Legaltech Hub

Thomson Reuters has built its own AI model, but its strategy points beyond model ownership. As AI becomes increasingly interchangeable, the company is betting that value will shift to proprietary content, expertise, and trust—and that an open ecosystem may be more valuable than a walled garden.

I have many hats I wear at ILTACON.  This year I swapped them out for a reporter fedora and was one of Legaltech Hub’s press pool delegates. It was exhausting but wonderful.  I got to have deep philosophical conversations with founders, product heads, and marketing people about their companies and products and got answers to many of the questions that I’d been wondering about. 

For centuries, much of humanity’s intellectual energy has focused on mastering the world around us. AI may now force us to confront a different frontier, one we have comparatively neglected: the internal world of meaning, ethics, attention, identity, consciousness, and human flourishing. AI may not simply challenge us to become more advanced. It may force us to become more mature.

Dolly Parton died in Nashville on August 25, midway through ILTACON 2026, as more than 5,600 legal technologists filled the city for a week of demos, concerts, and parties. Notes from a first ILTACON on flash, money, and community, and on what an industry spending like never before might take from a woman who proved abundance and generosity were never a tradeoff.

ILTACON 2026 surfaced a market moving in two directions at once: bringing the model in-house while pouring investment into the context, governance, and economics that make it defensible. From the model wars to the knowledge layer to the numbers behind the business of law, a look at who's positioning to turn commoditized intelligence into outcomes clients will pay for.