Thomson Reuters acquires AI start-up founded by A&O Shearman trainee

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Global tech giant Thomson Reuters has acquired a UK-based AI startup founded by an A&O Shearman trainee shortly before he started his training contract.

Thomson Reuters announced today it has snapped up Safe Sign Technologies, a company developing “legal-specific large language models” with the goal of making the “world’s best legal advice accessible to all”.

The company was founded in January 2022 by Alexander Kardos-Nyheim, who joined A&O Shearman (then Allen & Overy) as a trainee solicitor in August of that same year. Kardos-Nyheim, who is believed to have recently left the firm after completing his training contract, studied law at Cambridge University and completed the LPC at BPP.

His company expanded by recruiting experts from Cambridge, Harvard, MIT, and DeepMind, and in 2023, AI expert Dr. Jonathan R. Schwarz joined as co-founder and chief scientist

The exact amount Thomson Reuters paid for the business is unclear, but the acquisition is part of a war chest of over £6 billion that the company has set aside to invest in AI businesses and products.

Commenting on the deal, Kardos-Nyheim and Dr Schwarz said:

“We believe Safe Sign Technologies has been at the cutting edge of legal AI research since 2022, achieving significant progress in its goal to create the world’s best proprietary legal LLM. Safe Sign’s world-leading team—drawn from Cambridge, DeepMind, Harvard and MIT—is pleased to join with Thomson Reuters to become a major scientific and industrial disrupter in legal AI.”

Joel Hron, chief technology officer at Thomson Reuters, added: “This acquisition marks another milestone on our journey to combine our trusted content and world-class domain experts with our cutting-edge technology. Based on our internal assessment, we believe Safe Sign’s models have demonstrated industry-leading performance across a number of domain-specific evaluations. We believe that coupling them with our industry-leading content and expertise will help us deliver greater quality and performance from our AI solutions.”