By Camillo Speroni
Head of Partnerships and Alliances at Thomson Reuters
Those who drive real change don’t do it themselves.
They find the right partners. They move fast. They stay focused on outcomes, not optics. And they build trusted relationships that create real, visible business results.
That’s what changemaking looks like in partnerships.
Change in legal, tax, and compliance doesn’t wait for consensus. I’ve watched firms overhaul their infrastructure and move to the cloud while competitors were still debating the business case. I’ve seen AI go from an emerging capability to the backbone of professional workflows in the span of a few years. The window to lead doesn’t stay open long. The firms that moved decisively won ground they haven’t given back. The ones that hesitated are still catching up.
But here’s the part that gets underestimated: Speed and ambition only get you so far on your own. The real leverage, the kind that creates durable competitive impact, comes from partnerships built on complementary strengths, genuine trust, and a shared obsession with the outcome.
That’s the lens we bring to every partnership at Thomson Reuters: real results for real professionals
I see the same pattern in the work we’re doing alongside Anthropic and Google. Our new MCP integration with Anthropic connects Claude directly to CoCounsel Legal. Attorneys can move seamlessly between general-purpose AI and fiduciary-grade legal workflows without leaving either environment. With Google, we’re extending our solutions through advanced cloud infrastructure so enterprise customers can pursue their broader cloud and AI strategies without sacrificing the security and scalability their work demands.
Our partnership history goes far beyond AI partners and platforms. The Big Four consulting firms have worked closely with Thomson Reuters for decades to find the best compliance solutions for their clients to enable changemakers in large, multinational enterprises. Specialized legal partners like DeepJudge – bringing AI-powered knowledge management to law firms – and Sterne Kessler, where we built a new standard for patent eligibility analysis together, show the same pattern at a different scale. So do our longstanding partnerships with leading ERP providers, where Thomson Reuters content and workflows are embedded directly into the enterprise systems and advisory practices professionals already rely on.
The partners who move markets share a few things in common.
The best ones know their lane and they own it. They bring deep, differentiated expertise and trust you to bring yours. That clarity is what makes the collaboration valuable. Sterne Kessler didn’t need to become a content/data company. They needed a partner who was one.
They also engage at every level. The most productive partnerships aren’t managed at arm’s length through quarterly business reviews. They’re built through ongoing dialogue, real accountability, and people on both sides genuinely invested in making it work. The relationship is the infrastructure.
What separates the best from the rest, though, is the ability to operate in uncertainty. This industry is changing too fast for anyone to have all the answers upfront. The partners who create the most impact make sharp decisions with incomplete information and adjust as clarity develops. Paralysis in the face of ambiguity is expensive.
And underlying all of it: a genuine focus on the mutual win. The best partnerships aren’t zero-sum. They’re structured so that growth for one creates growth for the other. That alignment of incentives is what drives scale and engagement across companies, teams and individuals.
Every significant shift I’ve seen in my career has been accelerated by the right partnerships forming at the right time. We’re in one of those moments now…. AI is moving fast, the regulatory environment is shifting, and the professionals we serve are under more pressure to do more with less. The partnerships we build today will determine what this industry looks like in five years.
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