On February 3, 2026 the market decided that professional-information publishers were next in line to be eaten. Anthropic had posted a set of plug-ins for its Claude agent, one of them aimed at in-house legal teams, and when the financial press picked it up the data-analytics complex sold off on both sides of the Atlantic — a move Reuters described as a selloff that "deepened on Tuesday, with some investors pointing to a recently updated artificial intelligence chatbot by Anthropic as the main culprit" . RELX lost more than £6bn of market value in a day . By the time it reported full-year results nine days later, its shares had slid from 4,135p to 2,013p over twelve months and were trading at four-year lows .
RELX sells information-based analytics and decision tools through four divisions. Risk is LexisNexis Risk Solutions — fraud, identity, financial-crime compliance and insurance data. Scientific, Technical & Medical is Elsevier. Legal is LexisNexis, the case-law research franchise. Exhibitions runs face-to-face trade events. A shrinking print tail sits outside all four, and North America supplied £2,878m of the £4,871m of first-half revenue . The London shares also trade in New York as a one-for-one depositary receipt, which is the line quoted here: $36.13, inside a 52-week range of $27.57 to $47.22 and down 19.4% over a year .
The argument of this piece is narrow and checkable. The market repriced the whole company for a disruption thesis about Legal; Legal supplies roughly an eighth of group profit; and it is the division that sped up.
Legal is twelve percent of profit, and it is the fastest-growing division
In the half to June 30, 2026, reported on July 23, Legal produced £959m of revenue and £208m of adjusted operating profit, against group figures of £4,871m and £1,727m . The division that carried the de-rating is a fifth of revenue and 12% of adjusted operating profit. The largest division by some distance is Risk, at £1,810m of revenue and £697m of profit — 40% of group earnings. STM contributes £519m of profit, Exhibitions £226m.
Profit share is the right yardstick here...