Professional Legal Publishers: The Bell Tolls in D Minor
February 10, 2026
Another dinobaby post. No AI unless it is an image. This dinobaby is not Grandma Moses, just Grandpa Arnold.
I read “Anthropic’s New AI Tools Deepen Selloff in Data Analytics and Software Stocks, Investors Say.” The story is published by the outfit that reminds me it is in the “trust” business. I think the company is trying.
Here’s quote from the write up:
Toronto-based Thomson Reuters, which owns the Westlaw legal database, slumped by nearly 18%. It is on track for its biggest daily loss on record and lowest close since June 2021. “I think Anthropic came out with some plug-ins to tackle the legal space,” said Mike Archibald, a portfolio manager at AGF Investments in Toronto. “Obviously, that’s where Thomson Reuters generates a good chunk of their revenues. Sometimes the market just shoots first and asks questions later.” Thomson Reuters, which is also parent company of Reuters News, is set to report its fourth quarter earnings results on Thursday. Its shares are now down 33% year-to-date after dropping about 22% in 2025.
I really want to quote from John Donne’s Meditation 17 in the 1624 Devotions upon Emergent Occasions. You probably remember the line “Never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” But I won’t instead. I will suggest you recall that Mozart’s Requiem relies on D minor. You could I suppose find a YouTube version of this musical composition. I didn’t I just remembered the theme of the Confutatis. Good enough.
Thanks, Venice.ai. Good enough.
Why the reference to bells and a funereal work by Wolfgang? I was sparked by this passage in the cited story:
Britain’s RELX and the Netherlands’ Wolters Kluwer, both providers of legal analytics services, fell 14% and about 13%, respectively. RELX shares have now almost halved from their peak last February and on Tuesday were set for their biggest drop since 1988. Its dramatic reversal highlights the pressure AI is exerting on Europe’s software sector. Other professional services firms closed sharply lower too. Factset Research fell 10.5%, Morningstar lost 9% and LegalZoom slumped 19.7%. In London, Experian, Sage Group, London Stock Exchange Group and Pearson fell between 6% and 12%. Traders and analysts said investor fear often outweighed company fundamentals.
I don’t know much about today’s professional publishing business. Based on my bumping into these firms over the years, I know that each adds value to information. In the legal sector, smart people review documents and add notations. One outfit put hundreds of lawyers to work creating annotations very much like to work done by monks in medieval scriptoria.
Professional publishing firms’ share prices have taken a hit (temporary, probably) because smart investors realized that AI can do this type of knowledge work at a lower cost. It does not take much imagination to see a workstation trained to do legal content sitting in a closet at a big law firm or maybe in a rack in a data center somewhere where costs are low. That workstation can do to public documents and to “firm only” content what the professional legal publishers and adjacent firms do for less money. Since professional publishers rely on a relatively small number of very big law firms and government agencies for their revenue, the threat may give some investors pause.
Yes, there are actions the professional publishers can take. However, these firms have been telling themselves that their AI experiments and products are right in step with the needs of the law firms, the accountants, the consultants, and other markets. Unfortunately professional publishers believe they are often the smart people in the room. I would suggest that these individuals are indeed smart, but there may be even more intelligent people working at Anthropic-type outfits. In my experience, what I call Silicon Valley companies don’t see the world the way professional publishers do.
That’s the problem. Professional publishers innovate slowly and in a tightly constrained mind space. Those wild and crazy Silicon Valley types just slap tech on a problem, send it out, fiddle around, and upgrade in what I call fast cycle mode.
Do you hear those D minor vibrations? I do. But John Donne said in “A Hymn to God the Father”:
“I have a sin of fear, that when I have spun
My last thread, I shall perish on the shore;
But swear by Thyself, that at my death Thy Son
Shall shine as He shines now, and heretofore;
And having done that, Thou hast done;
I fear no more.” [Emphasis added by me]
Or at least until the next quarterly report.
Stephen E Arnold, February 10, 2026
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