It is a little more than semantic search. Their value prop is curation of trusted medical sources and network effects--selling directly to doctors.

I believe frontier labs have no option but to go into verticals (because models are getting commoditized and capability overhang is real and hard to overcome at scale), however, they can only go into so many verticals.

They’re one of the two big names in legal data - Thomson Reuters Westlaw and RELX LexisNexis. They’re not just search engines for law, but also hubs for information about how laws are being applied with articles from their in house lawyers (PSLs, professional support lawyers - most big law firms have them as well to perform much the same function) that summarise current case law so that lawyers don’t have to read through all the judgements themselves.

If AI tooling starts to seriously chip away at those foundations then it puts a large chunk of their business at risk.

TR will not disappear. But their value to the market was "data + interface to said data" and that value prop is quickly eroding to "just the data".

You can be a huge, profitable data-only company... but it's likely going to be smaller than a data+interface company. And so, shareholder value will follow accordingly.

If customers start asking Claude first, before they ask Thomson Reuters, that's a big risk for the later company.

Huge legal tech business units

I think the argument is that tools like Claude Code will cause more companies to just build solutions in-house rather than purchase from a vendor.

I kind of imagine more people going off and building their own companies.

It’s demonetizing process rent-seeking. AI can build whatever process you want, or some approximation of it.

maybe eventually, not in the near-term future.