When Thomson Reuters acquired ThoughtTrace in 2022, it scooped up a software provider that relied on artificial intelligence and machine learning to analyze documents and contracts for sector-specific use cases in industries like real estate and energy.
The company also got a future chief technology officer out of the deal.
Joel Hron, who had served as CTO of ThoughtTrace at the time of the acquisition, came into the fold at Thomson Reuters as a VP of technology to spearhead integration into the larger company’s ecosystem that includes the Reuters news agency and various tools sold to legal, tax, and other corporate professionals.
By 2023, Hron became head of AI and Thomson Reuters Labs, a decades-old research and development group whose work was dramatically changing as the generative AI boom was leading companies to rethink their approach on AI. During Hron’s tenure, TR Labs accelerated hiring and launched seven generative AI products in 18 months, including AI assistants for legal research and contract drafting.
That group still reports to Hron, who ascended to the CTO role in July 2024. Using the lessons he learned as an outsider who joined Thomson Reuters via an acquired startup, Hron is now helping to steer an aggressive M&A strategy that will continue to see more newly acquired technologies and teams added to the roster.
Since 2019, Thomson Reuters has spent $4.2 billion on acquisitions, adding e-invoicing provider Pagero, and automation software providers SafeSend and SurePrep to the company’s portfolio. Hron says these companies come with unique intellectual property that may take too much time or be too costly for Thomson Reuters to build on its own. There are also times where talent acquisition is a key consideration.
“I think the teams that we’ve acquired have been extremely critical—and I would probably include myself in that—in moving Thomson Reuters forward into being a more entrepreneurial and technology-led company,” says Hron.
It’s critical that Thomson Reuters and the smaller companies it acquires be aligned on future revenue and user growth targets, says Hron. But there must also be agreement on what technology integration will look like, especially in the first year after the deal closes. He shares the experience of integrating Materia, a startup that specializes in agentic AI tools for tax, audio, and accounting professionals.
“Being a small team, you run this risk of swallowing them and their priorities very early on,” says Hron. It would be easy for Thomson Reuters to get excited about Materia’s more-indie tech solutions and quickly plug it into the dozens of tax products the company offers across its portfolio.
Instead, he advocates that both parties align on as few as three business goals that the Materia team should prioritize. “Everything else that other teams might ask of you are not necessary,” he adds. That allows the smaller startup to remain focused on the specific problems that they were built to solve in the first place.
After the one-year mark, integration accelerates, a reflection of technology maturing and the combined companies having a shared roadmap of future product development, as well as Thomson Reuters wanting to get the most out of the hundreds of millions it may spend when buying these startups. By linking acquired technologies in one product suite, Thomson Reuters can make a more compelling pitch to customers.
“A lot of the value proposition of us acquiring companies is really solving the problem for our customers in a more end-to-end way,” says Hron.
When it comes to integrating and standardizing back-end systems, Hron describes a more pliable process. Since cybersecurity and compliance standards are uniform across all of Thomson Reuters, acquired startups are immediately standardized. But Hron takes a more hands-off approach when it comes to some administrative tools. If a startup’s team prefers to use Slack, they’re allowed to continue to do so even if Thomson Reuters relies on
Microsoft Teams. Over time, as those teams blend together and work more collaboratively, everyone will tend to gravitate to the same systems.
Branding decisions are also taken on a case-by-case basis. Materia’s technology was folded into the company’s CoCounsel offering, while the SafeSend and SurePrep names remained intact because they are still recognizable brands within the market.
There is also plenty of work that the team has been doing to transform the company’s existing products. In August, Hron says the online research tool Westlaw unveiled Deep Research, an agentic workflow that can plan, review, and strategize legal research in a manner that emulates human work.
With more than 100 products, each with domain specific-functionality, Hron sees many more opportunities to plug in agentic AI to speed up work for legal and tax professionals.
“That really opens the aperture of what is possible for us with our existing portfolio of applications, if we can really expose them in a way that fits within this agentic context that we’re moving towards,” he said.
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