Thomson Reuters corporation acquires Safe Sign Technologies to accelerate its AI strategy

Thomson Reuters, a global content and technology company, today announced it has acquired Safe Sign Technologies, a UK-based startup that is developing legal-specific large language models (LLMs).

“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,” said Joel Hron, Chief Technology Officer, Thomson Reuters. “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.”

“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,” stated the Safe Sign Technologies leadership team, Alexander Kardos-Nyheim and Dr. Jonathan Schwarz.

Alexander Kardos-Nyheim, founder and CEO, founded Safe Sign Technologies in February 2022. He was 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. The Safe Sign Technologies team will report directly to Hron and will be working closely with the Thomson Reuters Labs team. To learn more about Safe Sign Technologies and its team, visit the Safe Sign Technologies website.

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