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Business & Practice
Gabriel Pereyra and Winston Weinberg hatched the idea for Harvey as roommates
experimenting with OpenAI's ChatGPT.
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March 11, 2024, 10:00 AM GMT+1; Updated: March 11, 2024, 5:03 PM GMT+1
HARVEY EYES ‘ALL SORTS’ OF LAWYERS IN AI LEGAL HIRING SPREE (1)
By Brian Baxter
Brian Baxter
Reporter
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SEARCH BY LAW FIRM
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SEARCH BY TOPIC
* corporate officers
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SEARCH BY COMPANY
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* CEO Winston Weinberg says Harvey working with more law firms
* $700 million legal services startup recently recruited first CFO
Harvey, a generative artificial intelligence startup that quadrupled in value
last year, has spent the first quarter of 2024 embarking on an expansion spree
that shows no signs of slowing.
The privately held company, which has 82 employees, wants to double that number
by year’s end, said its 29-year-old co-founder and CEO Winston Weinberg in one
of the few interviews he’s given since Harvey surfaced on the legal technology
scene a year ago. “We do very little press,” he said.
Weinberg attributed his and Harvey’s desire to stay quiet to a policy of letting
its new clients speak for themselves, as well as to a personal bandwidth issue
for him as he sought to create a company from scratch.
The San Francisco-based startup, which just opened an office in New York, is
currently looking to fill nearly 50 job openings, many of them for lawyers.
“Normally, at a tech company, you hire lawyers to be in-house lawyers,” he said.
“We’re looking at them to fill a unique, interdisciplinary type of role. We want
them to do all sorts of different things.”
Harvey, whose official name is Counsel AI Corp., derived its brand name from an
“amalgamation” of things, not just the fictitious corporate lawyer Harvey
Specter from the legal drama “Suits,” Weinberg said.
Whatever the moniker’s origin, Harvey quickly made a name for itself. The
company was valued at $715 million in December after raising $80 million from
investors such as the startup fund affiliated with generative artificial
intelligence unicorn OpenAI and venture capital firms Kleiner Perkins and
Sequoia Capital.
Harvey, which straddles the larger generative artificial intelligence market,
has drawn much hype by touting a time-saving technology that it and a growing
number of other legal technology companies are offering to various clients.
(Bloomberg Law also competes in this market and sells legal technology tools.)
“When you have the backing of someone like OpenAI that puts you in a different
position compared to your competitors,” said legal technology expert Edward
Estrada. “You’ve got super smart people with intelligence, focus, and
visibility—that’s a compelling market differentiator. We’ll see if it’s a
product differentiator.”
Gordon Moodie, a former corporate partner at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz who
joined Harvey last summer as its chief product officer, is now working with
Harvey’s new recruits to create what the company considers the next generation
of tools to draft, revise, review, and research legal documents.
In recent weeks Harvey has brought on lawyers who have worked at firms such as
Gunderson Dettmer; Katten Muchin Rosenman; Latham & Watkins; O’Melveny & Myers;
Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison; Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom;
and White & Case.
TRANSFORMATIVE POWER
Ralph Baxter, a veteran legal industry innovator and former leader of Orrick,
Herrington & Sutcliffe who now advises firms and legal technology companies,
said how Harvey fares going forward will be a good gauge for how generative
artificial intelligence applications permeate into private practice.
“The proof is in the execution,” Baxter said. “Ultimately, artificial
intelligence should transform the way legal services are delivered, which will
be better for clients, the law firms, and the professionals that work in them.”
Weinberg said Harvey is building models to complete legal functions.
Winston Weinberg
“The training data for that is lawyers doing those legal processes in every
single practice area,” Weinberg said. “You need to hire folks in-house to help
you build that. We don’t train on anyone’s data unless they ask us to.”
While some of Harvey’s clients collaborate with the company on such tasks,
Weinberg said most of its systems are built by pairing a Big Law attorney with
an artificial intelligence researcher. The lawyer will walk through how they
would summarize an agreement or create a disclosure schedule, and the researcher
maps that model onto certain systems, Weinberg said.
Much as how a partner at a firm would coordinate a team of associates performing
subtasks within a broader legal matter, Harvey’s new hires are working to train
specific models to perform complex multi-step legal processes, Weinberg said.
Some select clients, like PricewaterhouseCoopers, get custom-built systems
exclusively licensed to them based on their data and expertise.
The mission is to create a system that’s repeatable for new legal documents. The
best lawyers are faster at reading and analyzing materials in their practice
areas, even documents they’ve never seen before, because they know from
experience where to look, Weinberg said. Harvey’s technology needs to be able to
perform the same analysis, whether it’s on a merger agreement or something else.
Building a product that can perform to such standards is a labor-intensive
effort that requires not just engineers from places like Alphabet Inc.’s Google,
but “domain experts” who know different areas of the law, Weinberg said.
BIG LAW BEDFELLOWS
Weinberg spent a year as an O’Melveny associate prior to co-founding Harvey in
2022 with Gabriel Pereyra, an artificial intelligence researcher who is now the
company’s president after stints at Google and Meta Platforms Inc.
Harvey’s hiring of engineers has increased three times over from late 2023, and
its business development team is also now starting to expand, although its sales
organization has remained small, Weinberg said.
Gabriel Pereyra
Many members of Harvey’s sales team are former Big Law attorneys whose
familiarity with its products helps when it comes to convincing their private
practice colleagues to experiment with artificial intelligence, Weinberg said.
Harvey just brought on its first chief financial officer in Alan Ghelberg and
hired Andrew Hyman, a former lawyer at Google, HBO, and Apple Inc., as deputy
general counsel for product and commercial. John LaBarre, another longtime
former Google lawyer who had been deputy general counsel at cloud data company
Snowflake Inc., joined Harvey a year ago as its general counsel.
Weinberg said Cooley—a firm known for its startup expertise that also has close
ties to Snowflake—and Wachtell are Harvey’s primary legal advisers but the
company expects to grow its outside counsel roster going forward. Harvey has
also worked closely with Allen & Overy, a global legal giant poised to become
A&O Shearman as of May 1, on developing its artificial intelligence technology.
Harvey announced last summer it was working with a handful of other firms,
including Reed Smith, the UK’s Macfarlanes, and Spanish legal giant Cuatrecasas,
and the company has expanded its partnerships to “dozens of firms,” many of them
mid-sized outfits, Weinberg said. Harvey isn’t yet ready to disclose them.
Weinberg said Harvey’s primary focus is law firms, and that Harvey isn’t working
with litigation financiers and its only work with other companies has been in
concert with their outside counsel. Weinberg expects more of the latter as
anxiety about artificial intelligence eases and clients become more comfortable
with the technology. Harvey’s pricing varies due to customizations, but it’s
planning to release a “more widely available platform” later this year, Weinberg
said.
“We want this technology to be affordable to as many lawyers as possible.”
Weinberg and Pereyra, whose brother is another former O’Melveny associate now
working with Harvey’s product team, were best friends and roommates when they
got the idea for the startup after experimenting with ChatGPT, the artificial
intelligence chatbot released by OpenAI in late 2022.
Harvey is built on OpenAI’s platform and while the investment from OpenAI helped
“change the roadmap” for Harvey, the two companies don’t have an exclusive
relationship, Weinberg said. Harvey continually tests other large language
models to refine its technology, he said.
Weinberg believes artificial intelligence won’t replace lawyers but will change
their productivity expectations. His hope is that Harvey’s products will free up
former Big Law associates to do more “higher-end” legal work earlier in their
careers.
“The rest of the market is going to adopt these tools, so there’s going to be
more regulations and more documents produced,” he said. “Our society is going to
get more complex in a good way, and that will be good for professional
services.”
Continue Reading
To contact the reporter on this story: Brian Baxter in New York at
bbaxter@bloomberglaw.com
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Alessandra Rafferty at
arafferty@bloombergindustry.com
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