Thomson Reuters Buys Legal Specific LLM Developer Safe Sign

Thomson Reuters has acquired Safe Sign Technologies, a UK-based startup that is developing legal-specific large language models (LLMs).

It’s a surprise move, given that TR has a large genAI team of its own already, boosted via the purchase of Casetext in 2023.

One immediate thought this site had is whether the deal, which brings with it a genAI brain trust, was inspired by what is clearly a greater demand from the legal sector for higher levels of accuracy in genAI outputs?

Also, how will a legal-specific LLM fit together with what they use already, e.g. OpenAI’s LLMs? They don’t make that clear. Most likely – and as with other companies – they will add whatever has been made to what they already use, matching whichever LLM works best for each task. Plus all that LLM knowhow will help with refining, RAG and system-prompt engineering, to improve the results TR already gets at the moment.

The Safe Sign Technologies team will report directly to Joel Hron, Chief Technology Officer, Thomson Reuters, and will be working closely with the TR Labs team.

Safe Sign is a recent company. Alexander Kardos-Nyheim, founder and CEO, started it in February 2022. He was then joined by leading Cambridge Law and AI professors and researchers.

Kardos-Nyheim’s team expanded, most notably with the arrival in late 2023 of Dr. Jonathan R. Schwarz, who became the company’s co-founder and chief scientist. Schwarz brought with him world-leading AI expertise, drove the company’s LLM strategy and enabled the company to achieve world-class legal LLM performance, TR added.

Hron said: ‘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. We expect this acquisition to help accelerate our ability to provide our customers with a professional grade AI experience through the CoCounsel AI Assistant – the company’s genAI assistant – that enables professionals across industries to accelerate and streamline their workflows.’

The Safe Sign Technologies leadership team, Alexander Kardos-Nyheim and Dr. Jonathan Schwarz, added: ‘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.’