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2026.10.09 | TB | Software | Wolters Kluwer Legal AI & Platforms II

原标题：Wolters Kluwer – Legal & Regulatory AI & Platform Monetisation

#software

Third Bridge · 2026-10-09

Analyst-led • 6 Oct 2026

Companies: TRI CA, WKL NL

Kenneth B. Crutchfield (KBC) Advisory Board Member at TLTF Summit LLC

Saad Maqsood (SM) — Third Bridge Sector Analyst

Agenda

Key Insights

Introduction

SM [00:00:02]: Welcome to Third Bridge's Interview entitled Wolters Kluwer – Legal & Regulatory AI & Platform Monetisation. I'm Saad and today, we have with us Kenneth, who is a former VP and General Manager of Legal Markets at Wolters Kluwer.

Just before we get started on the call today, Kenneth, could you please state, I agree or I disagree to the following statement: You understand the definition of material non-public information and agree not to disclose any such information, or any other information which is confidential, during this Interview.

KBC [00:00:39]: I agree.

SM [00:00:41]: Could you begin with an introduction to your background, please?

KBC [00:00:47]: Most recently, I was with Wolters Kluwer, managing the legal markets portion of the US information business in the Legal & Regulatory division. I did that for nearly six years, reporting into the Head of Legal and Regulatory US, who also managed a few other products, including the Kluwer Law International products and then also there's a group around pensions and a couple of other things. That's what I've done most recently, but I started in Legal at Lexis, have worked at Thomson Reuters, Bloomberg and pretty much know all the competitors in the landscape.

Questions

00:01:33] Looking at Wolters Kluwer's Legal & Regulatory division, how strongly positioned is the company today? Where does it rank, particularly in the US vs some of the players you mentioned, such as Lexis, Thomson Reuters and Bloomberg?

KBC [00:02:05]: I would say in scoping the US information business for law firms and for the legal space, I would position them probably as number four in that group. Thomson and Lexis are the market leaders. They have comprehensive case law. They're used for litigation. Bloomberg also has comprehensive case law and has built a broader platform based upon the wishes of Mike Bloomberg. Then Wolters Kluwer has always been focused more on the regulatory world laws and regulations and regulatory change as opposed to litigation and court cases. They serve a different focus, and they've also always focused a little bit more on, at least from a market positioning, being vertical and serving practice areas more specifically. That's been their differentiating factor, but in absolute revenue and then also I think in terms of loyalty and other things my take is that they are in the 3-4 range, probably four.

00:03:21] Given that Wolters is more involved in the regulatory world, regulatory change, etc, as opposed to Lexis and Thomson Reuters having the litigation side and comprehensive case law, was that just an intentional strategy from Wolters, or did the company try case law and it just didn't work? How has it come into this slightly different focus?

KBC [00:03:48]: They historically were a publisher. Lexis was not a publisher. Lexis came in starting in electronics. They created the full-text search engine in the 1960s and were 100% digital until the late '80s when they started to buy content that was already in print to augment their position in the marketplace. Lexis has had that dominant role of being the de facto case law authority because they were the official publisher for the federal government in most all states, and they assigned the case numbers. They've had a long-standing duopoly there with Lexis as they've negotiated and sued each other over the years. Wolters Kluwer was CCH, which was regulatory coverage on specific areas of law, go back to the 1980s, it was all in print. You received a book with multiple binders. A couple of court cases would come out that were relevant. They put those in a binder. They would also provide a newsletter. That was how people got their current awareness and learned what was going on. They waited with bated breath for things to be mailed, the librarian would install the pages because it was a loosely product that you replace things.

That's how that CCH business worked. Then they bought Aspen. Aspen Publishing was a treatise publisher, so they would go out and find experts in different areas of the law and bring those in and that was the core of what they did. They put all that online. In 2005-06, I think, was when they really went with the Global Atlas platform. It's called IntelliConnect. They've rebranded that a couple of times. I rebranded the whole thing as VitalLaw, and we added in a fairly comprehensive code and regs database that was sourced from the outside to give them primary-source coverage on that core regulatory space, but they didn't have a core case law. To my knowledge, they still don't have that.

00:06:11] Do you view not having core case law as a gap in Wolters' offering, in terms of whether the company should really go into that as well?

KBC [00:06:23]: I do believe that's a gap. I think AI exposes that in a very significant way because AI can only operate on data that's trusted when you have the data to answer a question. If you want to know what the speed limit is on federal highways outside of major cities in the state of Texas, if you don't have the law that defines that and the specific regulations, your AI can't answer that or it's depending upon the core foundation model of OpenAI, which is no better than just going and using ChatGPT. My point has been and was when I was there, that you need to have the underlying core primary-source data in order to be able to do the baseline questions that an attorney has that they're going to come for. They don't necessarily, unless they're specifically coming because they want an authority on Folk on Delaware, which is the authoritative treatise that they own on Delaware incorporations and Delaware law, you're not going to get an answer necessarily, and I think that is a weakness for them.

00:07:37] If Wolters were to try and address the lack of core case law, is that something that can only be solved through an acquisition, or could the company hypothetically go down the organic route if it has the patience?

KBC [00:08:00]: I think they could go for the organic route. They did own Loislaw. This is, I think, a strategy that existed back in the 2005 timeframe before they shifted to the vertical we go deeper kind of thing. They had bought a company called Loislaw, which had court cases, but it was a very small law, very small law kind of play. To my knowledge, they never were able to integrate that in so that the asset of the case law could be available to the rest of the market that purchase the CCH and Aspen products on their platform because that is very big law, if you will, and it was a market mismatch. I do believe, and without getting into some of the details on why I believe and why I think because it was certainly something that was part of my responsibility, I think that they could get there organically.

00:08:59] I appreciate there are a lot of variables to take into consideration, but is getting core case law a multi-year type of organic project, or could Wolters get something decent up and running within the year, for example?

KBC [00:09:22]: I think they could get something up and running if they put their mind to it. I can say with confidence that Legora, Harvey, Filevine and a number of others have done something like that and have incorporated through court listener, there are public sources of information where you can get at least a version of a court case to use for AI purposes. It's a separate question about getting the page number references and the citations that are official that Thomson does because that process requires cooperation with Thomson under a decree from the 1980s. The typical way that most organisations have done that has been to basically purchase the books, send them to the Philippines, cut out the pages with the razor blade, scan them in, OCR them in and then remove the headnotes. You'll see the Ross Technologies court case last week, which was about whether or not headnotes are copyrightable. There was a ruling in favour of Thomson Reuters on that. There's still some things being tested there. I think there's enough knowledge in the industry now that there's a semblance of data that can be acquired or licenced without requiring a complete build that would be multi-year.

00:10:51] If Wolters did go for the approach we're discussing, would the company come up with a more comparable offering to Westlaw, Lexis+ or the equivalent? Is that what you think would bring Wolters up?

KBC [00:11:18]: In my opinion, Bloomberg, when they tried to do that, that was fool's errand. It's a me-too at best. I think that's a problem. I think this is more existential in some respects that to stick in and continue to be on the regulatory compliance side, they need this to just be relevant long term, in my opinion. That will come out a little bit more as we talk. I think that they can have a strong position and a defensible winning market-leading position in the regulatory compliance side. I think they have to do this and then make sure that they have added the metadata, the other attributes and everything to create a superior regulatory experience when somebody wants to know what is the law, what has changed in the law, how has that worked? Those sorts of things. They need a reason for a firm to who wants to start and write a law to start with Wolters Kluwer with their research. Then if they can't find something go somewhere else, right now, it's pretty much the other way around. It's the afterthought. If you can't find something in Lexis or Westlaw or whatever your go-to legal research product is.

Now I will say at that point, there's a long-standing purchase pattern where firms will buy the Wolters Kluwer content with a little bit more of that value proposition of just in case. There's just enough usage of that kind of content, and it is more expert than just primary source because it does have editorial rigour if it's done in-house on the CCH side, and it does have the expert voice from somebody on the outside as an external author. When organisations come to that, it's often used for triage too. There is a value story there, but I think that value story is going to get pressure-tested with AI.

00:13:38] In what areas is Wolters likely to be negatively impacted by AI?

KBC [00:14:01]: I think there are within big law, I'll say, which is 140 or so firms in the Am Law 200 or even the Am Law 200, aside from personal injury firms, pretty much everybody has Wolters Kluwer products. That's the same for Bloomberg, and that's the same for Lexis and that's the same for Westlaw. They've always gotten the past. It's a question of market share and wallet share when renewals come up. Oftentimes, the standard practice is multi-year agreements. Everybody is now doing multi-year agreements. I think Wolters Kluwer was late to that party, but they're in that party too. When rules come up, they're highly negotiated. The negotiation is, here's what I was spending, here's what I was getting. They might cancel some things or try to cancel. There might be some things that they would add additional features, but it's a highly negotiated thing and often firms will pick that up against another vendor. They'll often pair Wolters Kluwer and Bloomberg against each other because Bloomberg even though they have the case law and the reasons why they went into case law were probably spurious.

At the end of the day, they are also a niche provider when you come down to it. They pick the two against each other and try to figure out how to manage within their budget. Now there's a broader thing of Harvey and Legora and workflow solutions and I view those as white space, areas that all of the vendors, the legal research vendors have talked about workflow and everything. Typically, workflow is very narrow. I think that the Harvey, Legora world and the Claude, Anthropic approaches that are more Palantir-like, I see those as being solving a new problem that really was never effectively solved by any of the major information providers. Those information providers are still generally needed as part of that. I think there will be a reckoning at some point when budgets have to be pulled back together and they're going to have to think through, "Okay, do we really need three tax research offerings in the firm because there's a lot that have the Thomson Reuters Checkpoint product, the Bloomberg Tax product and the Wolters Kluwer Tax product, and there will be some that are going to look at and have to say, "Well, let's go to two or let's go to one because we need to fund other things, and we can't have so much overhead in our firm."

00:17:02] If not already, are we pretty soon getting to the point where companies such as Harvey and Legora are becoming more and more entrenched in the daily workflows of law firms, or is this still at an exploratory stage? How much time do players such as Wolters or Bloomberg have, for that matter?

KBC [00:17:29]: I think there's a few years. The jury is still out in my mind about how far Harvey and Legora have gotten and will get in specific firms, having the account is one thing, having usage is another and getting some adoption, that being effective usage and adoption is the ultimate tier. There are some firms getting there. I do think that that is real. You also have to realise that the way the sales motions go, it's very managing-partner oriented as opposed to the day-to-day operation-centric, which is where all these other players are at. They'll say, what are your top three problems to the managing partners, and they'll talk about, we need M&A transactions to be faster. We have this problem in litigation. We have this other issue. They'll go through and automate those individual processes. There may be 10,000 processes that need to be automated, but they're going to get the ones that are most important to the managing partners, and that leaves entire practice areas untouched by Harvey or Legora or by an AI solution.

I do think that there's still a lot of runway for Harvey and Legora to work through. I think that there are going to be hooks in terms of why you can't cancel these other products. One of the things that's always been out there as Lexis in their time when the momentum was much more towards Thomson, organisations that did want to cancel the core Lexis product, and they couldn't because you'd lose Law360. Lexis bundled things together in ways that made it very hard to walk away. I think Wolters Kluwer and Bloomberg both have those sorts of things, too, where there are core titles, core things that partners, senior in the organisation want or trust, whether they're used a lot or not and those are hard to get away from, and those are the levers that I think exist in those highly negotiated renewals that make it hard for somebody to walk away from a Wolters Kluwer or a Bloomberg or Lexis, if you wanted to say single source with Thomson and then work with Legora.

SM [00:19:57]: A lot of bundling of products has helped.

KBC [00:20:06]: Yes. That's the big law, the large law areas, as you go downmarket, Wolters Kluwer does not play nearly as well in mid-market. When you get down to smaller firms, they really are de minimis in their play. That's an area that I think if they had case law, that might actually open up a little bit of an opportunity on the price-sensitive side or some down market play. I also look at it and say, if you are operating in the State of Ohio and you only work in state courts and not do any work in federal, all you need is the Thomson publications on the state of Ohio. In print in the old days, and you can be in business. You didn't need any other resource. Fast forward to the digital world, you still really only need Thomson or Lexis to be able to operate in as a solo practitioner doing personal injury law in the State of Ohio. That's the place where the market is very different, and that's a place where Lexis and Thomson have economies of scope that Wolters Kluwer doesn't have and Bloomberg probably doesn't have either, I think, because my understanding is that Mike Bloomberg really just likes to be around highly influential, important companies, so he doesn't really care about the low end of the market.

00:21:50] There are two sides to the Legal & Regulatory division – the information solutions side and the software side. There are key software offerings, at least in the US, such as Brightflag and Legisway. Could you provide an overview of what's available in the US from Wolters?

KBC [00:22:22]: Let me do one more point on legal research vs workflow players. Research, by definition, is an interrupt in workflow. You're moving along, you're going through, you're working on a filing and you get to a point where you don't know something. You need to stop and figure out what the issue is and what the answer is so you can move forward. Whether that's completely a tax return, you don't know what to do on line 23 of the 1040 and you got to go back and look for something from your client or go online to find an answer so you can get off that line or you're doing something in bankruptcy and you need to know whether or not you can actually file Chapter 11. You have to stop and get out and go to a legal research product. That's the core centre that has anchored Lexis and Westlaw and Thomson or Bloomberg and Wolters Kluwer.

The thing that the Harveys, Legoras and these workflow solutions are doing is that standard process, but you still need to go back to the core information solutions when there's an interrupt or if it can't be pulled directly by those workflow solutions. That's how I view the world. There are definitely places where you know you're just going to get an answer like what's the speed limit in the state of Texas on this type of road, or you know there's an answer and you just need to get it and pull it in. Those are places where you could have integrations with these workflow solutions. It also highlights the symbiotic relationship that I think is there that makes it harder to get rid of them unless the Harveys and the Legoras really get in and decide to compete on the information side.

00:24:10] To your point, there's white space that companies such as Harvey and Legora are addressing through these narrow workflows, which the research providers weren't able to address before. From a law firm's perspective, is this incremental budget being allocated to companies such as Harvey and Legora, or do you think eventually it becomes one budget anyway, and that's when the cutting has to be taken into consideration?

KBC [00:24:54]: I think that it is extra budget that the firms have to eat an overhead and then they have to find other ways to remove overhead because big law is funded by corporations. Corporations have outside counsel guidelines. They do not reward overhead. They don't want to pay for a first-year associate to learn on their matter. They don't want to pay for legal research where you should already know the answer. They don't want to pay for manual work that could be automated. They also don't want to pay for the capital and the investment for that automation to occur. Firms are walking this tight rope of, "Okay, we got to do this work. We got to automate. We got to invest. We've got to pull these things because if I don't, my client is going to go to another firm that's actually a step ahead of me on that and can work more efficiently." You've got that tension and then you've got the tension that there's a lot of work that has been done by law firms that maybe could be done by a legal services provider or by the client themselves.

It could flip the model a lot in terms of how work gets done. I have a hypothesis personally that I think some of the work that's done by associates could easily be done on the front end by the clients before they ever get to a point using AI to identify what are the legal issues, what are the alternatives, what are the actions and then you just send the work product that you've drafted as the client over to the partner and say, "Hey, can you evaluate these, tell me whether or not I'm on the right track and if you think that I should be going this way, I only need your expert opinion. I don't need you to take my issue, run it down through some junior-level associates to come up with the same work product that I could do myself, and I also know my business."

00:26:53] An expert in a previous Third Bridge Interview [see Legora – Enterprise Legal AI Workspaces & Workflow Integration – 18 September 2026] mentioned that there is a case for AI tools replacing junior associates, but going forwards, the intake every year will be less and less because more work could be done. If it does indeed go in that direction, is that technically a net negative for Wolters because there are fewer seats to sell, given there is a whole per-seat, per-user type of subscription model? If anything, does that model have to change then?

KBC [00:27:35]: They sell by attorneys, so the number of attorneys and bands by practice area. I don't see that being a real significant thing. I think they just raise the price per attorney and say "This is what you're paying before, your contracts coming up for renewal, here's what you're going to pay now. The fact that you're doing with fewer people doesn't really matter. The value is still there. You're still getting the same output to your firm and making the same revenue." Same argument that goes on with rates going up, the billable hour going up because there's no other way to monetise, a law firm can't monetise the work that they have to do in the investment to deploy Harvey, Legora or other workflow solutions to automate and make this work go away without raising their rates unless they're in an alternative fee arrangement. I'm hearing more and more that with AI, there's a lot of resetting and re-understanding the benchmark of what the work is. I think hourly rates continue to go up. I think the same behaviour will play through with the vendors.

00:28:49] With the increasing role AI is playing, Wolters has made its own moves in this regard, for example, the November 2025 acquisition of Libra AI. Do you have any headline thoughts on this acquisition from a strategic point of view? Do you see the clear value-add with that?

KBC [00:29:27]: I view that as an opportunistic acquisition of an organisation that had some capabilities, and I believe it was getting traction in Europe. The majority of the leadership that supports the Legal and Regulatory Division is in Europe. The division head, Martin O'Malley is in Europe. His staff is in Europe. It's a European-centric business, so they bought something that was European-centric. I think that it plugs in fairly well over in Europe and adds to a short-term narrative around being functionally equivalent to Protégé or CoCounsel in the Thomson Reuters world, but it's technology. It still has to operate on the core data that Wolters Kluwer has over in Europe. I think it gives them some runway, but to really effectively do more in that information research space that is building out workflow beyond that. I think it gives them something, but I think they're going to have to go get more data. I think they're going to have to get the forms in the US, there's different forms that you have to take on to be able to do certain types of tasks and Practical Law has been a big play for Thomson Reuters in that where it's like here's the steps.

All the steps are laid out. Here's how you file an automobile accident and filing in the state of Wisconsin or here are the steps do you take to be able to file an EEOC claim for employment discrimination. I think that there's a lot of practical information like that that probably is different in the European market that needs to go after. That's the area where both the workflow providers and the research providers intersect. That's, I think, where the battle could be. It's a long-winded way of saying I think it's probably good in the near term for them in Europe. In the US, you got to make that work for a legal and regulatory compliance play, which is really why the firms buy Wolters Kluwer. I think they'll probably put Libra on top of it. They already have an AI capability on top, whether or not it's going to do much more in the US beyond marketing and perception, I don't know.

SM [00:32:06]: Looking at the integration plans Wolters announced in its H1 2026 results in August 2026, it shows that Europe is where it has been deployed or integrated so far. I think it still needs to expand into the US.

KBC [00:32:36]: To the extent that it's technology only, I see that as build vs buy and nothing more at least for the US market. I don't know anything that Libra has that's relevant content-wise. The other thing that is very important to understand is the markets that Wolters Kluwer serves in the European Union are all civil law structure where that's not the case for common law in the United States. The methods and the approaches that you go about for deciding what is relevant law in a court case is different in the United States. That's another place to just be aware of is that it's just the frame of mindset is different when you are talking about litigation in general. Then when you get to regulatory, it's even further different, I think, in the US in terms of the market position and how you apply technology to those problems.

00:33:48] Would you say the threat from companies such as Harvey and Legora to someone such as Wolters is in the form of a direct replacement of something Wolters provides today? Is it almost a replacement in a certain area where they disintermediate Wolters, or is it more that they're going to take up more budget, and as a consequence, Wolters might risk getting cut because one of the other research providers gets favoured by the law firm?

KBC [00:34:31]: I think it's the budget one is the place. Law firms are very risk-averse. What you learn in law school is what you take to your retirement partners. Partners that are senior that learned how to look at regulations using CCH products in 1993 are going to use those until they retire. They're going to go literally say, go get the standard fed, blah, blah, blah, whatever, to an associate, an associate doesn't know what that means. Then they eventually find out, oh, they're talking about a Wolters Kluwer product that used to be in print, and they go search on VitalLaw because they're just trying to follow orders, and they don't know whether or not the request is just go find out what the tax law is. I don't really give a shit which technology you use or which vendor you use, but this is what I used, and that's why I call it that.

00:35:38] Could you break down Wolters' competitive positioning in the US when it comes to software offerings within the Legal & Regulatory division?

KBC [00:36:18]: The legal software division that reports up into Martin O'Malley is managed out of Europe. It contains Legisway, Kleos, and I think they have one or two other little things that they've bought there. Kleos serves the small law firms with practice management that would be similar to Clio in the United States. That's really what it does. I view it as a bit of a question mark as to how far they can go. That's a little bit harder sell. It was never considered seriously in the US to push, a, because it's a market mismatch, it would serve small law and penetration in the legal and regulatory business has been in large law in the information business. Then secondly, it's a very fragmented and stratified market for those practice management solutions like Time Matters or Abacus or Clio or all the others. It's just a very different market, so it was never released over in the US, and I don't see it as being an opportunity.

Legisway is the combination of two companies, Effacts, which was a Dutch contract life cycle management product and then Legisway, which is a French one. Those were merged together and rebranded as Legisway, and I think it's all one platform at this point. That product line had been sold in the US, the Effacts first and then rebranded Legisway and then rolled out the new technology. That's a very de minimis part of the revenue in the US. It was late to the market. Contract life cycle management is a significant investment with Ironclad and Agiloft and some of these other much bigger players that took on a lot more investment and did the land grab. Right now, I view contract life cycle management as a zombie category. I don't think anybody is buying across the market. Two years ago at CLOC, I was talking with people, and they had a meeting of vendors that were in that space. They're all like, "Yes, there's nothing new out there that nobody knew was buying."

I think that function of contract life cycle management is getting embedded in core enterprise products that need contract visibility and the law department is the one place where you could potentially really buy. If you've got that problem solved, you just don't need to buy it anymore. I view that as low-growth, retention-based business, very few logos and de minimis in the US. It's also managed by the information side as opposed to the ELM solutions division, which is a separate division or business unit within the division.

00:39:28] Is Legisway being run out of the information solutions side and not the ELM [enterprise legal management] side?

KBC [00:39:39]: Yes. It's run out of the information side. I actually managed that for several years while I was there, including the relaunch. One other quick note there is the ELM side since we'll probably bridge into that. That business unit also bought a contract life cycle management product called CLM Matrix. That product, you won't find on any website anymore. It was a failure, and those customers were migrated over into Legisway to the extent that they were willing.

00:40:24] From a revenue contribution perspective, do you expect Wolters' software side to remain relatively low vs information solutions for the foreseeable future?

KBC [00:40:40]: I don't have as much visibility, and it's more driven by the European market. I'll go back to Nancy McKinstry, the CEO. I think her capstone, what she was looking to do was ride out her career by saying, "I took a slow lumbering publishing company in print, transformed it into an information business and then swapped out portfolio assets, so it's really a software business and get re-rated by the market as a software business." I think that's what she was looking to do. I think some of the broader picture was they created this fifth division of corporate software with Tagetik and the Enablon product and others. That has not gone very well. One of the assets moved into another group and then sold off. They haven't been very successful with high-growth software revenue like they wanted to. Then all the AI work re-energised the information side of the business. It went counter to their narrative. I do think if Legisway and ELM products were growing at a rapid rate, they would have been moved over into that division. I'll say it that way.

00:41:59] In the examples we discussed, it seems Kleos hasn't really come out in the US market anyway, and even if it did, it would be a mismatch and wouldn't really work. Legisway has its own issues, especially on the contract life cycle management side of things for the market. Is there a software offering Wolters could venture into a bit more in the US that would have potential, or do you think it's better to just stick to its bread and butter in this case?

KBC [00:42:54]: They have the ELM products, TyMetrix or T360, whatever they call it and Passport. Those are US-centric, US-managed substantial businesses, two products under their ELM solutions. They did buy Brightflag, which is also in that space, too. I think a little lower in the market, has a little bit more footprint in Europe, is new technology and has momentum. They did not organise that underneath the ELM business. They kept it separate. I'm speculating here, but I'm expecting that's because of an earn-out structure and also because you don't want to touch it if it's growing really well by contaminating with the slower-growth legacy part of the ELM solution. They have three products that are substantially similar in different technology stacks and different areas of the market, and they've intentionally kept the Brightflag piece separate.

SM [00:43:58]: Even as of the latest H1 2026 results, Brightflag is separate, whereas ELM is TyMetrix 360 and Passport. Is that correct?

KBC [00:44:05]: Yes. That's a big difference. The category is also, I think, an important observation because e-billing, if you strip away the core value proposition, it's corporations and law firms haggling over bills. That gets into these outside counsel guidelines that I mentioned earlier. A lot of times, the de facto sales pitch by anybody selling one of these e-billing solutions is, I can line-item veto. If you have our solution, I can line-item reject things that don't comply with your guidelines so you can reduce the spend. It's adversarial and lawyers are naturally adversarial too. In my opinion, is not a strong platform to then add other value products that compete on value, not on cost or that provide collaboration opportunities to reduce friction across law firms and corporations together. That's, I think, one thing that is a bit of a challenge. I think CLM was an area that conceptually is probably a better one that you could anchor adjacent acquisitions or products to. I think the adversarial nature of e-billing makes it a lot harder. It doesn't mean they can't or that they wouldn't or that they could organise something separate. I would want to emphasise that, especially if they continue to manage portfolio of products as opposed to a deep platform.

00:45:57] From a growth trajectory outlook, looking at Legal & Regulatory software, at least for the time being, Brightflag was showing strong double-digit growth, while ELM solutions were showing mid-single-digit organic growth, primarily driven by transactional revenues. Is that in line with how you expect these two areas to grow for over the next 2-3 years, or do you expect one area to pick up or slow down?

KBC [00:46:36]: I would expect that, that's probably a reasonable thing. I think as long as Brightflag is the bright shiny object, the one that externally in the market, if somebody is going to switch to an e-billing solution, that's going to be on their shortlist. I think Brightflag will continue to grow. I think the ELM Passport, TyMetrix it's hard to switch, especially when they're high in the market, they're Fortune 250. There's a lot more switching costs involved to get out of those products. There's also an interesting trend in the market where when somebody wants to move away, the knee-jerk from most of these vendors is, "Well, then we'll bill your law firm. Don't cancel us. You don't have to pay, we'll charge your law firms on your behalf," which I think is an interesting dynamic in that e-billing space in general because it creates a first line of defence that we're not happy, we won't want to cancel across the market. If you aren't paying for it, you don't care as much. I think broadly in the legal market in general, there's a lot more complexity to the way retention plays out and how monetisation works that the typical, I think, investment analyst doesn't fully understand. Just saying that upfront.

00:48:25] The information solutions side saw 5% organic growth, led by continued strong organic growth in digital revenues in H1 2026 on a YoY basis. What's your growth outlook for this side?

KBC [00:48:56]: I think that that's probably in line. I know that others in the market are recognising their moat is their data, and they need to focus a lot on ever-expanding data. Having started at Lexis, I follow them a lot more, but they measure their total data content sets in petabytes. They have a ton of data and a lot of data that they've collected even with older methodologies for 30, 40, 50 years. I think that and comparing it to the Wolters Kluwer bias towards the written word makes them a little more vulnerable. I think if they can continue to expand and add more data and recognise that primary-source information, publicly available information that's well-linked and has appropriate metadata will strengthen their position and allow them to continue to play. I don't know that they're going to monetise that in a dramatic way because it's me-too, but it will keep their retention position strong, and they'll be able to continue to get that 5% uptick on a contract on an annual basis into a three-year deal.

Ten I look at Lexis, which I think their H1 13% growth. I think that's pretty telling also as to they're fine. I think Wolters Kluwer is fine and defensible right now. If you look at the physics, if you will, of the marketplace, if you have Lexis getting 13% and that's additional wallet share, even if it's the wallet expanding, there are breakpoints here where some of this stuff becomes a reckoning point and how much are we using, where do we go if we have to reduce the number of vendors. There's been a long-term pass, I think, for the main four vendors in the marketplace, but does that get re-evaluated at some point? I think that's realistic to consider in the next few years, that's a risk.

00:51:31] From recent growth figures posted by Wolters, or historically, how would you rank or split out growth across new customer wins vs up- and cross-selling vs flat price increases? Do you think one has been the dominant driver, or do you think they've all played an equal role?

KBC [00:52:08]: I think it's price. Having access to content for shifting the model from letting people select title by title to saying, we only licence in this practice area in these bundles, which is a common practice in the market. I'm speaking from the US side. I think there's also been a drag because Wolters Kluwer was the most print-centric of all of the businesses and COVID took a real… That was one of the easiest ways to control your expense was to stop buying print.

00:53:03] What do you think is the largest opportunity for Wolters and its Legal & Regulatory division over the next 1-2 years vs the largest risk or threat over the next 2-3 years?

KBC [00:53:33]: I think to the division, I think they have to execute on Libra and play that through and whatever they're doing in the US. I think they need to expand data. I think that's table stakes. Then I think more broadly, they need to decide how do they want to compete? Are there acquisitions that they want to make that would change the game fundamentally. I'm being purely hypothetical here, but what if they did something like bought iManage or went after other systems that had a system of record. I think there are things like that from an acquisition standpoint that could be higher risk, higher reward in terms of anchoring them in further and continuing to make them a very relevant vendor that you cannot ignore and that you could not ever think of cancelling, think about being in the managing partner meeting or whatever, "We're not getting away from Wolters Kluwer." I can hear that voice echoing down through and then the decision says what other vendors can remove because law firms have 150-200 vendors. There's a lot that they're playing through on that long tail.

That's my broader take because they've got to make those decisions. In the United States, when the last time they made an acquisition in the information space, it's been at least 20 years, I think. Then the e-billing thing, they've got to figure out, is there another category they want to go after? Can we go after the corporate side where I think more of the money is. I think that's the big question.

00:55:30] Is there anything else you would like to add or highlight regarding Wolters or the wider industry?

KBC [00:55:45]: I think, do you want to talk OpenAI and Claude for a second?

SM [00:55:49]: Yes, that would be great.

KBC [00:55:53]: I would say my take on the moves that Anthropic and OpenAI have done in legal are more check-the-box. I think the prize for them is not law firms. I think the prize for them is corporate enterprises and then consumer. A lot of consumer behaviour is tied to law and health. I think they have to do a little bit there. Then when you go to the enterprise and you're trying to sell Ford or DuPont or somebody on, "Hey, become an Anthropic shop," they have to have an answer for all the major departments in the organisation. Now that doesn't mean that when you get into implementation in year three, you're looking at your priorities and legal, the law department drops off because they've got other solutions. I think that's a very realistic play. Also, I think OpenAI and Anthropic as long as they continue to make their latest models, their skills, everything that they're doing available to Harvey, Legora, Lexis, Thomson, Wolters Kluwer, everybody else, those products only get better, and it would be an antitrust issue for them to start to block and be them as competitors.

I view the market as it's a non-event for Claude and Anthropic for the foreseeable future. I think they just have to do things. It's more on the corporate side, which is where there's less play and as long as those products can be inherited, the last-mile work, the hands-on, the customer support, the working, training users, everything else plays to the vendors that focus on legal tax.

SM [00:57:39]: I think that will be a good note to end on. Let me close by saying thank you so much. I feel like we covered a lot of ground there as well, got a lot of great insights into the market. That was incredibly helpful. It was a pleasure speaking with you. I hope you enjoyed it too.

KBC [00:57:59]: All right. I enjoyed it, too. Thank you so much.

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