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Thomson Reuters Corporation
Thomson Reuters sells news, information, and software that helps lawyers, accountants, tax professionals, and companies do their jobs.
Thomson Reuters is a big information company. It sells the tools and trustworthy content that professionals rely on to do their jobs correctly — the legal research a lawyer checks before arguing a case, the tax software an accountant uses to file a return, and the news that lands on a trading desk or a newsroom screen.
The business is split into a few clear parts. Its biggest segment sells legal research and practice software, largely under the Westlaw brand, to law firms and in-house legal teams. Another segment sells tax, accounting, and audit tools to accounting firms and corporations, mostly under names like Checkpoint and Onesource. A third part sells news and data to financial professionals, plus the Reuters news agency that supplies journalists around the world. There is also a smaller unit selling content and software to media outlets and other businesses. What customers actually pay for is trust and time. A lawyer could hunt for cases on their own, but Westlaw puts decades of organized law and smart search in one place, so the firm pays a subscription rather than risk missing something. These subscriptions renew year after year, which makes the revenue steady and predictable. That reliability is the core of the business, and it is why the company can keep investing and returning cash to shareholders.
Thomson Reuters traces back to a newspaper business in Canada and to Reuters, the wire service founded in London in 1851. The modern company was reshaped by the 2008 merger of Thomson and Reuters, and then by a major shift: it sold its Financial & Risk division, which became London Stock Exchange Group in 2018, leaving it focused on legal, tax, and news. Its main rivals are RELX and Wolters Kluwer, which sell similar professional information, and it competes on brand, depth of content, and the sticky grip of software that firms build their daily work around. The company is headquartered in Toronto and also trades in New York. It spends heavily on artificial intelligence to embed research and drafting help directly into its tools, a bet that keeps customers paying and keeps rivals at bay.
Saved answer · last researched 12 Nov 2026