UK BUSINESS AI UNIVERSE: Start-ups: Legal: Legal services

Owner or parent

Thomson Reuters (acquired Aug 2024; terms undisclosed)

Founded or opened

2022

Lab director or lead

Not stated (now part of Thomson Reuters)

Other leaders

Alexander Kardos-Nyheim — co-founder; Dr Jonathan Schwarz — co-founder (now Head of AI Research, Thomson Reuters)

Headcount

"15-person startup" when acquired — per Thomson Reuters, Dec 2025 (single source)

What it does

A London start-up that trained large language models for legal work, with a team "drawn from Cambridge, DeepMind, Harvard and MIT". Thomson Reuters bought it in August 2024 to support its CoCounsel assistant. Its team became the core of TR Labs' Foundational Research group, which later built Thomson Reuters' own model, Thomson.

Research groups or focus

legal-domain large language models

Notable outputs

Safe Sign's legal LLMs (unnamed); successor: Thomson model — Jul 2026 (see BIZ-LAB-6004)

Funding or budget as published

Not stated (investors not stated)

Status now

Acquired; the team works as TR Labs Foundational Research inside Thomson Reuters.

Labs Round 8 deep profile (31 Oct 2026), as the researchers wrote it; confidence: verified (acquisition: UKTN and Thomson Reuters); founding year one source (UKTN).

Sources

1. uktech.news/ai/thomson-reuters-acquires-uk-ai-st
2. thomsonreuters.com/en-us/posts/innovation/from-s