Thomson Reuters NASDAQ: TRI executives said the company is positioned to benefit from rising compliance complexity and demand for specialized artificial intelligence tools, while pushing back on investor concerns that general-purpose AI models could erode its core legal, tax and accounting franchises.
Speaking at a Barclays event, Chief Executive Officer Steve Hasker said Thomson Reuters has been supported by a multi-year tailwind from increasingly complex legal, tax, accounting and audit compliance requirements. He said the company’s “big three” franchises have moved from low-single-digit organic growth several years ago to high-single-digit growth, with “line of sight” to double-digit growth in future years.
Hasker said AI represents a second major tailwind, arguing that the company’s long history in machine learning, proprietary content and subject-matter expertise distinguish its offerings from broader AI tools.
“We’re the only company we believe that can provide fiduciary-grade AI,” Hasker said, using a term he said the company has recently adopted to describe AI for professions where users “cannot afford to be wrong” or to rely on hallucinated outputs.
Executives Highlight Legal AI Growth
Gary Bisbee, head of investor relations, said Thomson Reuters reported 8% organic revenue growth across the company in its latest quarter, above the 7% growth it had previously guided for. He said the outperformance was driven by the legal and corporates businesses.
In legal, Bisbee said law firm customers, excluding government customers, grew 11% organically, up from 9% in the prior quarter. He attributed the acceleration to the launch of Westlaw Advantage and continued growth in CoCounsel, the company’s AI product.
Hasker said Thomson Reuters is seeing AI expand the company’s role in customer workflows. In tax and accounting, he said the company can move beyond being a tax calculation engine to providing an end-to-end agentic solution for the tax return process. In litigation, he said the company is moving beyond research into drafting applications, including motions and rebuttals.
Chief Operations and Technology Officer Kirsty Roth said AI is also changing the way Thomson Reuters operates internally, allowing it to launch features and products more quickly. She said the company began work on internal AI-driven operating changes about two and a half years ago.
Company Defends Its Content Moat
Hasker said 85% of Thomson Reuters’ content is not publicly available and has been created or curated by company experts. He also said the company relies on 2,700 practice experts to help train its AI agents and maintains data privacy protections that prevent customer inputs from becoming part of AI outputs.
Bisbee said Westlaw processes more than 300 million documents annually from more than 3,500 sources. He pointed to tools such as the Key Number System, which he described as a legal taxonomy with 140,000 legal matters, and KeyCite, which helps verify whether cases remain valid law.
Bisbee said those verification tools are particularly important in an AI environment, citing a recent incident in which a large law firm submitted a brief containing hallucinations. He said the opposing side used a Westlaw tool called Litigation Document Analyzer to identify the mistakes.
Hasker said Thomson Reuters does not currently see a reason to share its content or expert knowledge with outside AI providers. He described current relationships with frontier model providers as “fairly vanilla vendor relationships,” adding that Thomson Reuters is model agnostic and uses different AI models depending on the task.
For CoCounsel Legal, Hasker said the company has used Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet models. For tax and accounting products, he said Thomson Reuters has used the latest ChatGPT models. He also said the company has built its own legal-focused large language model, called Thomson, which is expected to move into full release this year.
Legal Workflow Market Still in Early Stages
Executives said the market for AI workflow tools in law firms remains early and experimental. Hasker said some customers use only Thomson Reuters products, while others are testing competing tools such as Harvey or Legora alongside Thomson Reuters offerings.
Roth said many law firms have purchased multiple tools but are still determining how to use them and manage change internally. She said customers often prefer a single tool rather than several separate systems, and said Thomson Reuters has packaged CoCounsel to provide access to Westlaw, Practical Law and other resources through one interface.
Hasker said CoCounsel has reached one million users and that its annual recurring revenue is “in the same zip code” as some legal tech competitors, though the company has not disclosed a specific figure. Roth said customers in the beta for CoCounsel Legal are seeing it address about three times as many use cases as before.
Tax and Accounting Seen as Durable Franchise
Hasker said Thomson Reuters operates in duopolies in parts of the tax calculation market, including tools for tax professionals and corporate tax departments. He said the company is the largest provider of direct and indirect tax products to heads of tax and the Big Four accounting firms.
He also pointed to Pagero, an e-invoicing supplier Thomson Reuters acquired, as benefiting from e-invoicing mandates being rolled out by tax authorities globally.
Hasker said tax calculation engines are difficult for customers to replace because they contain years of historical tax return data, established user workflows and connections to tax authorities. He said the company’s opportunity is to add agents for automated document ingestion, e-invoicing and advisory workflows.
Bisbee said automation is important in accounting because the number of accounting graduates and CPA exam takers has declined while the number and complexity of returns and audits continue to rise.
Capital Allocation Focus Remains Disciplined
Hasker said Thomson Reuters has about $9 billion in available capital, including cash, additional leverage capacity and free cash flow generation. He said free cash flow is expected to reach about $2.1 billion this year.
On mergers and acquisitions, Hasker said the company remains focused on legal, tax and corporates, seeking products that improve the customer experience, have clean technology stacks, are financially accretive and fit culturally. He cited Pagero, SafeSend, SurePrep, Additive, Materia and Noetica as examples of smaller deals that have been integrated into the company’s distribution model.
Bisbee said the company now evaluates potential acquisitions by first asking about AI disruption risk. Hasker said Thomson Reuters remains open to larger deals but expects to continue pursuing “singles and doubles” while valuation gaps persist, particularly for private equity-owned assets.
Hasker also said the board will review capital returns at an upcoming meeting. He noted that the company recently completed a $605 million return of capital and is about one-third of the way through a $600 million normal course issuer bid.
About Thomson Reuters NASDAQ: TRI
Thomson Reuters is a global provider of information and technology solutions for professional markets, including financial services, legal, tax and accounting, and media industries. The company delivers a range of data, analytics and software tools designed to help customers make informed decisions, manage risk and stay compliant with evolving regulations. Its key offerings include the Eikon financial data platform, Westlaw legal research service, Checkpoint tax and accounting solution, and Reuters News, which supplies real‐time journalism to media organizations worldwide.
Formed in 2008 through the merger of Canada's Thomson Corporation (founded in 1934) and the UK's Reuters Group (established in 1851), Thomson Reuters has built on a legacy of journalistic integrity and information innovation.
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