LexisNexis's revenue grew by 10% in H1, fuelled by take-up of its AI-enabled technology, making it its parent company RELX Group's fastest-growing division.
Underlying revenue grew to £959m, a record performance for the division, with adjusted operating profit up by 13%.
LexisNexis attributed the performance primarily to demand for Lexis+ Protégé, its core AI offering, which assists lawyers with legal research, drafting and document analysis.
The company said it continues to roll out enhancements to AI tools such as its legal workflow product Protégé Work.
Speaking during an investor call, RELX CEO Erik Engstrom said AI-enabled products now account for around 90% of the value of new LexisNexis sales, while roughly three-quarters of renewal value comes from the Lexis+ with Protégé package.
He added: "Lexis+ with Protégé is continuing on the same penetration curve, the trend that we’ve had before in terms of share of revenue. What we can see in terms of number of customers is that it’s probably growing slightly faster now in terms of number of institutions. Users is growing faster than number of institutions, and usage growth is faster than number of users. It’s on a very positive trend... "
Last month, Bloomberg Law reported that some legal technology companies were beginning to explore pricing models based on token usage – tokens being the units of text processed by AI models – as AI agents process increasingly large volumes of data.
However, according to CFO Nick Luff, LexisNexis is not under pressure to abandon its subscription model. He said the company saw “effectively managing [token costs] on behalf of customers” as a “significant competitive advantage”, adding: “Of course, the cost of tokens is going up, but it's still less than 1% of our overall cost base.”
RELX's shares fell more than 14% in early February after Anthropic unveiled Claude for Legal, fuelling concerns that AI developers could disrupt established legal information providers.
However, analysts argued this was an over-reaction given the importance of LexisNexis's proprietary data. Although the shares rose following the H1 results, they have yet to recover all of those losses.
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