions and leadership changes and expect to get back on track in the second half. In addition, the second quarter growth rate was again impacted by two product updates that shifted revenue recognition toward the second half of the year. This was an approximate 1% drag, but is expected to largely normalize in the second half. We continue to expect TAA revenue growth to accelerate in second half, driven by rising revenue contribution from our newer AI-driven offerings in the U.S., a key product line extension at Domínio in Brazil, and the benefit from the revenue recognition timing change I just mentioned. Moving to Reuters, our organic revenue rose 4% for the quarter, driven primarily by growth from the news agreement with the data and analytics business segment of LSEG and our agency business. Finally, Global Print revenues decreased 3% on an organic basis.

Speaker 3

On a consolidated basis, second quarter organic revenues increased 8%, slightly ahead of our expectation from a quarter ago. At the end of Q2, the percent of our annualized contract value or ACV from products that are GenAI-enabled was 32%, up from 30% last quarter. Turning to our profitability, adjusted EBITDA for the Big Three segments was $691 million, up 12% from prior year period, or 10% constant currency, with a margin of 42.7%. Reuters adjusted EBITDA was $48 million, with a margin of 20.8%. Global Print's adjusted EBITDA was $42 million with a margin of 37.7%. In aggregate, total company adjusted EBITDA was $745 million, a 10% increase versus Q2 of 2025, reflecting a 30-basis point year-over-year margin increase to 38.1%. Our Q2 results included $8 million of severance expense related to our initiatives to reimagine how.

Speaker 3

Turning to earnings per share, adjusted EPS was $0.99, up 14% from $0.87 in the prior year period. Currency added $0.01 to adjusted EPS in the quarter. Let me now turn to our free cash flow. For the second quarter, our free cash flow was $727 million, up 29% from $566 million in the prior year period. EBITDA growth and working capital changes were the primary drivers of the year-over-year increase. I'll also provide a quick update on several capital allocation items. We completed our $605 million return of capital transaction on May 4th and repurchased $100 million of our shares in the quarter. In July, we repurchased an additional $238 million, completing the $600 million NCIB announced in February. In aggregate, these transactions have reduced our share count by approximately 3%. We also paid down $500 million of maturing notes in the quarter.

Speaker 3

Now let me add some incremental color on the Global Print transactions Steve mentioned. In mid-July, we reached agreement to sell a 51% stake in our Global Print business to KKR for cash proceeds of approximately $500 million. As Steve indicated, we see this as a positive development as it will leave a stronger and more focused portfolio with improved growth and a higher quality revenue mix. We anticipate the transaction closing in the fourth quarter, subject to the satisfaction of regulatory approvals and customary closing conditions. After the close, Global Print will be deconsolidated from our financial statements with our 49% stake treated as an equity method investment. Beginning with our Q3 results, we intend to report Global Print as discontinued operations in our financial statements.

Speaker 3

To help with your modeling, we plan to issue a schedule with restated historical results based on this discontinued operations treatment ahead of our Q3 report. As part of the transaction, Thomson Reuters will maintain intellectual property rights and full editorial control over its content portfolio. The joint venture will hold an exclusive license to publish and distribute the content in print on ProView, on print and on ProView, Global Print's e-book platform. In return, the JV will pay a royalty to Thomson Reuters equivalent to 20% of its professional revenue, which is 85%-90% of the total Global Print revenue. The royalty will be reported within a new revenue line in our segment reporting. The royalty plus a multi-year transition services agreement will largely offset stranded costs from the separation.

Speaker 3

As a result, we see the Global Print transaction being 60-70 basis points accretive to our organic growth, revenue growth and approximately neutral to our margins following the transaction close. I'll conclude with a few thoughts on our outlook. Let me start by noting that our guidance is based on the current reporting format, including the Global Print segment. Following the close of the transaction, we will update our outlook to incorporate the financial impact. As Steve outlined, we are raising our full-year outlook for both total and organic revenue growth to the high end of the prior 7.5%-8% ranges, incorporating the stronger first-half performance. We are also raising the total and organic revenue growth outlooks for the Big Three to a range of 9.5%-10% from the prior approximately 9.5%. Our other outlook metrics remain unchanged.

Speaker 3

We continue to see 2026 adjusted EBITDA margins of approximately 40%, and we expect free cash flow of approximately $2.1 billion. Turning to the third quarter, we expect organic revenue growth of approximately 8% and our adjusted EBITDA margin to be approximately 36%. Included in this outlook is an expectation for $19 million of severance expense related to our initiatives to reimagine how we work. We are confident in the full-year margin outlook and see strong year-over-year margin expansion in the fourth quarter, driven by the impact of severance actions in recent quarters, growing automation savings, moderating M&A dilution, and underlying leverage on our strong revenue growth. Savings from severance actions and automation efforts are expected to be approximately $40 million in the fourth quarter. I'll turn it to Gary Bisbee for the Q&A.

Speaker 1

Thank you. Jennifer, we're ready to begin the Q&A session.

Operator

Thank you. If you'd like to ask a question, please signal by pressing *1 on your telephone keypad. If you are using a speakerphone, please make sure your mute function is turned off to allow your signal through to our equipment. Again, press *1 to ask a question. We'll pause for just a moment to allow everyone an opportunity to signal for questions. We'll take our first question from Manav Patnaik with Barclays.

Speaker 4

Thank you. Good morning. I was just wondering if you could give us a sense of how CoCounsel was doing in terms of its growth rate and size. Just curious if the build-out of Thomson, is that going to be beneficial to CoCounsel? Like how interconnected are those two?

Speaker 3

Yeah. Hi, Manav. Thanks for the question. I'll start. Gary will likely add. A quarter or so ago, we reported that CoCounsel had breached the million-user mark. We see healthy growth beyond that. I think equally importantly, though, we see exciting growth in terms of its usage. It's one thing to get it in the hands of people. I think it's another to see daily usage tick up in really healthy ways, and that's across the legal and the tax and audit versions of CoCounsel. That's my first comment. The second comment is we put a completely rebuilt version, fully agentic version of CoCounsel legal into the market in beta form, and we're ramping that up as we go through here. We'll be talking a lot about it at the ILTACON conference in a couple of weeks.

Speaker 2

The feedback on that has been extremely strong. I haven't seen feedback as strong in my career for a new product. Specifically the accuracy and the breadth of agentic capabilities. Maybe most significantly, the transparency. It is the opposite of a black box. For the fiduciary professions that we serve, particularly the legal profession, the idea that a young, mid-tenure senior lawyer can see the 12 or 20 or 30 steps that the agent's going through and see all the citations and references, and in a sense, access a product that is verifiable, auditable, and they're able to validate each and every step, I think that's a step forward for the profession, and that's one of the things that the customers are excited about. That's the first part of your question.

Speaker 2

The second part of the question, we're going to port, as I mentioned, tabular analysis, which is an important bulk document analysis feature, across onto the Thomson model later this month. Over time, I would see us porting more and more capabilities as we develop the Thomson model and its capabilities are enhanced. That will give us, we think, the benefit of reduced latency, so greater speed, more scalability, and a cost advantage. All of those things we think will be compelling in the marketplace.

Speaker 3

Yeah, the only thing I would add is I think, relative to the CoCounsel, the pipeline is building nicely here coming out of beta and heading into what we've seen in June and July. The team's out there selling all the benefits through, and we're seeing also good conversion early on in that pipeline. That's the only thing I would add.

Speaker 4

Got it. Thank you. Maybe just ask a slightly different way. The acceleration in the legal organic growth has been impressive the last two quarters. Is there any way to disaggregate that growth, either by the market that you described, like the first three, the content and research, and then the workflows? Or any way to disaggregate to help us appreciate the growth rates there?

Speaker 2

It's a great question, Manav. The answer today is no, we don't have that ready for you. I think one of the reasons we don't is that these things are becoming increasingly intertwined. The most exciting thing for us about this agentic AI environment, for example, is it expands the role we play in a meaningful way. You take a product like Westlaw Advantage and CoCounsel. It gets us into the drafting business. It gets us into the brief building business. It gets us into sort of advanced litigation analytics. We start to do more and more advanced lawyering tasks for the professionals that we serve, using our content, using our expertise, using the access to the best AI tools.

Speaker 2

That sort of clear distinction between research and workflow software is meaningfully and I think purposefully blurred, and that's sort of what's driving the uptick in growth that you cite.

Speaker 4

Thank you.

Operator

We'll go next to Vince Valentini with TD Cowen.

Speaker 5

Hey, thanks very much. Can I focus on the margins for a second? If you do 36% in the third quarter, obviously that's down from 37.7% last year. $19 million in severance would be just about 100 basis points of the impact, but there's still seemingly a year-over-year decline even after the severance. Is there anything else one-timing in nature, timing-ish in nature that you can point to? You mentioned earlier the largest ever brand campaign you've done for the next generation of CoCounsel, so maybe there's some somewhat non-recurring costs there. Secondly, just keying off of that, if your full year guidance hasn't changed, you can still be up around 100 basis points full year. Unless my math is wrong, you need to do just about 45% EBITDA margin in the fourth quarter.

Speaker 5

I just want to make sure that's what you're telling us is possible, given the automation savings from reimagining work plus other benefits of leverage from the good revenue growth you're doing. If you can clarify those margin things, that'd be very helpful. Thanks.

Speaker 3

Yeah, you got it, Vincent. Thanks for the question. I'll address your third-quarter question first and then go to the full year. In the third quarter, it's really a continuation of factors we've described in the first half. The severance that we mentioned here in the third quarter. We are continuing to make investments in addition to the increase in the marketing spend Steve mentioned to drive automation and innovation. We also have some modest dilution from an M&A perspective. It's the amalgamation of all those things that, like you rightly pointed out, is driving that guide in the third quarter. The thing that I would then pivot to in terms of the full year, margins are progressing largely as we have planned. This has kind of been how we thought about the year as we've gone through it.

Speaker 3

We remain confident delivering that full-year outlook. Year to date, we've had a number of targeted investments as we focus on, like I said, innovation and automation. We have absorbed a lot of that acquisition dilution, and there's been meaningful severance. Like I said, in the third quarter, we expect $19 million of severance. In the fourth quarter, to your question, maybe not quite as high as you just referenced, but in the low 40s EBITDA margin is what we have line of sight to. We expect to deliver $40 million of savings from our efforts to drive automation or reimagine how we work. We expect to have significantly lower year-on-year severance than last year. We had $19 million of severance in Q4 of 2025.

Speaker 3

You kind of put that all together, Vince, what that says is that combining the underlying operating leverage from our healthy revenue growth and the factors I pointed out, that provides confidence we feel, and we do have line of sight to the strong year-over-year margin expansion applied for the fourth quarter in our full-year outlook.

Speaker 2

Thank you.

Speaker 3

Thanks, Vince.

Operator

We'll go next to Drew McReynolds with RBC.

Speaker 6

Yeah, thanks very much. Good morning. First question on the increase in Big Three organic revenue growth for 2026. Obviously, great to see. Wondering if you could unpack the key driver, key drivers underneath. You're clearly seeing strong transaction revenues on a year-over-year basis, and just wondering, is there a segment that's driving it? Is it transaction revenue? Then Steve, your prepared remarks, you talked about repeat transaction revenue. Can you just explain that for us? Then second question, just to follow up on the Thomson LLM, with it trained on less than 10% of your content, is its capability presumably going to grow with the function of training it on more of the content? And what's the gating factor for just to date training it on less than 10%? Thank you.

Speaker 3

Thanks. I'll handle the growth drivers here quick. The corporate segment had a standout transactional revenue growth quarter. That was ahead of our expectations. They had a bit of an easy compare embedded in that. Pagero and the global expansion really has accelerated that business. Global Trade, Indirect Tax, we're seeing strong traction there. We continue to add agentic capabilities to those platforms, which is driving kind of a new conversation for the field to have, therefore delivering strong growth. Our legal professional business, the size and scope of that, for it to grow and accelerate its growth rate, that's a lot of dollars of growth as well, in addition to growing and accelerating kind of from seven, eight, nine to 10, 11.

Speaker 3

I just want to make sure we all understand that we're driving that kind of growth at scale across that in its Westlaw. It continues to be CoCounsel as we continue to drive that forward. Those are kind of some of the growth drivers that we saw delivering that growth rate here in the second quarter. Steve, did you want to talk about the other part of the question?

Speaker 2

Just the two parts. The repeat transactional revenue, Drew, that was really. This is the reference to the improving quality of our book of business as we divest 51% of Print. You know, we're very focused on the long-term customer relationships and driving our NPS up and translating that into multi-year agreements. That forward visibility, we think is important, in terms of the way we manage the business and the way in which investors view us. That was really just a reference to that shift. In terms of the Thomson model, there's no particular constraint that led us to use less than 10% of the legal content other than the architecture of the model wanted to create something that is rock solid in terms of its foundation. As I said, ended up creating something which has produced extraordinarily strong general domain results.

Speaker 2

I think that was sort of the order of business in terms of creating the model. There's no particular constraint in there that we're trying to navigate. What we will now do is continue to invest in that and start to open the spigot in terms of that legal content. We expect the legal specific results to improve as we apply more and more content and expertise to it. We'll keep you apprised as to sort of what that looks like as the quarters roll through here. Let me make a couple of comments about why we're calling out the Thomson model and why we think there's reason for real sort of optimism, and we're encouraged by what the team has been able to achieve. The first thing, Drew, is I think it speaks to innovation at Thomson Reuters.

Speaker 2

If you look at the last couple of years, we've been able to put a fully agentic deep research version of Westlaw into the marketplace, which has been, by far and away, the leading legal research product in this deep research environment. We've reinvented CoCounsel Legal, as I said in response to Manav's questions, we're very encouraged by the early feedback there. CoCounsel Audit and Taxes is performing well. We've started to add agentic capabilities to our ONESOURCE and to our transaction compliance portfolio. For us to create a large language model that performs at the level it does in its first version, I think speaks to us owning our future. I think it gives us a level of sort of leverage with suppliers that's healthy.

Speaker 2

Importantly, as we've taken this out in the very early going to customers, our most sophisticated customers are increasingly seeking advanced AI models operating within their own environments, where they retain control over their IP and their data. This is incredibly important when we serve, as we do, fiduciaries, right? Their preference for what I would call sovereign AI is strongest where they have the concerns over compliance and those concerns are particularly acute, the sort of consequences of IP bleeding out from their environment are particularly acute. I think there's an opportunity here for us to meet and exceed that demand for sovereign AI within the legal community, within the tax accounting and audit communities using Thomson. Lastly, I've referred to this in response to Manav's question, I'll just reiterate it.

Speaker 2

It does provide us some really compelling optionality as it pertains to CoCounsel. We'll start with tabular analysis. We'll run that in August, based on our evaluation of that, we'll, I think, port more capabilities across within the CoCounsel suite to Thomson. That'll give us reduced latency, a significant cost advantage, and this ability to provide sovereign AI solutions that will meet the needs of our most sophisticated customers. Look, what I've said to the teams here is I think they've done something amazing, but we're just getting started.

Speaker 3

Steve, the only thing I would add to that, just to your reoccurring transactional revenue, I would call it reoccurring, if you will. In some of our tax products, while we call it transactional, it's a repeat kind of year in and year out, and kind of what goes up and down is a little bit of the volume elements of that. That's what I would call reoccurring. Again, we have good visibility to that here as we get closer to when that demand shows up.

Speaker 6

Okay. Thank you both.

Speaker 2

Sure. Thanks, Trey.

Operator

We'll go next to Andrew Steinerman with J.P. Morgan.

Speaker 7

Hi there. This is Rohan Kalra on for Andrew Steinerman. Thanks for the question. I just wanted to touch maybe on LLM costs, maybe how you guys are thinking about this going into the back half, and also maybe seeing if there's any interest in shifting to a consumption or subscription and overage model for any of the AI offerings. Thank you.

Speaker 2

Thanks, Rohan. Great question. A couple of thoughts, and I'm sure Gary will build here. The first thing is, we built our agentic solutions to be optimally efficient, and kudos to Kirsty and Joel and everybody involved here, because we do see more efficient usage of tokens than some of the other sort of competitors and in-market products. That's one thing. The second thing is, as I just referred to, the Thomson model gives us a lot of optionality here, and if we can reach anywhere near capacity of our GPUs, our compute around that model, we're going to have a meaningful cost advantage, which means we can keep our pricing and our sort of propositions very simple, clean and clear to our customers.

Speaker 2

Having said that, I think like many others, we are considering a consumption-based component to pricing some of our options in the future. Certainly customers are open to that. We're making a series of infrastructure investments to support this as soon as the new year. Gary, what would you add?

Speaker 3

I think the other point I would make here is that our AI solutions are typically sold as the premium tier that includes the agentic capabilities. The pricing for that key AI offering, like in Westlaw Advantage, is comfortably covering the growth in the LLM costs and the customer usage here we're seeing in 2026. That pricing structure that we have today really also is aimed at supporting the cost of growing customer usage over time. I feel good about the current mechanisms, like Steve said, that are simple for customers to understand, but also providing the right economic outcomes as we move forward.

Speaker 7

Got it. Thank you.

Operator

We'll go next to Aravinda Galappatthige with Canaccord Genuity.

Speaker 8

No line.

Speaker 9

Good morning. Thanks for taking my question. Start with a quick follow-up on CoCounsel. Steve, I think you've said in the past that you've observed that, with many of your law firm clients, that the level of experimentation and trying out new products remains high. I know that you speak to some very good feedback on CoCounsel, including the sort of the recent beta version. Vis-a-vis the competitors, the startups, any kind of head-to-head feedback that you can share? I'm not sure how easy that is to extract, but I was keen to maybe hear your thoughts on that. In terms of sort of my main question, with the buyback programs completed, maybe just how you're thinking of capital allocation. I know the stock's recovered a bit off the bottom, but obviously I think in the minds of many remains attractively priced.

Speaker 9

I wanted to hear your thoughts on that as well. Thank you.

Speaker 2

Thanks, Aravinda. I'll defer the buyback question to Gary, but let me address the CoCounsel legal question. I think as you've captured the environment correctly up until now, which is law firms, small, medium, large, and to some extent general counsels offices have been experimenting with multiple tools and have signed up for trials or one-year agreements. It remains a pretty fluid market. It was with that as the backdrop that we completely rebuilt CoCounsel. We've done that under the leadership of Emily Colbert and Rawia Ashraf, who I think have done a wonderful job with the head engineer, Viola, in redoing it. It's given us enough confidence to launch the CoCo campaign and spend some real money in terms of getting the merits of that product into the hearts and minds of our customers.

Speaker 2

It is the first time that we have used the depth and breadth of our content and expertise, Westlaw, Practical Law, 2,600, 2,700 attorney editors and practice experts to train that product. It's the first fully agentic version. The early feedback we're getting as customers compare it to other offerings in the marketplace is that it is highly differentiated because of its access, its native access to our content and our expertise. It's barely going in terms of launch.

Speaker 2

It's only literally a number of weeks that it's been in the marketplace, the customers that have ported across from the prior version of CoCounsel and the new customers to this offering are showing very strong usage growth, which for me is the most important thing that I look for, in terms of are people coming back all day long and using the product and getting value from it? That looks really encouraging. How it plays out from a competitive landscape, I think remains to be seen, we're very optimistic about this new offering. We're going to keep investing behind it with bulk document review capabilities, with collaboration tools, increasingly linking it to our other propositions. Bear in mind, one last comment. This is white space for us.

Speaker 2

This whole sort of legal AI assistant is a white space growth opportunity for us, we're confident we'll capture more than our fair share as we go through the next 12, 24, 36 months. It is new spend and a new growth opportunity over and above the existing components of our legal business. Gary, what else would you add on CoCounsel and Buybacks?

Speaker 3

Yeah. On CoCounsel, I would just emphasize Steve's point around usage with just a click down. We're seeing the number of interactions go up, but also the duration and persistence of those interactions sustain. They're in it more often, and they're using it for longer and kind of getting to end of job, if you will. It's demonstrating a real impact, I think, by those usage patterns. Encouraging for sure. In terms of your question around capital allocation, I'll just go up periscope in a minute and then directly answer your question. I definitely support a balanced capital allocation approach that TR has followed in recent years. Our objective, as Steve outlined, is to drive innovation, really to beat our competitors, delight our customers, while maintaining a key focus on shareholder value creation.

Speaker 3

Against that objective, our first priority for capital allocation remains investing in our business, in innovation, both internally and through strategic M&A. We remain committed to growing the dividend over time, and we'll consider capital returns through share purchases and other return of capital to shareholders. That's the broad philosophy in that directly related to the rest of the year, but we don't have an approved program in place right now. We just completed that program. We'll continue to evaluate that relative to that prior kind of stated set of priorities and determine if it would be prudent to get back in for a share purchase or not, but no plans at the moment.

Speaker 2

Thank you.

Operator

We'll go next to Tim Casey of BMO.

Speaker 8

Thanks, and morning. Steve, could you outline how we should think about the Thomson LLM model in terms of discrete product offerings? Is this going to be a product that is marketed in itself, or will it power and complement existing platforms? There has been some stories of major law firms deciding to go it alone and protect their IP and content. Is the Thomson LLM something that could help them do that? I'm just trying to, if you could help us think about how we should place Thomson LLM in your product set.

Speaker 2

Thanks, Tim. We're working through that now. The first production version eval results came out 10 days ago, and we've been hard at work to look at what's the best way for us to take advantage of that which we've created and built. I think it provides at least two paths. One is, as you say, major law firms who want to create a sovereign AI environment and run a version of the model, commingle their own information within their own environment, and potentially run CoCounsel on the top of that. That is one path, and we're in conversation with a number of firms now around what that might look like and what the primary use cases will be and how we would implement that.

Speaker 2

The second that I've referred to a couple of times is to build upon tabular analysis running on Thomson and add more and more of the CoCounsel capabilities. As I said, I think that gives us a degree of ownership over our future and independence and autonomy, as well as speed and cost advantages. We'll be thoughtful about that because CoCounsel is working well, and so we don't want to be overly disruptive. It's pretty exciting as to the options that it puts in front of us.

Speaker 8

Notionally, when do you think you'll be in a position to monetize Thomson LLM on a discrete basis?

Speaker 2

We're certainly, as I said, exploring the opportunities now. I think we'll have more to tell you in the next couple of earnings calls about where it's going. I'm hopeful we've got an announcement or two to make between now and then. We'll be thoughtful, and we'll be trying to optimize its value for the long term versus any particular quarter.

Speaker 8

Thank you.

Operator

We'll go next to Kevin McVeigh of UBS.

Speaker 10

Great. Thanks so much, congratulations. Hey, I guess on the print business, can you just remind us what the after-tax proceeds are going to be from that? If you were to really size the buyback, like size it, how big can you go?

Speaker 3

Thanks for the question. Right now, you'll hear more about the net proceeds as we continue through the overall updating from a regulatory requirement and what we'll file on that. For now, we're just going to leave it at gross proceeds of $500 million. As it relates to the size we could go to, it's an interesting question, but I would just go back to, again, the overall philosophy here, Kevin, is we've got tremendous growth options internally and externally to fund. We're excited about those. We'll be prudent as we deploy that capital and get the expected returns that we would want out of that. That's point 1. Point 2, the dividend's an important aspect of what we do, and we want to continue to sustain and grow that.

Speaker 3

In this environment, we just need to make sure that we have the capacity to take advantage of those growth options that I talked about. How big could you go? Everybody can do the math. I'll leave that up to you. That capital allocation approach is important that we understand and identify and clear the market on those organic and inorganic options, and then consider other returns of capital.

Speaker 10

Great. Steve, it sounded like the commentary on the organic growth, it didn't sound like a ceiling to me in terms of that 10%. Is there any way to think about where you think that can go and what the drivers are that? Maybe just a range as whether it's CoCounsel legal or Thomson start to scale. How does that contribute to the growth?

Speaker 2

Okay. I'll sort of let you in on the way I think about this, and that is just incrementally driving it up. I don't think there's a ceiling. The reason I don't think there's a ceiling is that we're serving fiduciary professions that are retooling. That are at the start of retooling their businesses to take advantage of automation and AI. We're one of the players that have the assembly of assets to take advantage of that and to provide those tools. Our focus is to up our rate of innovation. As I said in answer to an earlier question, we're happy with the last 12, 24 months and the success rate that we're delivering and the results on our growth to date. We're just hell-bent on increasing that rate of innovation and translating that into higher organic growth.

Speaker 2

Bit by bit, year by year, we just want to drive it up and make sure that it flows through in terms of healthy leverage, and we're able to reinvest some of that back in the opportunities that Gary just described that are ahead of us. I won't quantify it because I think it would be inappropriate to do so, but that's really where the focus is, and I think everything we see from our customers suggests that opportunity is real, and it will play out over the next few years.

Speaker 10

Super. Thank you for the comments.

Operator

We'll go next to Stephanie Price with CIBC.

Speaker 11

Hi, good morning. I wanted to follow up on Gary's comments about AI pricing. With 32% of ACV now GenAI-enabled, I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the revenue uplift you're seeing from CoCounsel and the GenAI solutions, how you kind of structure the AI pricing here, and how you think about that evolving over time.

Speaker 3

Yeah, no, thanks for the question. It's a great point. I've seen several of these technology transitions over the years, and you can think about an analog run, a cloud transition to migration and uplifts from that. As I stated, I think I would start with the fact that the Agentic offering is a premium tier pricing mechanism for us. The acceleration in that pricing mechanism, we want to make sure that the contracts are appropriately capturing the accelerating pace of innovation and therefore benefits to our customers from getting that innovation path as we move forward. If you think about a multi-year contract, we'll enter and then see the progression in price that would be commensurate with the progression in innovation and benefits that you'll see in the customers and what they're realizing.

Speaker 3

The interesting, I think, development from a migration and uplift perspective is, like Steve mentioned, we're increasingly performing more and more complex kind of lawyer tasks with those solutions, and that solving those complex lawyer tasks is commensurate with a higher degree of value. Therefore, how do we continue to think about the appropriate value between exchange between customers and our offerings? That's a large part of what we're digging through and working our way through, I think, right conversations with customers regarding consumption. I'm not going to give you a specific kind of migration uplift that we're seeing today, but it is more than sufficient relative to the cost of consumption and the underlying cost base that we're seeing. We think that it's a good balance between growth and profitability over time.

Speaker 11

Thank you very much.

Speaker 2

Thanks, Stephanie.

Operator

We'll go next to George Tong with Goldman Sachs.

Speaker 12

Hi, thanks. Good morning. Legal organic revenue growth accelerated to 10% and legal ex government remained at 11%. You highlighted Westlaw and CoCounsel as key contributors. As AI adoption increases, are you seeing that spend come primarily from new budget creation or from customers reallocating existing legal technology spend? In other words, to what extent is AI expanding wallet share versus just shifting spend within the legal ecosystem?

Speaker 2

Yeah. Thanks, George. That's a great question. I think if you run a survey of law firms, small, medium, large, the vast majority are spending more on technology this year than they did last, and the vast majority plan to further expand that going forward. It reflects, I think, a couple of things. I think it reflects a sense of optimism about what automation and AI can do for their practice areas. It reflects, I think, a competitive need to do so, whether that's coming from pressure from their biggest customers or pressure from their most talented prospective recruits. Essentially, the transition that they're on is to spend less on real estate, potentially less on headcount per dollar of revenue, although that remains, I think, very much up for debate. Unequivocally, more on technology.

Speaker 2

Essentially, some of the announcements you've seen in recent months are some of the world's biggest legal partnerships saying, "We're going to take a portion of partner profits and invest them in our tech spend over a period of time." That's, I think, one manifestation of that new spend that we're seeing.

Speaker 12

Very helpful. Following up on that, you highlighted very strong CoCounsel usage growth, engagement, customer feedback. What metrics do you watch most closely to determine whether that engagement is translating into sustainable revenue growth and market share gains?

Speaker 3

Yeah, I think you can see it in our results relative to, again, the legal professional growth at 11%, accelerating from 9% in our recent history. That's a pretty good indicator that I think we're winning in the marketplace. I would say that the second thing is that ongoing pricing mechanism is something we continue to evaluate. Do we go to more of a consumption-based pricing approach? Some customers of ours certainly want to engage in that conversation. I think overarching, what you're going to see is the continued acceleration in the legal professional ex government growth rate. Again, a large part of that is coming from the agentic offerings, both Westlaw and CoCounsel.

Speaker 12

Thanks very much.

Speaker 2

Sure. Thanks, George.

Operator

We'll go next to Toni Kaplan of Morgan Stanley.

Speaker 13

Hi, good morning. This is Yehuda Silverman on for Toni. Just had a quick one on the tax and accounting challenges you mentioned in the quarter. Can you dive a little bit deeper into some of the execution challenges, if it was environmental, internal competition based, and what gives you confidence to move past this going forward?

Speaker 3

It's a good question. I appreciate the follow-up. If you go up periscope a little bit, we entered 2026, I think, focused on messaging our future product vision, for an expanded Ready to Review that integrates capabilities from a number of our offerings into a single tax workflow platform. That's absolutely the direction of travel. That combined with Ready to Advise to then take advantage of the Ready to Review outcomes and the agentic pieces that go with that. However, I'd say the messaging and the future vision, while it's been well-received, may have caused some confusion with our customers in our sales organizations over what products they should be buying today versus where are we headed with that vision. This kind of transitional period in what do we buy today, where are we going from a vision and perspective.

Speaker 3

While the vision is clear and coming into focus, and we're executing against that, impacted some sales momentum in products like SurePrep here in the past tax season. I would say, like I said, we've got clear vision as to where we're going. It's resonating. You'll hear more about that in coming events, but it may have caused a bit of confusion here in the short run.

Speaker 2

The thing I would add, Yahir, is just it's not competitive. We don't see any sort of change in the dynamics in that marketplace. I mean, if you step back, what we have is a privileged position in terms of providing tax calculation engines to a wide variety of tax professionals, whether they're the head of tax within a Fortune 500 company, the Big Four large strategic firms, all the way down to one and two-person firms on the high street. We've got an array of tax calculation engines that serve all of those marketplaces. Those engines are very accurate. They are constantly and almost instantly updated for the latest rules and regulations. They're cost-efficient to run, and they're deeply entrenched, with years of back data and so on and so forth.

Speaker 2

If you think about sort of applying AI to that environment, there's not a lot of room to improve those tax calculation engines. The extent to which there is, we're able to do that with minimum disruption. Where AI is helpful, to Gary's point, is in all the shoulder activities, whether it's the document ingestion, the e-filing, all the way through to the sort of follow-up and advisory recommendations. That's our belief set as we've built out Ready to Review and Ready to Advise the sort of integrated workflows. We think this is a place where we're building on those positions with the tax calculation engines. We can automate more and more of the shoulder activities to help alleviate a pretty acute talent shortage that exists across the entire industry, across the entire CPA space. That's our vision.

Speaker 2

We haven't executed from a go-to-market sales perspective as well as we'd like to. We've made some changes to the composition of the team, and we're optimistic that we'll be on track very, very quickly.

Speaker 13

Thank you.

Operator

We'll go next to Jason Haas with Wells Fargo.

Speaker 14

Hey, good morning, and thanks for taking my questions. I'm curious if you could comment on where you're finding some efficiencies, just given some of the severance expense that you're calling out. I'm curious, yeah, where those efficiencies are being found in the organization. Thank you.

Speaker 2

Yeah, I'll start, I'm sure Gary will add. As you know, Jason, we've taken the team that drove the change program. Under Kirsty's leadership, Andrew Pierce, the addition of Mike Goddard and Liz Bank, they're running the play here to make sure that every aspect of TR adopts Identic technology and is able to deliver higher growth, scale up without cutting headcount, potentially over time, making things more efficient. The places where we've seen progress, I think, are fairly well-documented. Joel Hron has, I think, made great strides within our software engineering space, adoption of the latest cutting-edge tools, I think importantly, improving the quality of output and of our code base. Secondly, the customer support areas have seen some really promising early signs.

Speaker 2

As we think about all of our functions, all the way through to our go-to-market, we see opportunity across that. We'll be pursuing that over the next 12-24 months with great rigor, and application from all of us.

Speaker 3

Yeah, I would just add to that the ongoing focus on finding, identifying, and executing against productivity is a muscle that TR has built over many years and will continue to stay in focus and will help us drive some of that investment back on the organic side as well. It's an organizational capability to drive productivity and something that's done systematically.

Speaker 14

Got it. That's very helpful. As a follow-up, I wanted to go back to the transactional revenue was really strong in both legal and corporates. I guess by its nature, we shouldn't assume that continues. Is that the right assumption to make? Can you talk about, was there any one-time revenue in there or any certain products that really stood out that won't repeat going forward? Just trying to think about how to model that going forward. Thank you.

Speaker 3

Yeah, I would say that the one place maybe where it wouldn't repeat as strongly in the third quarter as in the second quarter will be in the government space. As I called out in my remarks, that might not be as strong heading into third quarter. Still confident in the full-year call for the government business and accelerating through that kind of end-of-year Federal fiscal year. That feels good. I mean, Pagero, like I just said, has been really a shining star for us and has exceeded our expectations. We'll continue to look for that progress here in the second half. I don't know, Steve, if there's other areas you would add.

Speaker 2

No, I think it's well said.

Speaker 14

Okay, great. Thank you. That makes sense.

Speaker 2

Thanks, Jason.

Operator

We'll go next to Curtis Nagle of Bank of America.

Speaker 15

Great. Thanks so much for taking the question. Yeah, great to see continued momentum in Westlaw Advantage. Maybe if you just comment in terms of how far we are through the contract cycle, in terms of how much of the base has been addressed, how much longer of a tailwind do you think this could be to ongoing legal growth?

Speaker 2

Thanks, Curtis. Gary, do you want to take that?

Speaker 1

Yeah. We've not quantified the penetration or adoption on it, but there remains a good runway in Westlaw Advantage. I think more importantly, CoCounsel Legal, the bundled offer that bundles Westlaw Advantage, Practical Law Dynamic, and the CoCounsel capabilities. I think we're still very much early innings, both in our legal customer base and our general counsel customer base of the adoption of that. As you've heard, we're excited about the next generation version of that really continuing or bolstering the momentum we're seeing.

Speaker 15

Okay. Makes sense. Thanks so much for taking the question.

Speaker 2

Thanks, Curtis.

Speaker 1

Thanks, Curtis. All right. I think that's the end of the queue. Thanks, everybody. We're around and happy to follow up if you'd like. Have a good day.

Operator

This does conclude today's conference. We thank you for your participation.

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