The AI boom has been hammering LexisNexis on Wall Street. The legal-software giant says its fundamentals tell a different story.
“Every time we see a new model, every time we see a step forward, we’re actually in a better position,” Sean Fitzpatrick, CEO of the global legal business of LexisNexis, told Business Insider.
In recent weeks, many software companies, including LexisNexis’s parent Relx have seen their stocks plunge over investor fears that AI poses an existential threat.
Shares of Relx fell about 14% on February 3, the day after the AI startup Anthropic rolled out a new plug-in for its Claude Cowork agent that can draft legal briefs and analyze contracts. The London-based company’s shares are down roughly 17% since the start of the year.
‘Authoritative content’
Fitzpatrick said investors are wrong about LexisNexis because AI model makers simply aren’t equipped to compete with it.
“What they don’t understand is that the most powerful thing that we have is our authoritative content, and that cannot be replicated,” he said.
This content, collected over several decades, includes some 200 billion legal documents, with around 4 million added daily, the company said, along with information from Shepard’s Citations, a service owned by LexisNexis that has tracked and validated legal precedent since 1873.
LexisNexis doesn’t license its proprietary data to general-purpose AI model providers, said Fitzpatrick. A spokesperson for Thomson Reuters said the company doesn’t either. LexisNexis and Thomson Reuters are the top providers of legal research software in the US.
While anyone can use off-the-shelf AI agents to complete legal work, Fitzpatrick said their data won’t be secure, and the results won’t be reliable.
“They’re not grounded in authoritative legal material, and that’s the standard for legal work,” said Fitzpatrick, noting that many lawyers have filed court documents containing AI-generated hallucinations. “You can’t be ‘probably’ right.”
LexisNexis did, however, cut a deal last year with Harvey, the OpenAI-backed legal software startup last valued at $8 billion, to pipe its legal corpus into the company’s platform. Users still need a LexisNexis subscription to access its content in Harvey’s app.
Not all legal work demands traditional legal research. A corporate lawyer doesn’t rely on case law as much as a litigator does. The opportunity for a company like Anthropic is to sell to in-house legal teams that use software to assist with reviewing contracts and comparing terms across agreements.
AI sales boost
LexisNexis uses a range of third-party AI models to enhance its products, including its digital legal assistant, Protégé. Fitzpatrick said the difference between general-purpose models and what LexisNexis’ AI tools offer is that the latter are grounded in the company’s legal corpus. That’s been helping LexisNexis deliver more value to customers, a boost reflected in Relx’s top and bottom lines, he said.
Earlier this month, Relx reported 7% revenue growth for 2025, and a 9% increase in adjusted operating profit. The company said its law firm and corporate legal business, which accounts for about 70% of its legal division’s revenue, is growing at a double-digit rate, driven by customers adopting its AI tools.
LexisNexis is hiring, said Fitzpatrick. The company hasn’t done any layoffs because of AI, and doesn’t plan to do any, he said.
For now, Fitzpatrick isn’t letting investors’ anxiety color his outlook, even though software stocks took another beating this week, and Wall Street forecasters said fears of a software apocalypse could drag the market into another sharp decline. He said investors will eventually realize their AI fears about LexisNexis are misguided.
“I’m not concerned, not one bit,” he said. “I haven’t sold a share.”
Additional reporting by Melia Russell.
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