LexisNexis Owner Plans to Buy Doctrine – Top French Legal AI Company

Breaking News – RELX Group, the publicly listed company which owns LexisNexis Legal & Professional, has announced that it has entered into a ‘put option agreement to acquire Doctrine, a leading legal AI platform for legal professionals across Continental Europe’.

Founded in 2016 and headquartered in Paris, Doctrine combines a comprehensive corpus of case law, legislation and regulatory content for civil law jurisdictions with a suite of AI-powered research, drafting and analytics tools.

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The platform is used daily by 27,000 legal professionals across France, Italy, Germany and Spain, including law firms ranging from solo practitioners to top-tier Anglo-American firms, multinational corporations and public entities, including French ministries, local authorities, and universities.

The proposed acquisition would accelerate the delivery of enhanced, trusted, intuitive and authoritative legal AI workflow solutions in France and across key European jurisdictions, including Germany, Spain and Italy and should assist customers to improve productivity and achieve better outcomes, they said.

Doctrine and LexisNexis would provide legal professionals across Europe with end-to-end AI-powered legal workflows that span research, drafting and analyses, underpinned by trusted, authoritative content in their native language and legal tradition. Doctrine would continue to be led by its existing management team and would operate as part of RELX Group.

Sean Fitzpatrick, Chief Executive Officer, Global Legal, LexisNexis Legal & Professional, said: ‘We are excited about the prospect of welcoming Doctrine, so that we can serve customers in France, across Europe, and beyond in even greater ways. Doctrine’s customer-centric innovation approach, powerful platform and expert talent complement LexisNexis’s global capabilities in authoritative legal AI workflow solutions, and we look forward to delivering even more value to customers.”

Guillaume Carrère, Chief Executive Officer of Doctrine, said: ‘From the start, we have been obsessed with one thing: building cutting-edge AI solutions for legal professionals across Europe. Joining RELX is the natural next chapter for that mission. LexisNexis brings unparalleled depth of content, global reach and a shared conviction that AI, applied responsibly, will transform how legal work gets done. For our customers, this means faster access to a richer set of capabilities; for our team, it means joining a company that recognizes and will invest behind the technical and product excellence we have built. I want to thank every single person at Doctrine, as well as our partners at Summit Partners, whose conviction and support were instrumental at a defining stage of our journey.’

They added that: ‘The put option agreement provides RELX Group with a binding commitment to acquire Doctrine, exercisable following completion of the information and consultation process with Doctrine’s employee representative bodies in accordance with French law. The parties expect to enter into definitive share purchase documentation following the conclusion of that consultation. Completion of the envisaged transaction is subject to customary closing conditions, including foreign direct investment clearances and other applicable regulatory approvals. The terms of the transaction have not been disclosed. The two companies will continue to operate separately in the interim.’

Raymond James served as financial advisor to Summit Partners, and Latham & Watkins served as legal advisors. Scotto Partners advised Doctrine’s management. Freshfields acted as legal advisors to RELX.

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Is this a big deal?

Well, if you are in France then this is massive. Doctrine started not long after AL did and have steadily grown from being a local legal research company using NLP, to a very frontier-focused AI company that has become a leader locally and also expanded across Europe.

By buying them, they have ‘taken Doctrine off the board’, and prevented a company such as Legora or Harvey taking them – if that had ever been in the cards. Nevertheless, Doctrine is a major player in Western Europe and it really does bolster LexisNexis in the EU – a key market.

On that theme, Legora just bought Qura – a small Swedish legal research startup with a novel approach to deploying AI.

One then has to ask if Lexis – and its parent RELX – will target other research based companies in Europe? Wolters Kluwer is probably too large to bring in, but there are several others in Spain, Germany, and Scandinavia still.

It’s not clear how long Doctrine was on the market for, or what triggered the Lexis move. But, overall, it strengthens them – because, as AL has said many times: curated legal data is the best moat in the world against the inroads of general AI.

Let’s keep a look out for more deals in this legal data space.

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