London, April 25, 2026, 16:02 BST
- RELX closed out Friday in the green, with the company sticking to its 2026 targets and reporting a solid start to the year across all four divisions.
- Legal AI rivalry is heating up: Freshfields and Anthropic just rolled out a multi-year partnership to co-develop legal workflows. The plan? Deploy Claude across the global firm.
- RELX kicked off a fresh £350 million buyback, the latest installment in its £2.25 billion repurchase scheme aimed for 2026.
RELX PLC finished the week a touch stronger, with shares ticking up 0.45% to 2,701p on the sell side and 2,703p to buy, as the information and analytics giant stuck with its full-year guidance. Even so, questions lingered among investors about the impact of fresh artificial intelligence tools on RELX’s legal-data segment. The FTSE 100, for its part, slipped 0.75%.
Timing’s playing a key role. RELX wants to make the case that AI isn’t just a challenge for LexisNexis—its legal research arm—but also a catalyst for growth throughout the group. On Thursday, the company reported a solid start to the year across all four divisions, reiterating its outlook for robust gains in both underlying revenue and adjusted operating profit. “Underlying growth” leaves out currency shifts, acquisitions and certain timing impacts to highlight the group’s core momentum. Relx
The message dropped the same day as news broke that Freshfields and Anthropic had inked a multi-year deal focused on building out legal AI workflows with Claude. According to Freshfields, Claude is already in action on client work through the firm’s internal AI platform, which reaches 5,700 users. Usage shot up roughly 500% during the first six weeks.
RELX’s legal division is still a key player here. According to the company, law firms and corporate legal departments pushed double-digit growth, largely thanks to uptake of Lexis+ with Protégé—RELX’s AI-powered research and analytics tool that comes with an agentic legal assistant. In this context, agentic AI refers to software designed for multi-step tasks, needing fewer human prompts.
The company flagged robust interest in Risk, especially for financial-crime compliance, digital fraud, and identity solutions, along with insurance data offerings. For Scientific, Technical & Medical, management noted a pickup in higher-value analytics and a surge in article submissions. Exhibitions, although facing some Middle East event rescheduling, maintained a bullish growth outlook.
Market response wobbled. RELX dropped 2.04% Thursday, closing at 2,684p after the news, before clawing back 0.45% to 2,696p on Friday, Investing.com data show. Shares remain well under their 52-week peak but have recovered from the low hit in February.
Capital returns might be providing some support here. RELX announced a fresh £350 million non-discretionary share buyback, set to run from April 23 through May 22, right after wrapping up another £350 million buyback on April 22. Both initiatives fall under the company’s broader £2.25 billion buyback program targeting 2026, with all repurchased shares going straight into treasury.
According to Hargreaves Lansdown senior equity analyst Matt Britzman, there’s “no sign that AI disruption is denting performance.” Still, he noted, investors remain keen for firmer proof of how AI is feeding into revenues. Britzman described RELX as looking more like an “AI winner than a casualty.” Hargreaves Lansdown
Matt Dorset, equity research analyst at Quilter Cheviot, described the update as “brief but reassuring” and argued RELX’s valuation derating seemed “overdone.” Still, he pointed out that shaking off AI-related worries “will take much longer”—a key reason a solid trading update didn’t translate straight into a full rerating. Quilter
Competition is heating up. Thomson Reuters, according to Reuters, is pushing its own legal AI lineup—CoCounsel among them. Freshfields is already using and testing the latest version. Legal AI firms Legora and Harvey have hit multibillion-dollar valuations lately, Reuters said.
The risk isn’t one-sided. Should law firms start relying on AI systems for more routine research, drafting, and contract tasks—often at a lower price point—RELX may feel the squeeze when it comes to renewals or pricing in its Legal segment. There’s also a layer of operational risk here: Reuters has pointed out recent mishaps with AI-generated legal documents, and RELX itself flags worries about regulatory changes around data use, intellectual property disputes, cybersecurity issues, and geopolitical shifts.
RELX, for the moment, is holding firm—leaning on its proprietary data, workflow tools baked into its platform, and a reliable cadence of buybacks. The question for investors: will that playbook suffice as legal AI offerings like Claude, CoCounsel, and Harvey become more deeply woven into attorneys’ routines?
