(Reuters) -Thomson Reuters said on Monday it had agreed to acquire Casetext, a legal startup with an artificial intelligence-powered assistant for law 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 budget of about $10 billion from now till 2025.
One of Casetext’s key products is CoCounsel, an AI legal assistant launched in 2023 and powered by GPT-4 that delivers document review, legal research memos, deposition preparation, and contract analysis in minutes, Thomson Reuters said in a statement.
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 professional, it added.
California-based Casetext employs 104 employees, and its customers include more than 10,000 law firms and corporate legal departments.
The acquisition of Casetext is another step towards bringing generative AI solutions to customers, said Steve Hasker, president and CEO of Thomson Reuters.
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 deal is expected to close in the second half of 2023, subject to specified regulatory approvals and customary closing conditions.
(Reporting by Bharat Govind Gautam in Bengaluru; Editing by Rashmi Aich)
