An A&O Shearman trainee has celebrated the completion of his training contract by selling the AI tech start-up he founded two years ago to Thomson Reuters.

Alexander Kardos-Nyheim left the Magic Circle firm this week to join Thomson Reuters along with fellow Safe Sign Technologies co-founder chief scientist Jonathan Schwarz.

London-based Safe Sign Technologies is developing legal-specific large language models (LLMs) which it says “drastically reduce hallucinations” and are both tailored to different legal jurisdictions and require citations to up-to-date legislation.

Unveiling the acquisition, Joel Hron, chief technology officer at Thomson Reuters, said the product had “demonstrated industry-leading performance across a number of domain-specific evaluations”. 

He added: “We expect this acquisition to help accelerate our ability to provide our customers with a professional grade AI experience through the CoCounsel AI Assistant – the company’s genAI assistant – that enables professionals across industries to accelerate and streamline their workflows.”

Kardos-Nyheim founded the start-up in 2022 after graduating from law school at Trinity College, Cambridge, at the same time as embarking on a training contract at legacy firm Allen & Overy.

He brought on board Schwarz as a co-founder of the business late last year. Schwarz is a research fellow at Harvard University and spent seven years at Google DeepMind, where he became a senior research scientist.

Kardos-Nyheim, Schwarz and their team will report to Hron.

In an update to its AI investment strategy last November, Thomson Reuters underlined its ongoing commitment to invest more than $100m a year in generative AI and its strategy of securing acquisitions in this field.

UK law firms have also been investing in AI. In June, Ashurst partnered with legal AI platform Harvey to support areas including document review, due diligence, drafting and market research while a month earlier Travers Smith spun out its AI technology products into a new software business.

This October’s Law Firm Marketing Summit, which is co-hosted by Global Legal Post, will feature a live demonstration of the uses of generative AI in marketing and business development. Click here to read the agenda. For sponsorship opportunities email [email protected]