Thomson Reuters to acquire legal tech provider Casetext for $650M

A logo of Thomson Reuters is pictured on a truck during preparations for the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF), in Davos, Switzerland Jan 19, 2020. REUTERS/Denis Balibouse/File photo

Thomson Reuters Corp said on Monday it had agreed to acquire Casetext, a California-based company that provides technology solutions for legal professionals, in a $650 million all-cash deal.

Thomson Reuters’ chief financial officer Michael Eastwood had said last month that the company planned to spend about $100 million a year to invest in artificial intelligence (AI), which would be separate from the news and information company’s merger and acquisition (M&A) budget of about $10 billion from now to 2025.

Casetext employs 104 employees, and its customers include more than 10,000 law firms and corporate legal departments, Thomson Reuters said on Monday.

The acquisition of Casetext is another step towards bringing generative AI solutions to customers, said Steve Hasker, president and CEO of Thomson Reuters.

Casetext was granted early access to OpenAI’s GPT-4 large language model, allowing it to develop solutions with the new technology and refine use cases for legal professionals.

Generative AI is a type of artificial intelligence that generates new content or data in response to a prompt, or question, by a user.

The transaction is expected to close in the second half of 2023, Thomson Reuters said in a release.