LegalTech Acquisition By Thomson Reuters
Legal AI entrepreneur and former A&O Shearman trainee Alexander Kardos-Nyheim has made a major career change – and fortune.
Kardox-Nyheim founded the legal AI start-up Safe Sign Technologies in 2022 after graduating from law school at Trinity College, Cambridge, at the same time as embarking on a training contract at legacy firm Allen & Overy.
The company specializes in developing large language models (LLMs) for the legal sector.
This week the business was bought by news and tech giant Thomson Reuters, although the statement announcing the deal did not specify how much. TR however have a big fund to spend on technology and it would have been substantial.
After founding the company, Kardox-Nyheim brought on board Jonathan Schwarz (pictured) a research fellow at Harvard University and spent seven years at Google DeepMind, where he was a senior research scientist.
The acquisition is part of Thomson Reuters’ aggressive strategy to enhance its AI capabilities, particularly within the legaltech space.
Since 2020, the company has purchased ten startups across various domains, including legaltech, software, and payments. With a war chest of $8 billion earmarked for AI-focused acquisitions, Thomson Reuters aims to strengthen its position in the market.
\Safe Sign Technologies boasts a talented team drawn from prestigious institutions such as Cambridge, DeepMind, Harvard, and MIT.
Unlike many of its competitors in the AI legaltech sector, Safe Sign has not announced any funding from outside investors but the whole legaltech sector is exploding with a surge in AI-powered solutions, with at least six young European companies in the legaltech space raising significant venture capital funding this year.
Generative AI, especially when combined with human oversight, is particularly well-suited for tasks such as drafting, editing, and negotiating legal documents. Historically, the legal sector has been slow to innovate, but it is now witnessing a wave of transformation driven by AI technologies that firms are increasingly embracing to improve services and delivery.
The trend of AI acquisitions is expected to continue as many tech companies have been actively acquiring AI startups in recent years, with notable examples including Apple, which has purchased over 20 companies in the space since 2017, and Microsoft, which made headlines in 2022 by acquiring voice recognition developer Nuance Communications for a record-breaking $19.7 billion.
AI continues to gain ground in the legal sector, which has become a competitive landscape for venture capital and other companies, eager to build new and better AI models for the legal world. Law firms too have been investing in the space, often partnering with startups and other entrepreneurs to build new AI legal tools.
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