The AI boom is hitting Wall Street’s LexisNexis. The legal software giant says its basic idea tells a different story.
“Every time a new model comes out, every time we see a step forward, we’re actually in a better position,” Sean Fitzpatrick, CEO of LexisNexis’ global legal business, told Business Insider.
In recent weeks, many software companies, including LexisNexis parent company Relux, have seen their stock prices plummet as investors worry that AI poses an existential threat.
Relx stock fell about 14% on February 3, the day after AI startup Anthropic rolled out a new plugin for Claude Cowork agents that can analyze draft legal briefs and contracts. The London-based company’s shares have fallen about 17% since the beginning of the year.
“Trusted content”
Fitzpatrick said investors are wrong about LexisNexis because the AI model maker simply doesn’t have the ability to compete with LexisNexis.
“What they don’t understand is that the most powerful thing we have is authoritative content, and that can’t be replicated,” he says.
The content, collected over decades, includes about 200 billion legal documents, with about 4 million added every day, along with information from Shepherd’s Citations, a service owned by LexisNexis that has tracked and verified legal precedents since 1873, the company said.
LexisNexis does not license its proprietary data to general purpose AI model providers, Fitzpatrick said. A Thomson Reuters spokeswoman said the company did not agree. LexisNexis and Thomson Reuters are the top providers of legal research software in the United States.
Anyone can use an off-the-shelf AI agent to complete a legal process, but the data is not secure and the results are unreliable, Fitzpatrick said.
Fitzpatrick noted that many lawyers are submitting court documents that include AI-generated hallucinations, saying, “They are not based on authoritative legal sources, and that is the standard of legal practice.” “There’s no such thing as ‘probably’ right.”
But last year, LexisNexis struck a deal with Harvey, an OpenAI-backed legal software startup last valued at $8 billion, to pipe its legal corpus into its platform. Users will still need a LexisNexis subscription to access content on Harvey’s apps.
Not all legal work requires traditional legal research. Corporate lawyers rely less on case law than litigation lawyers. The opportunity for companies like Anthropic is to sell to in-house legal teams that use software to help review contracts and compare terms between contracts.
AI sales increase
LexisNexis uses a variety of third-party AI models to power its products, including its digital legal assistant Protégé. Fitzpatrick said the difference between the generic model and what LexisNexis’ AI tools offer is that the latter is based on the company’s legal corpus. That’s helping LexisNexis deliver more value to customers, he said, and that’s reflected in Relx’s sales and bottom line.
Earlier this month, Relx reported a 7% increase in revenue and a 9% increase in adjusted operating profit in 2025. The company said its law firm and corporate legal business, which accounts for about 70% of the legal division’s revenue, is seeing double-digit growth as customers adopt its AI tools.
LexisNexis is hiring, Fitzpatrick said. The company has not cut staff due to AI and has no plans to do so in the future.
Despite software stocks plunging again this week, Mr. Fitzpatrick so far won’t let investor concerns change his outlook, with Wall Street forecasters saying fears of a software apocalypse could send the market plummeting again. He said investors will eventually realize that their AI concerns about LexisNexis are misplaced.
“I’m not worried at all,” he said. “I’m not selling stocks.”
Additional reporting by Melia Russell.
