Law Firm

“They did a really good job commercially early days. Like, because they were smart. They were res, there was like a research plus lawyer combo. You know, they got some momentum and some, you know, high profile law firms to sign up early days. But, you know, the…”

“We have, you know, I think a 180 legal engineers who are Working with these law firms and in-house teams on building bespoke agents based upon the firm's best practice, the playbooks, their precedent. And these legal engineers have themselves been lawyers for …”

“In law firms, the way that that business model works is you overcharge for the associates and you actually undercharge for the partners.”

“I think there's no way the legal industry looks the same as it does in five and 10 years. I think that some law firms will be skeletons of what they were. I think that some law firms that do things that ultimately doesn't make sense for humans to be doing at a…”

“Most of these law firms and enterprises Can't rely on a single lab provider. So like there's a big risk if you're a law firm that if you just use Anthropic or you just use OpenAI you run into conflict risk. So imagine you're using only Anthropics models as a l…”

“And I think something people don't appreciate about the billable hour and why it's such a good mechanism is, It lets you price incredibly complex work at massive scale in a way that the entire industry can agree on, right?”

“Okay, the billable hour creates some pricing misalignment, but the fact that these law firms need to compete with every other law firm means that that's kept in check. And so it's like, this actually converges to roughly the right pricing.”

“If somebody bills by the hour and their goal is to bill for as many hours as possible, there's not that much incentive to become more efficient.”

“Fast forward five years, to be clear, I think there will be AI-focused service providers, two law firms, they'll buy the product and the drama will be out of the deal.”

“And I think law firms are gonna, they're gonna have to change this. Like they're going to have to say, hey, this associate is better. Like this associate is better at X, Y, Z, and we're gonna promote them faster. Than the other ones, because that time to partn…”

“These law firms or professional services firms who have a lot of kind of perverse incentives, right? They don't really want to cut hours because they bill by the hour”

“What I've seen for the in-house enterprise legal team, which is where we've only ever sold, we haven't sold to law firms, is There's a high standard deviation, but call it roughly 50% of the budget goes to law firms, 50% goes to the internal headcount, right, …”

“The rates actually have gone up 18% year over year since AI came out.”

“We even paid a 100,000 dollars to our law firms for our series A legal documents, right? And I now know that work can be done for a thousand dollars.”

“Now they're an eight billion dollar company. So I might be getting priced out here as it's, as it goes, but I do love the space. So they're about two hundred million in revenue off of just like a thousand customers. I think like half of the like top hundred la…”

“And, you know, in anecdotal evidence so far, every firm that has us has chosen to do more with their people than let them go.”

“I think everybody is still treating this as an extended pilot and an option on AI. It's like a call option, right? They're not doing five-year contracts. They're doing one to three-year contracts.”

“So I think law firms will go through a quite significant consolidation period, because so far there hasn't been a lot of incentives to consolidate law firms, but now actually private equity wants to get in on the action. They want to fund different law firms w…”

“I do think that there will Probably be less junior lawyers and trainees, but, because I think that you just won't need as many people to execute the work that the firm has.”

“I think it's around 40% of our revenue is in-house corporate, and 60% is law firm. Something like that.”

“I don't think so. I think we'll just get more work.”

“There's no real incentive structure for an EPC to want better software. It's the same reason your law firm doesn't necessarily want like AI software to help them accelerate, you know, and reduce their billables.”

“ChatGPT offered law firms the greatest demo in the history of software for what it could do for the white collar professional.”

“We might be looking at more profitable law firms in the future that run on leaner teams. You know, this is like, I feel like we see this conversation playing out in, in tech, the idea of the you know, one person unicorn company. And I think we're gonna see tha…”

“The first wave of legal tech companies were developing software to sell to law firms and general counsels to help them deliver legal services faster and more affordably. The newer wave is companies doing the legal work itself. They are either attorneys spinnin…”

“I think that the law firms ultimately will continue to buy something that feels best in class and built for them.”

“For something like generate this merger agreement, it's really hard to just give some binary like this is good or this is bad. And I think this has been like a big research problem, like with all the labs we work with, and also internally, there is just this o…”

“Law firms are starting to do this for their in-house clients. So 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 because we have the scale and the expertise to …”

“The big challenge that they ran into was, you're essentially just building two different companies, right? You're building a law firm, And you're building a tech company, and it's already really hard to, like, build product engineering, do AI, scale sales, and…”

“Solving that equation at scale is a much bigger opportunity than if you build a single law firm Because you get conflicted out. You can't scale this.”

“Law firms have like 10 X in size compared to before computers and the internet. And I think that's going to happen again, but in like maybe a different way than the past 20 years.”

“Many big law firms fearing disorder from envy and jealousy have long treated all senior partners alike In compensation, no matter how different their contributions to firm welfare, they're willing to destroy their incentive structure just to avoid triggering e…”

“Open source is insanely valuable, but not in the sense where a law firm should go off and build their own AI project using an open source model. Like, That, that is just a recipe for disaster if, you know, we think that, that every single company on the planet…”

“And now it's becoming almost a commodity where you're expected to do it, but clients are also not really that excited to pay for Very simple contract review when they know that AI can do, you know, 99% of it.”

“A lot of legal work is low differentiation. You know, if you're doing a DD from, you know, law firm X or law firm Y, kind of getting the same deal. And so when you have this perfect Equilibrium of services and somebody disrupts that by taking a new approach. C…”

“So we're not seeing anybody want to lock in a five-year contract. Because the world is moving so fast. So we instead see them, you know, doing one-year contracts.”

“And so you have a structure in the largest law firms in the world where they're moving from the billable hour to fixed pricing. And what you have in finance is you take a portion of the transaction value, and we will start to see that happening too in transact…”

“And I think there's one interesting dynamic in the legal world, which is these firms are not spending the company's money. They're spending their own money because every year the firms split the profit.”

“If you're in a company of 2000 people, there are probably 10 lawyers in there. Their biggest pain is not working out novel legal issues. It's dealing with the 2000 people in the company screaming who want stuff and the type of work they're doing is totally dif…”

“If there's three people competing for the same Making the same kind of software. Then the law firm gets the value. Like we don't get paid. Excel doesn't charge 60 grand a year because it replaced an analyst. It charged 60 bucks because that's what you get for …”

“Partners at law firms will charge anywhere from eight 50 to 1600 dollars an hour. And with us, they still get the similar type of quality at 10 dollars an hour in type of cost, which is incredible savings for a similar type of quality, what they could expect f…”

“People are starting to use things like our infinite effective context window to actually look over entire libraries of formally negotiated agreements and live during a negotiation actually come with better terms or what a better understanding of what is market…”

“I don't think the billable hour is going to just completely disappear. I think what is going to happen is a lot of these tasks that are going to get, you know, AI can automate a lot of that task with a lawyer in the loop. Those tasks will end up being kind of …”

“We were starting to work with firms and basically take, you know, the special things that they do and the way that they practice law and turn it into their specialized system in Harvey. And then they go and sell that to their clients.”

“There is so much legal work that law firms actually do at a loss and they do it at a loss... There's a lot of legal work that they do at a loss in order to get the big deal. So, you know, a lot of law firms will do work for private equity and they will do that…”

“And we realized that law firms were the most critical vendor that pretty much any company has.”

“We knew every vendor in the legal vertical. We knew what 49 other law firms were doing in their space, so we were able to share best practices and really moved a lot of the people in the industry to one uniform methodology. You're always going to have differen…”

“There is a world where The law firm's getting 40% less inbound inquiries, but of the 60% that they're still getting, those are higher margin now because they're able to leverage AI.”

“I think more than impacting the outcome, it impacts the ability of a law firm to turn over its cases. So if you think about cases like inventory, the less delays you have baked into the system, the faster you can turn those cases.”

“Law firms, consulting firms, hourly billing businesses that have armies of people doing things that the machines can do are That's over.”

“We already see on the legal side that it's making quite a bit of an impact already. You can go and talk to the lawyers. They are already talking about, okay, there are so many jobs right now in the company that the machine is able to do much, much better job v…”

“There's very much a an arms race going on amongst the law firms. Everyone's trying to weaponize and get ready for this new world. So it's at a point now where they're, it's just about parity and a defensive measure to have technology.”

“Agencies are a little bit like a law firm or an accounting firm or our consulting firm where you've got this kind of flat linear growth that happens over time.”

“And most firms have about twice the staff of the number of attorneys that you see.”

“You know, the small firms have migrated and you can find small firms that are a hundred percent cloud, but the rest of the market is, is this sort of hybrid model between on-prem and cloud.”

“So we sell to agencies, to consulting firms, to law firms, accounting firms, these companies that are selling hours, they need to understand their profitability on a, in real time.”

“So, so law firms are probably 70% of our customers. Including about 30 of the top 100 law firms in the country.”

“And I don't think it necessarily extends just to large companies at this point, legal firms accountants, huge targets. I mean, you think about what they're dealing with in regards to confidential agreements, financials of individuals and companies. And that's …”

“Negotiate a cap with your law firm to do the regals because it will go over and it will end up being 30 days or maybe even 60 days.”

“Really we've been getting a lot of our a lot of our acquisitions through partner channels. So it's a lot harder to just like market to law firms cause they're not really a huge online business. Like you know, like a fast company would be, or an enterprise comp…”