Information giant Thomson Reuters has snapped up British artificial intelligence (AI) company Safe Sign Technologies as it looks to grow its suite of AI-powered research tools targeted towards the legal industry.
Safe Sign has been building and developing a legal specific large language model (LLM) that aims to make reliable legal advice more accessible.
Both firms declined to disclose the value of the deal.
Joel Hron, chief technology officer at Thomson Reuters, said the investment in Safe Sign Technologies is “a big vote of confidence” in the UK’s leading academic and industry sectors.
“We have ambitious plans for investing in Safe Sign Technologies in the UK and growing our talent from UK’s data science community,” he said.
“With the UK being a global leader in the legal profession and a pioneer in AI, the choice to invest in the UK has always been a natural one,” Hron added.
Alexander Kardos-Nyheim, co-founded Safe Sign Technologies in February 2022 with former senior Deepmind scientist Jonathan Schwarz.
Safe Sign said it is “pleased to join with Thomson Reuters to become a major scientific and industrial disrupter in legal AI”.
“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,” the company added.
The number of lawyers using generative AI tools at least once a month more than doubling in half a year, according to a recent survey commissioned by legal publishing firm Lexis Nexis.