London, April 27, 2026, 13:03 BST
- RELX PLC has filed for the admission of 70,000 new ordinary shares to the London market, tied to its 2023 employee share purchase plan.
- That filing comes after a new £350 million buyback launch and solid shareholder support at last week’s annual meeting.
- Still up in the air: can RELX hold onto its pricing power for paid legal and data tools as AI challengers push further into professional workflows?
RELX PLC has filed to admit 70,000 new ordinary shares for trading on the London Stock Exchange, a minor staff-share move coming just days after the information and analytics firm locked in buyback approval and reaffirmed its 2026 outlook.
Shares carrying a nominal value of 14 51/116 pence apiece are set to be allotted under the RELX PLC Employee Share Purchase Plan 2023. According to a regulatory filing, admission is slated for April 30. These shares will stand on equal footing with the company’s existing ordinary shares.
This shift is more about timing than dilution. Investors have their eyes on RELX’s capital return plans and approach to artificial intelligence, especially after a rocky period for data and legal-information stocks—a stretch marked by sector-wide worries over generative AI.
RELX last week announced a £350 million non-discretionary share buyback, set for April 23 through May 22, just as it wrapped up a separate £350 million repurchase on April 22. Both pieces are part of a larger £2.25 billion buyback plan that stretches to 2026. All shares bought back will go into treasury, trimming the company’s capital.
Shareholders barely hesitated. The AGM poll revealed overwhelming backing: 99.67% in favor of share buybacks, 94.49% for new share allotment, and 99.82% greenlighting the final dividend. About 84% of issued capital weighed in on the main resolutions.
RELX said it “started the year well” in all four segments, sticking to its outlook for solid underlying growth in revenue, adjusted operating profit, and adjusted earnings per share at constant currencies. Underlying growth, which excludes currency swings, recent deals, and asset sales, is meant to show how the core business is performing. ([relx.com][4])
Legal is still where the tension sits. RELX reported double-digit growth for Law Firms & Corporate Legal, crediting the uptick to stronger take-up of Lexis+ with Protégé—an AI-powered legal research and analytics tool, equipped with what the company calls an “agentic” assistant. That means it can tackle multi-step tasks, not just spit out answers to single queries. ([relx.com][4])
Rob Hales, senior equity analyst at Morningstar, noted in a comment after the update that RELX offered “no first-quarter numbers” and left its guidance unchanged. Hales maintained his fair value estimate at GBX 4,200, described the stock as “deeply undervalued,” and pointed out that the company stands to gain from AI-driven product innovation—even with the stock pressured by concerns around AI disruption. Morningstar
Competition in this space is accelerating. On April 23, Freshfields and Anthropic announced a partnership to build legal AI tools. Freshfields, meanwhile, is also piloting a newer release of CoCounsel from Thomson Reuters—a direct competitor to RELX in the legal tech arena. “We’re seeing the industry shift from experimenting with AI to actually weaving it into daily operations at scale,” Thomson Reuters Chief Technology Officer Joel Hron told Reuters. Reuters
The downside risk hasn’t gone away. Back in February, when Anthropic introduced its legal tool, shares in European data and legal software firms took a hit—RELX, Wolters Kluwer, and Thomson Reuters all dropped sharply. According to Dan Coatsworth, AJ Bell’s head of markets, the main concern is these tools could squeeze margins or even push certain data providers out of the workflow entirely.
RELX pointed out a more routine risk in its Exhibitions division: a few events in the Middle East have shifted their dates. Despite that, management is sticking to its forecast for solid underlying revenue gains and better adjusted operating margin in the segment. Still, this footnote underscored that RELX’s growth story isn’t solely tethered to AI. ([relx.com][4])
Monday’s session saw RELX shares nearly flat, slipping just 0.04% to 2,695 pence, according to Investing.com. That’s barely a move from the 2,696 pence finish on April 24. The current filing doesn’t amount to much yet. The bigger question: can RELX’s mix of proprietary content, buybacks, and AI-based tools deliver enough growth to fend off disruption?
[4]: https://www.relx.com/media/press-releases/year-2026/trading-update-april-2026 “
Trading Update – RELX – Information-based analytics and decision tools
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