| Harvey | |
|---|---|
| Developer(s) | Counsel AI Corporation |
| Initial release | 2022 |
| Website | www |
Harvey is a generative artificial intelligence (AI) product developed by the Counsel AI Corporation for the legal industry. [Note 1] The product has been described as a provider of customised large language models (LLMs) for law firms and in-house legal teams. [1] It is named after the lead character of the legal drama Suits, Harvey Specter. [2]
Harvey was founded in 2022 by Winston Weinberg, who was formerly a securities and antitrust litigator at O'Melveny & Myers, and Gabriel Pereyra, who was a research scientist at Google DeepMind. Weinberg had been an associate at O'Melveny for a year prior to founding the company.
In November 2022, it was reported that the Harvey team consisted of five persons and that the company had USD 5 million in funding led by the OpenAI Startup Fund, together with other investors such as Jeff Dean, the head of Google AI, Elad Gil, the founder of Mixer Labs, Sarah Guo, the founder of Conviction, and other angel investors. [3] Harvey raised another USD 23 million in April 2023 in a funding round led by Sequoia Capital. [1]
Gordon Moodie, a corporate partner at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz also joined Harvey in July 2023 as the company's chief product officer. [4]
Harvey announced in December 2023 that it had raised USD 80 million in a Series B funding round led by Elad Gil and Kleiner Perkins which valued the company at USD 715 million. Other investors in the round included Sequoia Capital and the OpenAI Startup Fund. [5]
In March 2024, Harvey had 82 employees and stated that it intended to double that figure by the end of 2024. The company has reportedly hired a large number of lawyers, including from White & Case, Latham & Watkins, Skadden, Gunderson Dettmer, Katten Muchin Rosenman, and Paul Weiss. Harvey CEO Weinberg explained that many members of the company's sales team were formerly attorneys at 'Big Law', i.e. large US law firms, and that the sales team's experience was useful in convincing attorneys to trial the company's software [6] The integration of former 'Big Law' attorneys into product and sales teams has been attributed as a major factor in Harvey's success. [7] [8]
It was reported in June 2024 that Harvey was seeking an additional USD 600 million in funding at a USD 2 billion valuation, and was hoping to acquire legal research company vLex. [9] [10] [11] [1]
In July 2024, Harvey announced that it had raised USD 100 million in a Series C funding round that valued the company at USD 1.5 billion. The round was led by venture capital firm GV, and other participants included OpenAI, Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia Capital, Elad Gil, and SV Angel. [12]
In February 2025, Harvey announced it had raised USD 300 million in a Series D funding round that valued the company at USD 3 billion. [13]
In May 2024, Harvey launched its products on Microsoft Azure and stated that it would offer a Harvey on Azure version of its product going forward. [14] It was also reported that Harvey would begin offering general commercial access to some of its products, such its case law models, as well as product bundles that included its AI assistant, specialised models, and its Vault feature for running prompts on large document collections. [15]
Various law firms around the world are customers of Harvey.
US law law firm Paul Weiss began testing Harvey within the firm in January 2023, and became a client of the company later that year. Gina Lynch, the firm's chief knowledge and innovation officer explained that the firm was not using hard metrics, such as time saved, to assess productivity gains because the time and effort needed to carefully review the output made efficiency gains difficult to measure. [16]
In February 2023, the UK law firm, Allen & Overy (now A&O Shearman), announced that it had been trialing Harvey since November 2022 within its Markets Innovation Group. This was reported to be the first known use of a generative AI product within the UK magic circle law firms.
According to Allen & Overy, during the trial, 3,500 lawyers had used Harvey for around 40,000 queries in the course of their day to day work. The firm's press release stated that "Whilst the output needs careful review by an A&O lawyer, Harvey can help generate insights, recommendations and predictions based on large volumes of data". David Wakeling, head of the Markets Innovation Group, also cautioned that "You must validate everything coming out of the system. You have to check everything". [17] [18] [19] [20] [21] [22]
The Irish law firm, A&L Goodbody, announced in February 2024 that it would be working with Harvey to enhance its services in relation to document analysis, due diligence, litigation, and regulatory compliance. [23]
In June 2024, UK law firm Ashurst announced that it would partner with Harvey and roll out its services to its branches worldwide. [24]
In September 2024, PwC announced that it would be adopting Harvey to empower its lawyers in Singapore. [25] [26] Singapore law firm WongPartnership also announced that month that it had become the first Southeast Asian law firm to test Harvey's generative AI solutions. [27]
Harvey has not demoed its product at trade shows or to the press. According to news reports, many in the legal and legaltech industry "have never seen what Harvey does". Weinberg and Pereya acknowledged that the company has been "stealthy" and explained that they would rather their clients "speak for themselves". [15] [1]
As of 2023, Harvey was reportedly built on top of OpenAI's GPT-4. [28] Some users have complained that the product would break when OpenAI updated its GPT models, and described the product as "OpenAI's legal wrapper". [1]