Although it is a continuing rather than a new story, I was nevertheless interested to read the recent listing by Publishers Weekly, entitled The World’s Largest Publishers, 2025. For clarity, this is a top 25 of the largest, by revenue, of all publishers in the world and not just those which publish legal information. Nevertheless, first and second on the hierarchy are Thomson Reuters and RELX. The key aspect of the latest report is that after a seven-year run, RELX has been overtaken by Thomson Reuters as the new front-runner in the grouping. In 2024, Thomson Reuters’ revenues rose by 6%, while RELX’s reduced by approximately 1%. In his report of the story in House of Butter, Sean Hocking adds an observation, “Remember it is all due in part from the year in year out support and fleecing of the legal industry”. It is to be expected that artificial intelligence subscriptions should offer continuing and greater opportunities for pricing and billing for updates, versions and enhancement on a regular and never-ending basis.
With my own interest being primarily in legal and professional information publishing, my attention was drawn to those publishers on the list which, to some extent, are involved in those markets. Of the twenty-five, there are six which fall into the category, and among them I have had career experience of one kind or another with four in one guise or another; after the first two, at number five is Wolters Kluwer, despite its greatly diminished market value, at thirteen is Informa (of whose revenues not much comes from law nowadays) and at seventeen and twenty-three are, respectively, Cambridge University Press and Oxford University Press.
Wolters Kluwer, through its Legal and Regulatory division, has recently acquired Libra Technology, a Berlin-based artificial intelligence solutions’ provider. According to Outsell’s Hugh Logue, Wolters Kluwer hopes to close an innovation gap in legal technology provision; it seems that, watching LexisNexis and Thomson Reuters take steps with generative AI and seeing software providers like Clio purchase vLex, now it has competitive plans. I doubt if their efforts will be meaningful in specifically legal information provision and I would be less surprised if they were to exit that market entirely, under advantageous conditions, having already completed the unloading of its Finance, Risk and Regulatory Reporting unit.
From all twenty-five publishers, their combined revenues for 2024 were approximately US$60b, of which the six which engage in legal and professional markets produced more than US$20b, or, in rough terms, about 35% of the total; Hugh Logue measures the specifically legal and regulatory market at around US$33b. While it must be stressed that the Publishers Weekly stated revenues come from a variety of sources and market sectors, they offer an indication of the size, value and importance of law, tax, accounting and other professional markets. Leaving aside the university presses, CUP and OUP, with their particular characteristics and structures, so much market share among the four others from the relevant six might make competition authorities look negatively at any takeover and merger thoughts among them.
The opinion being proffered here is that the six in question and those other providers which are not quite so strong but are nevertheless well-entrenched and successful around the world, are dominant, powerful and, generally, competent and they will not disappear unless it is in their own interests to do so. Moreover, to the extent that they might see it to their advantage to move in changing strategic directions, as they have done before, they are capable of doing so, where permitted by relevant authorities, by a combination of acquisition, disposal and merger activity, organic growth and innovation, while not losing market leadership. A recent example from the lesser tier is Karnov Group, which has divested its environment, health and safety business-to-business compliance division, as well as its legal training business in Spain. It claims that the legal landscape is undergoing significant transformation, with AI opening new opportunities to serve legal professionals with new solutions. It wants to concentrate its investments on businesses wherein it identifies the best prospects for long-term profitable growth. It is partly for these reasons that I find it difficult to take seriously the notion the market behemoths have several new competitors aiming to dislodge them from their dominant positions, certainly not in the short to medium term. If I am correct to any significant degree, then it might be legitimate to express scepticism about those commentators and participants who choose to convey the impression that small, new entrants into the field are aiming to replace the old guard, notwithstanding the enthusiasm that prevails in many quarters. The longer term is more difficult to assess, partly because of the impossibility of predicting the future but also because history tells us that nothing lasts for ever. In contrast, with regard to consolidation, content aggregator, Mondaq, with its AI enabled intelligence, data and analytics, has been acquired by the legal benchmarking platform, Legal 500. This is another one of a notable handful of combinations of business-to-business publishers focusing on legal and related markets, as they seek to meet the challenges of advertising-driven revenues and technical innovation. It should not be long before we see the next merger or acquisition of this kind.
To that extent, one might be sympathetic to the views expressed in Artificial Lawyer, that the Clio-vLex combination has huge challenges if it hopes to compete meaningfully with Lexis Nexis and Thomson Reuters. It would not surprise me if a measurable quantity of v-Lex’s support thus far has been based on personal and deserved customer admiration and affection for Masoud Gerami, its long-standing but recently retired managing director of global markets. At the same time, there may be those who might be seeking to disguise or minimise some of the negative factors that, perhaps, are being introduced in the rush to gain footholds, notably, for example, some of the inherent dangers of artificial intelligence and the effects on the security of jobs. The market failure at Robin AI, as it is broken up, and the multiple reports of the imminent reversal of artificial intelligence optimism, might be indicative of this. As Joanna Goodman writes in the English and Welsh Law Society Gazette, “it is surely a sign that the legal tech start-up space is becoming crowded, and not every investment is profitable”. With worthy exceptions, an excessive focus on greed-only-driven monetary success, often involving law firm staff cuts, more than on other factors, might be likely to help steer the trend, unless there is clarity and honesty as to purposes, with the primary aim of focusing on greatest needs for the greatest number of people.
The only inevitability is that there will continue to be progressive, regressive and irreversible change, probably evolutionary, to a similar, lesser or greater extent that it has been in the past, while hoping that nothing or no one of value will be seriously injured or destroyed in the process. Almost certainly, there will be successes and failures, and a great deal of consolidation within the market. Nonetheless, with, according to ChatGPT, the term “artificial intelligence” having been coined in 1956 by the computer scientist, John McCarthy, to declare every minor event in those fields to be a revolution is a disservice to actual and somewhat more exhilarating revolutions.
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