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2 episodes · 39 quoted claims
Gabe Pereyra worked on a large language model team at Meta around the GPT-2 and GPT-3 era before co-founding Harvey.
“when I was working at Meta on their large language model team, this was around GPT two, GPT three, you kind of saw these models getting better.”
Harvey's co-founder Winston, then working at a large law firm and Gabe Pereyra's roommate, showed Pereyra his legal workflows, which led to the company's founding.
“my roommate and now co-founder Winston was working at a large law firm, and he showed me his legal tech, his legal workflows.”
Pereyra says Harvey is used to help associates do their work, with output still reviewed by more senior lawyers, rather than to file documents directly.
“Harvey wasn't being used as, hey, go write this memo and file it directly. It was being used as help this associate do their work better, and then that still gets reviewed.”
Harvey has begun partnering with legal data providers including Lexis and Wolters Kluwer to improve its systems and reduce errors.
“now, as we've gotten bigger, we've started partnering with Lexis, Wolters Kluwer, kind of data providers, working with these law firms to kind of improve these systems to avoid those challenges.”
Pereyra says law firms are typically divided into transactional and litigation departments, and Harvey started by serving transactional work.
“So law firms are typically split into transactional and litigation departments.”
Pereyra says law firms manage tens of thousands of client matters at a time, which is why Harvey is building ways to organize and query them.
“So law firms are managing tens of thousands of these matters at a time.”
Harvey does not pre-train its own foundation models; it uses existing models and adds post-training plus retrieval and agent infrastructure for legal work.
“we don't pre-train models, and so we will use, you know, pre-trained models from the foundation or cloud providers. We do post-train and build kind of all the RAG and agent infrastructure”
In early testing, Harvey's founders had GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 answer questions taken from Reddit's r/legaladvice community.
“we went on r slash legal advice, which is like a Reddit subcommunity where people ask legal questions. And we just downloaded a bunch of those and had 3.5 and four answer these questions.”
Pereyra says about 80 to 85% of lawyers shown the AI-generated answers said they would give them to a client without editing.
“And it was something like eighty, 85% said yes for a lot of these answers.”
Pereyra says Harvey already has internal systems that automatically negotiate its own non-disclosure agreements.
“Like already internally, we have systems that automatically negotiate our NDAs.”
Pereyra says fund formation, where investment firms set up and structure funds, is a major use case among private equity and financial services clients such as Bridgewater.
“One very big use case is fund formation.”
Pereyra says much fund formation work is unprofitable for law firms and gets written off.
“there is a lot of work in fund formation that is not profitable for law firms.”
Pereyra says PwC is ahead of many firms in rethinking how it provides services in the AI era.
“I think with PwC, we've talked with them a lot, and they're kind of, I think, ahead of the game in terms of thinking about, okay, how we need to provide services in this new way.”
Harvey's sales team includes former associates and senior associates from top law firms who help map firms' workflows into the product.
“we also have a bunch of lawyers from top law firms that were associates, senior associates that help sell the product”
Harvey tests for hallucinations using benchmarks and human evaluations by its internal team, contractors and clients.
“we have a bunch of benchmarks, we do a ton of human evaluations, so we have both our internal team, we use a ton of contractors, we work with our clients”
Harvey uses its own instances and dedicated cloud capacity, potentially isolated per customer, to protect confidential legal data.
“we have our own instances, we have dedicated capacity. This is isolated, um, potentially for individual customers.”
Harvey is partnering with several law schools to bring AI tools into their curricula; the host specifically mentioned Notre Dame.
“We're we're partnering with a bunch of a bunch of law schools”
Pereyra predicts more law firms will adopt lower leverage ratios, with the number of associates closer to the number of partners.
“if you look at the top law firms, they have this like lower leverage ratio where probably you start seeing more law firms like that”
Pereyra said Harvey had nearly 1,000 customers and about 500 employees, and was founded just over three and a half years earlier.
“We're almost at one zero customers, 500 employees, started about just over three and a half years ago and so been kind of scaling quickly since then.”
Harvey gained access to GPT-4 when it first raised money from OpenAI.
“when we 1st raised from OpenAI, we got access to GPT four, and I think GPT three to GPT four was such a big model jump.”
Harvey announced it signed Walmart and is working with AT&T and other Fortune 500 companies and private equity firms.
“we've signed Walmart, we're working with ATT, a bunch of these Fortune 500 large private equity firms, Global 2000”
On the first day of GPT-4 access, Harvey co-founder Winston Weinberg spent 14 hours redoing his associate tasks with the model.
“Winston went in his room for 14 h and just redid a bunch of his associate tasks.”
Pereyra did reinforcement learning research while at DeepMind.
“when I was at DeepMind, a lot of the RL research I did was that.”
Gordon Moodie, a former partner at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, joined Harvey early and is now an advisor.
“Gordon Moody was a partner at Wachtell, which is one of the top transactional firms in the world that joined us early on and is now an advisor.”
Pereyra said the Wachtell partner worked on Michael Dell's multi-year take-private and re-listing of Dell.
“he was a part of, Uh, when Michael Dell took Dell private and then restructured it and took it public again.”
Pereyra said the Dell restructuring involved the largest debt offering of all time and a newly invented financial instrument.
“At the time, they had to do the largest debt offering of all time, they had to create, they had to invent a new financial instrument.”
Pereyra said Harvey's forward deployed engineering program resembles Sierra's agent engineering program rather than Palantir's model.
“I would say this is closer to, like, Sierra's agent engineering Um program.”
Harvey did some customization for very large customers such as PwC.
“for very large customers like PwC, we did some customization.”
Pereyra said some law firms now resell Harvey to their in-house clients and help implement workflows.
“They're starting to go and take Harvey and go to their clients and say, Hey, buy Harvey. And we'll help you build all the workflows and implement it.”
Harvey's first customer was reached through an introduction from an investor to an ex-partner, who introduced them to David Wakeling.
“Our 1st customer we actually met through. You intro'd us to an ex partner who's doing business school here, and he intro'd us to David Wakeling”
While researching, Harvey's founders spoke with 30 people from Atrium, a tech-enabled law firm.
“we actually talked to 30 people from Atrium.”
Y Combinator invested in Atrium, and its general counsel at the time later became OpenAI's general counsel, according to Pereyra.
“was the GC at Y Combinator when they did the Atrium investment.”
Pereyra estimated legal services at about $1 trillion and professional services at roughly $3 to $5 trillion.
“the scope of this, like legal, is 1 trillion, professional services is something like three to 5 trillion.”
Pereyra said Harvey grew from him and Winston Weinberg in an Airbnb to 500 people in about three and a half years.
“Winston and I in an Airbnb to 500 people in like three and a half years.”
Pereyra worked on large language models at Meta before Harvey.
“I was working on large language models at Meta.”
Pereyra said Harvey's initial differentiating feature was uploading a document and acting on it, with accurate citations.
“the initial feature we built that none of the products had at the time was upload a document and do something with it, right?”
Harvey hired a site lead for its New York office to scale it up.
“We just hired a site lead for New York, so starting to scale up that office.”
Pereyra said he spent the decade before Harvey trying to start a company like it.
“I actually just spent the decade before Harvey trying to start a company like Harvey.”
Pereyra said law firms are about ten times larger than before computers and the internet.
“law firms have like ten times the size compared to before computers and the internet.”