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Comment by gip | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

The commodification of expertise writ large is a bit mind boggling to contemplate.

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.

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.

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

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.

It's definitely not a major threat, but many/most finance people are clueless about what is and isn't possible with LLMs.

Again, unless Anthropic are taking on liability for their legal tools, this is not going to impact TR.

That being said, there probably is a potential company here that's gonna be built soon/is currently being built, but it definitely won't just be a wrapper around Claude as the recall will be way too low for these systems unaided.

Huge legal tech business units

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