In brief
Gabe Pereyra, co-founder and president of Harvey, argues that AI works best in law when it assists lawyers and does not replace them. Harvey acts as an AI associate for large law firms and corporations, handling document-heavy work such as contract analysis, research and drafting. Pereyra says this fits the law's existing review hierarchies, which already catch errors, and leaves senior lawyers free for strategy and client relationships.
The main tension is between the efficiency AI brings and the structures that law depends on. Billable hours, the junior-lawyer career ladder, client confidentiality and the risk of hallucinated citations all come under pressure. Pereyra expects firms to move toward fixed-fee or value-based pricing and to train juniors with AI. He says the ethical lines, such as giving legal advice to consumers, still need careful handling.
Facts
Stated by the speakers. Each quote matches the transcript, which shows what was said, not that it is true.
Harvey, the legal AI company, was described by host Rana El Kaliouby as valued at $5 billion about three years after its launch.
“In just three years since their launch, Harvey is now valued at $5 billion and boasts a client roster of some of the biggest law firms out there.”
0:03:15 · Rana el Kaliouby · Valuation
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.”
0:04:17 · Gabe Pereyra · Founder background
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.”
0:04:17 · Gabe Pereyra · Founding story
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.”
0:07:02 · Gabe Pereyra · Law firm adoption
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.”
0:07:38 · Gabe Pereyra · Partnerships
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.”
0:08:01 · Gabe Pereyra · Law firm structure
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.”
0:08:55 · Gabe Pereyra · Law firm scale
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”
0:14:57 · Gabe Pereyra · Technical approach
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.”
0:16:04 · Gabe Pereyra · Early testing
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.”
0:16:35 · Gabe Pereyra · Early testing
In 2023 a lawyer cited court cases that turned out to be AI hallucinations, a story the host raised as a concern about AI in law.
“I kept thinking back to the story from 2023 where there was this lawyer and he cited a bunch of court cases, but of course they were all basically AI hallucinating.”
0:05:59 · Rana el Kaliouby · AI hallucinations · 2023
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.”
0:19:08 · Gabe Pereyra · Automation
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.”
0:20:41 · Gabe Pereyra · Use cases
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.”
0:20:41 · Gabe Pereyra · Law firm economics
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.”
0:21:26 · Gabe Pereyra · Business models
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”
0:24:02 · Gabe Pereyra · Team
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”
0:27:25 · Gabe Pereyra · Safety evaluation
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.”
0:28:29 · Gabe Pereyra · Data security
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”
0:32:26 · Gabe Pereyra · Education
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”
0:31:45 · Gabe Pereyra · Law firm staffing
The host says Harvey is expanding beyond legal work into tax and audit, an example of what she calls economies of scope.
“Harvey is a great example of that, expanding beyond legal work to do tax and audit.”
0:35:14 · Rana el Kaliouby · Expansion
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0:00:01 · Ad read · Stripe volume