Investors Fear for Thomson Reuter's Future

Working in a law library, it is surprising to see confidence waver in what many view as the immovable rock of the legal industry: Thomson Reuters. Yet its stock has been on a steady downward trajectory, falling from a peak near $220 per share in mid-2025 to roughly $89 per share in early February 2026. Recent market volatility, including a particularly steep drop this week, might reflect investor fears as opposed to a fundamental shift in legal tech.   

Economists describe this kind of disruption through the lens of “creative destruction”, where novel technologies render older models less relevant. Consider how the advent of email diminished the use of traditional postal services: the U.S. Postal Service once employed about 900,000 workers in the 1980s, but that number has since fallen to around 600,000 as demand for letter mail declined (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2026). 

Investors are understandably skittish about scenarios like this. Market participants seek confidence that the companies they own shares of will sustain growth; persistent disruption pushes some to sell in anticipation of future obsolescence. Creative destruction often brings stagnation or declines for companies caught unprepared, motivating investors to sell their shares, often without giving the companies they are invested in a chance to adapt. 

In the current cycle, artificial intelligence has emerged as the central agent of this disruption. AI technologies are advancing rapidly across industries that depend on computing and data, and the pace of change is both confusing and unpredictable, contributing to market anxiety. 

A tangible example is Anthropic's Claude Cowork, an AI assistant that has recently been upgraded with plugins aimed at automating professional tasks, including legal workflows. These tools were cited by analysts and traders as key catalysts in the recent sell-off among software and legal data stocks, including Thomson Reuters.  

Claude Cowork is a version of the Claude AI model designed to operate directly on a user’s computer, performing tasks like generating spreadsheets, analyzing data, or drafting emails. A suite of plugins, including legal-focused modules, extends this functionality to work such as contract review, non-disclosure agreement (NDA) triage, compliance workflows, and legal briefings, all areas that have traditionally underpinned revenue for established legal software providers.  

Because these capabilities overlap with services offered by incumbents like Thomson Reuters, investors are reevaluating long-term growth prospects. Investors who know little about the broader legal publishing industry see the potential replacement of Thomson Reuters in the development of Claude’s AI tools. In a certain sense, investor fears make sense because if a general AI company--be it Open AI or Anthropic--can provide legal AI tools directly to consumers, why would anyone need the likes of Thomson Reuters, Wolters Kluwer, or even LegalZoom? However, an AI assistant that helps with legal tasks still leaves a wide-open space for these legal publishing companies to remain relevant in this new technological climate. What one pays for with, say Westlaw, is the editorial organization that these services bring to the otherwise chaotic mess of publicly available legal documents. Without the help of these existing editorial standards, AI companies would have to rebuild the wheel in terms of indexing this data. For that reason, it seems to me that Thomson Reuters is here to stay and remains full of potential in the AI age of legal tech.  

Citations 

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, All Employees, U.S. Postal Service [CES9091912001], retrieved from FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis; https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES9091912001, February 6, 2026. 

Written by Yanis Ait Kaci Azzou, Library Assistant