Harvey offers a suite of tools for legal professionals with AI-enabled solutions for drafting, research, document analysis, redlining, and other related workflows. It leverages large language models and AI agents trained on complex legal tasks and fine-tuned by domain experts. Founded by Winston Weinberg and Gabe Pereyra, Harvey leverages cutting-edge AI to address pressing challenges in legal practice, offering a highly tailored solution that stands apart in a crowded market.
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The Vision Behind Harvey: Background of the Company and Its Founders
Harvey was co-founded by Winston Weinberg, an antitrust and securities litigation attorney who started his career with O'Melveny & Myers, and Gabe Pereyra, an AI researcher who’d previously worked at Google and DeepMind. Harvey’s story begins in 2021, when the two were roommates in Los Angeles. Late-night discussions revealed a compelling overlap between their professional expertise: while Pereyra was advancing large language model (LLM) research, Weinberg was immersed in the repetitive and mechanical tasks of junior legal work. They talked about what they were each working on and realized that much of the work that Weinberg was doing as a junior associate could potentially be augmented by large language models. They started testing discrete legal workflows using these models and realized pretty quickly that they were on to something.
Together, they envisioned a platform that could alleviate these inefficiencies by applying AI to streamline legal workflows. Energized by their value proposition, they pitched the idea for Harvey to executives at OpenAI, who were so excited that they decided to lead a Seed round investment in Harvey.
From its inception, Harvey has embraced a dual commitment to AI engineering and legal expertise. This ethos is reflected in its team structure, which includes attorneys working closely with engineers to ensure the platform meets the nuanced needs of legal professionals. Since launch in 2022, Harvey has raised additional funding from Sequoia Capital, Kleiner Perkins, and Google Ventures, fueling the company’s rapid growth.
The Legal Sector’s Challenges and Harvey’s Solution
Legal practice is fraught with inefficiencies. Attorneys often spend disproportionate amounts of time on repetitive, low-value tasks like drafting, document review, and research - tasks that neither excite practitioners nor align with the high-value work clients expect.
Harvey’s mission is to allow lawyers to focus on substantive, intellectually rewarding tasks by offloading the mechanical ones to its AI platform. As Weinberg puts it, “The work attorneys go to law school to do, and what clients pay for, is not the work they’re spending most of their time doing.”
For example, junior associates traditionally learn by performing complex legal analysis alongside time-consuming mechanical tasks, such as extracting precedent language or reviewing redlines. By automating these processes, Harvey accelerates attorneys’ paths to mastery, enabling them to focus on client-centered, value-driven work.
Key Use Cases Addressed by Harvey
Harvey addresses a wide range of legal workflows, categorized into several key use cases:
- Contract Analysis and Extraction: Harvey excels at extracting terms and clauses from contracts, enabling attorneys to quickly access critical information. In its Vault module, Harvey allows for uploading from many thousands of contracts with a limitless number of customizable provisions for extraction.
- Document Review and Discovery: The platform automates review tasks across litigation and transactional contexts, ensuring efficiency in high-volume workflows like targeted discovery.
- Drafting: Harvey supports the drafting of discrete provisions as well as entire documents, including pleadings and transactional agreements, freeing up attorneys to focus on legal strategy. Harvey’s Word add-on allows for clause-based drafting, leveraging Harvey’s models in addition to user-specified precedents. Harvey’s Assistant mode allows for drafting from scratch or from precedent, at the document or clause level.
- Legal Research: Using AI-assisted retrieval and generation, Harvey helps attorneys efficiently navigate regulatory sources, case law, and public filings. Harvey’s EDGAR function allows for full EDGAR workflows. Its tax function provides cross-jurisdictional access to tax resources through a library of data sources that was co-developed with PwC.
- Due Diligence: By streamlining repetitive aspects of diligence, including red flag identification, Harvey reduces the time and cost of transactional reviews.
Harvey also supports advanced outputs, such as generating chronological tables of litigation events, adding a layer of clarity to complex legal matters.
The Technology Behind Harvey: Leveraging AI
Harvey is an AI-native company, designed around the capabilities of large language models. The platform employs a mix of custom LLMs and commercial-grade models like OpenAI’s GPT-4.0 and o1. Notably, Harvey is model-agnostic, integrating a variety of AI models based on their suitability for specific legal tasks. Partners such as Mistral and other open-source providers also contribute jurisdiction-specific models for nuanced applications.
What sets Harvey apart is the sophistication of its AI infrastructure. Unlike simpler AI tools that rely on single model calls, Harvey chains together multiple model calls—often ranging from 30 to 1,200—to produce a single, comprehensive output. For example, when asked to analyze a merger agreement, the platform sequentially processes defined terms, cross-references, and specific covenants to ensure an accurate, high-quality response. This approach is supplemented by attorney reinforcement learning and rigorous quality benchmarking, ensuring outputs meet the highest standards of legal accuracy.
Harvey’s Target Demographic
Harvey is tailored for two primary audiences:
- Law Firms: From junior associates to senior partners, Harvey enables lawyers at all levels to streamline workflows, focus on high-value tasks, and deliver better outcomes for clients.
- Corporate Legal Departments: In-house teams benefit from Harvey’s ability to reduce operational costs and improve efficiency, particularly in document-heavy tasks like compliance, contracting, and litigation management.
Harvey’s intuitive interface and AI-driven capabilities make it accessible to professionals across varying levels of technical proficiency, ensuring widespread adoption.
Setting Harvey Apart: Differentiators in the Competitive Landscape of Legal AI
While the legaltech market includes numerous AI tools, Harvey distinguishes itself through its legal specificity and depth. Many competing products, particularly consumer-grade tools like ChatGPT or AI “wrappers,” lack the tailored functionality needed for complex legal tasks. Harvey’s outputs, enriched with inline citations and quality-controlled responses, reflect a superior level of accuracy, trustworthiness and legal specificity, supported by a state-of-the-art security infrastructure.
Another key differentiator is Harvey’s approach to user experience. The platform is designed with intuitive workflows that minimize the need for detailed prompts. The latest updates introduce “agentic workflows,” enabling users to accomplish sophisticated tasks with minimal input. As Weinberg explains, “Harvey should be so intuitive that attorneys could operate it with their elbows.”
Finally, Harvey’s commitment to partnership—rather than mere client service—sets it apart. With a team of in-house attorneys working alongside product designers and customer success managers, Harvey ensures the platform evolves in direct response to user feedback. This collaborative approach has solidified its reputation as a trusted partner in the legal industry.
Harvey’s legal AI platform is more than just a productivity tool—it represents a paradigm shift in how legal professionals work. By combining AI sophistication with deep legal expertise, Harvey enables attorneys to focus on the substance of their practice, delivering greater value to clients while enhancing job satisfaction.
