Critics of the legislation want the government to water it down, but for many employees change can’t come too soon
When Seamus Foley took a job on a zero-hours contract at a board games bar in London two years ago, the flexibility it offered was appealing. Now, it is a deal so bad he is prepared to walk out on strike.
“It’s exhausting. You’re constantly living your life on the back foot,” says the employee at Draughts, which has bars in Stratford and Waterloo. There, workers fed up with last-minute rota changes and a lack of basic protections are staging industrial action.
As Americans wrap up their summer trips and students get in the swing of a new school year, Labor Day weekend can feel like the last hurrah after months of hot weather and relaxation.
“What we’re seeing is a new era of competition,” Thomson Reuters chief executive Steve Hasker told analysts on a recent earnings call.
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Big Law is lavishing money on software to give clients faster, smarter legal service.
Many millions are funneled toward the Big Two in legal tech: LexisNexis and Thomson Reuters.
It is unclear whether startups can move fast enough to pry budget from incumbents.
There’s never been more money in legal software — or more ways to burn it.
Ask LexisNexis. Founded in 1973, the company sells a legal research platform that lawyers use to draft and analyze documents. Its parent company, Relx, posted $1.2 billion in revenue for the legal segment in the first half of this year, buoyed 9% year-over-year by firms paying up for its “intelligent” new tools.
“Law firms are spending more money on technology than they ever have,” said Sean Fitzpatrick, chief executive of LexisNexis’ North American group. The question is where those dollars go next.
The duopoly LexisNexis shares with Thomson Reuters, which also provides accounting and media services, is no longer unchallenged. Startups are muscling into the same budget line, promising next-gen alternatives. And Vlex, a distant third in the legal research race, has agreed to a $1 billion sale that would bundle its tools into a legal ops platform many lawyers already live in.
Spending is soaring, competition is swarming, and for the first time in a long time, the outcome isn’t obvious.
“What we’re seeing is a new era of competition,” Thomson Reuters chief executive Steve Hasker told analysts on a recent earnings call, citing “a bunch of startups” and newly energized incumbents. He insisted Thomson Reuters has the edge: proprietary data and a “single integrated solution” that combines content and workflows.
Breaking up a duopoly
LexisNexis and Thomson Reuters invested billions over decades to create comprehensive, searchable, citation-linked databases. The duo’s early head start created a moat that’s almost impossible for new entrants to breach.
In 2022, OpenAI released GPT-3.5, a set of models that could understand and produce plain language and code. At the time, David Wong was two years out of Facebook and settling into his role as chief product officer of Thomson Reuters. It didn’t take long to connect the dots between what large language models could do — retrieve information and produce written work — and what his company sells. “That’s what all of our products do,” Wong told Business Insider.
Suddenly, the threat felt existential. “If Thomson Reuters doesn’t do something with this tech to either enhance or replace our products,” Wong recalled, “others will, and we’ll be obsolete.”
Thomson Reuters moved fast. It acquired Casetext, an early mover in automating legal workflows. It pulled veteran machine learning researchers out of the lab, said Joel Hron, the chief technology officer of Thomson Reuters, and put them to work on shipping product. And the company doubled the size of its applied research group to 260 people.
Its legal segment, the largest of its three main businesses, is growing healthily. Legal “organic” revenue, which strips out factors like acquisitions and divestitures, grew 8% for two straight quarters.
If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em
Big Law is lavishing money on software.
It’s yet to be seen whether legal-tech startups — unburdened by legacy code and built on the latest models — can shift spend away from the incumbents, or if total budgets will simply expand.
Fitzpatrick, for his part, doesn’t see any of the new entrants as a serious threat to LexisNexis. “To be successful, you’re not going to be able to differentiate on technology alone,” he said over Zoom.
The bull case for LexisNexis and Thomson Reuters is that even if firms buy new tools, their legal research subscriptions are nonnegotiable.
Law is an industry built on precedent. Judges, law schools, and citation norms all orbit around Lexis and Westlaw. As the former litigator Shlomo Klapper put it, “If it’s not in Wexis, it doesn’t exist.”
If any startup is positioned to challenge “Wexis,” it’s Harvey. The company, with backing from venture capital giants, wants to make an operating system for law. This year, Harvey’s roadmap has been all about meeting lawyers where they work — inside systems like iManage, LexisNexis, and even ChatGPT. It’s now piloting a feature that allows customers to search Lexis content directly inside the Harvey interface.
Fitzpatrick described the LexisNexis-Harvey relationship as symbiotic. “Most firms are going to want both,” he said.
Winston Weinberg, who briefly worked as a lawyer before starting Harvey with research scientist Gabe Pereyra, believes the pie is expanding. Law firms are becoming more like tech firms, and chief innovation officers are becoming “more like CTOs” in terms of having to build, buy, and manage large tech stacks.
In February, Relx joined Harvey’s $300 million Series D through its corporate venture arm, Rev Ventures. Four months later, it increased its Harvey stake in another $300 million funding round.
The fund typically backs early-stage data and analytics startups across industries, but this bet signaled something more strategic. That LexisNexis, half of the duopoly, is keeping its friends close and its fastest-growing frenemies closer.
Louis Vuitton launched its high-end beauty line this week.
Klaudia Radecka/NurPhoto via Getty Images
Louis Vuitton launched a beauty line with $160 lipsticks and $250 eye shadow palettes.
The line comes amid economic uncertainty and a broader luxury downturn that’s also affected LVMH.
While consumers are cautious, some are still splurging on trendy, indulgent items.
According to the “lipstick index,” sales of lipstick go up in times of economic downturns. The theory, if you believe it, saysconsumers cut back on large purchases and instead opt for smaller, more affordable luxuries.
So what is the likelihood of success when a brand launches a $160 lipstick in this economy?
We may soon find out, thanks to Louis Vuitton‘s new La Beauté line, launched this month with Dame Pat McGrath as its creative director. The acclaimed British makeup artist was dubbed one of the most influential people in the world by Time in 2019, and her own makeup brand, Pat McGrath Labs, was once valued at over $1 billion.
The line officially launched Friday and includes $160 lipsticks and lip balms, $250 eyeshadow pallets, each with four shades, and a line of accessories ranging from a $2,990 mini Louis Vuitton trunk that holds exactly one lipstick to an $870 vanity case that holds, paradoxically, four more.
The products look as gorgeous as one would expect from the iconic French fashion house. Lipstick cases and the actual bullet are imprinted with the LV logo, while the accessories are emblazoned with the brand’s iconic monogram pattern.
Still, the prices are remarkably high, even in the world of luxury beauty. You can buy a Chanel or Dior lipstick, for instance, for a third of the price ($50)of Louis Vuitton’s, and Hermès lipstick ($81) for about half the price.
The debut comes during a broader slowdown in luxury that’s hit even the biggest brands, including Louis Vuitton’s parent company, LVMH, whose long list of brands includes Dior, Fendi, and Givenchy. LVMH’s revenue was down 4% in the first half of 2025 compared to the same time period a year prior, the company said in its July earnings report.
Consumers are being ‘choiceful,’ but they’re still splurging
“Consumer sentiment right now is pretty complicated,” Tamara Charm, a partner at McKinsey who focuses on consumer insights, told Business Insider. Sentiment is not quite as low as it was several months ago, but consumers are still cautious and price-sensitive, she said.
“However, we also see consumers really splurging,” she added. “But it’s for the right thing at the right time.”
Charm said luxury buyers can generally be divided into two groups: those for whom those price points are not out of reach, andthose she calls aspirational luxury buyers, who still purchase luxury goods despite it being a reach for them.
While the former — regular luxury buyers — are still spending on luxury as normal, she said it’s thelatter who have gotten pickier about when they splurge.
“Luxury brands need this aspirational luxury consumer, and the aspirational luxury consumer is being a lot more choiceful right now,” Charm said, adding that the clients she works with are thinking a lot about what the current trends are and what might still get consumers to “reach up.”
Typically, consumers are willing to splurge on super trendy and of-the-moment items, especially when it comes to social media-heavy Gen Z, as well as services or items that have a real “treat yourself” vibe.
“Something like a small expense that gives an outsized punch of fun or indulgence is oftentimes where you see the splurge,” Charm said, which could bode well for Louis Vuitton’s new beauty products, if you buy into the lipstick index.
Hannah Reed, a research analyst at Walnut Collective, told Business Insider that consumers have placed a higher value on skincare and cosmetics in recent years, demonstrating a willingness to pay more — or “invest,” as beauty fans like to call it — for the right product.
“Obviously, with Louis Vuitton, it is going to be on the upper end, but if it’s a good product that works, consumers will see value in it,” she said.
The lipsticks are also refillable, with refills costing $69, so some consumers might view the fancy case as more of a delightful trinket or keepsake. “Then you’ve got something for life, but you can purchase the product as and when you need it or run out,” Reed said.
She added that novelty is also a big draw, and the LV-monogrammed lipstick and eyeshadow cases are the kind of thing that Gen Z shoppers might love, especially if they can use them as bag charms.
Deena R. Merlen, a partner at Reavis Page Jump who has worked with luxury brands, said that despite its relatively high price point, the beauty line is still more affordable than Louis Vuitton bags and could serve as an entry point to the brand. In that sense, she said, the pricy lipstick could be more about optimism rather than a recession indicator.
“Maybe you can’t afford that $6,000 Louis Vuitton bag yet, but you’re up-and-coming, you can afford a $160 lipstick, because times are good and only getting better,” she told Business Insider.
The trick for luxury brands is to find the right product at the right time and price point to inspire consumers to splurge despite their economic worries.
“Value is in the eye of the beholder right now,” Charm said. Just look at what some consumers are willing to spend on Labubu dolls.
“I think we’re going to continue to see luxury products where some of us really don’t understand who is going to buy it,” she said, “and others of us couldn’t understand why the rest of the world doesn’t realize what a value this is.”
Ties between China and Russia are at their “best in history”, having become the “most stable, mature and strategically significant among major countries”, Chinese state broadcaster CCTV said in its report of the arrival.
