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Thomson Reuters sells information, news, and software that help lawyers, accountants, and businesses do their work.
Thomson Reuters is a company that sells answers, not stuff. Lawyers pay it for legal research and case tools. Accountants pay it for tax and audit software. Traders and businesses pay it for news and market data. Nobody walks into a store to buy any of this. They subscribe, the way you pay for a phone plan every month, and that steady stream of subscription money is the whole engine. Roughly a third of revenue comes from its Legal business, another big chunk from Tax & Accounting, and a smaller piece from news and its Reuters news agency.
The Legal segment is the largest and most important. Its main product, Westlaw, is a giant online library that lawyers search to find cases, laws, and legal opinions. Its real moat is that it is the best version of that library, trusted by judges, courts, and every serious law firm. Tax & Accounting sells software such as Checkpoint and Onesource that helps companies and accounting firms handle taxes and audits. Those customers almost never switch once they are in, because the tools are deeply wired into how they work. The news arm sells financial and general news to media customers and financial firms, and it still carries the Reuters name worldwide.
Think of it as the plumbing of professional advice: nobody notices it, but lawyers and accountants cannot function without it. That stickiness, plus years of moving customers to the cloud, is why the business grows slowly but very reliably. In 2023 the company bought Casetext, a legal AI startup, to build AI tools into its legal products, and it has been pushing AI heavily since. It also owns a large stake in the London Stock Exchange Group, which it has been gradually selling, and it returns a lot of cash to shareholders through its dividend and regular share buybacks.
Saved answer · last researched 11 Oct 2026