Thomson Reuters to acquire legal AI firm Casetext for $650 mln
10 Jul 2023
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News and information giant Thomson Reuters has agreed to acquire Casetext, a legal startup with an artificial intelligence-powered assistant for law professionals, in a $650 million all-cash deal.
Reports had earlier cited Thomson Reuters' chief financial office er, Michael Eastwood, as saying that the company planned to spend about $100 million a year to invest in artificial intelligence (AI). This, according to him, was in excess of the news and information company's 2023-25 merger and acquisition budget of about $10 billion.
One of Casetext's key products is CoCounsel had, early this year, launched an AI legal assistant, powered by GPT-4 that delivers document review, legal research memos, deposition preparation, and contract analysis in minutes, Thomson Reuters said in a statement.
Casetext was granted early access to OpenAI's GPT-4 large language model, allowing it to develop solutions with the new technology and refine use cases for legal professional, it added.
California-based Casetext employs 104 employees, and its customers include more than 10,000 law firms and corporate legal departments.
The acquisition of Casetext is another step towards bringing generative AI solutions to customers, said Steve Hasker, president and CEO of Thomson Reuters.
“Our bleeding-edge AI expertise plus Thomson Reuters’ industry-leading content, reach, and customer relationships will deliver unmatched customer experiences,” says a CaseText release.
“We’re excited about this deal precisely because we won’t be “exiting.” Quite the opposite. Our entire team will join Thomson Reuters, together accelerating the revolution in legal tech. We’ll be able to realise much sooner all the potential we see for our AI legal assistant, CoCounsel, whose resounding success has brought us to this point. Most important, we’ll advance more quickly and completely toward fulfilling our vision of using the power of AI to help more attorneys do more and better work for more clients—the key to increasing access to justice for everyone,” the release added.
Generative AI can be used to generate new content or data in response to a prompt, or question.
The deal is expected to close in the second half of 2023, subject to specified regulatory approvals and customary closing conditions.
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