“Allen & Overy Breaks the Internet (and New Ground) With Co-Pilot Harvey”, 2023-02-16 ():
In a world where law firms are often criticised for being slow to adopt new technologies, we should applaud Allen & Overy for its wow-factor launch yesterday (16 February) of ‘co-pilot’ Harvey, which helps lawyers to conduct research and due diligence using natural language instructions, leveraging the most up to date OpenAI large language model. I’d be lying if I said I don’t have some serious reservations.
Founded in 2022 by former O’Melveny & Myers antitrust litigator Winston Weinberg and former DeepMind, Google Brain, and Meta AI research scientist Gabriel Pereyra, Harvey is a verticalized version of what I understand to be GPT-4, which has been trained on the entire corpus of the internet. By verticalized, I mean that Harvey has further trained the model with legal sector-specific data. Harvey, which in November last year received $5m in investment from OpenAI, has been working with a number of law firms—including A&O—in beta.
The model, which has now been rolled out by A&O across its 43 offices, can automate various aspects of legal work, such as contract analysis, due diligence, litigation and regulatory compliance. It can generate insights, recommendations and predictions without requiring any immediate training, which A&O says will enable its lawyers to deliver faster, smarter and more cost-effective solutions to their clients.
…We’re told that at the end of the trial, around 3,500 of A&O’s lawyers had asked Harvey around 40,000 queries for their day-to-day client work. MIG [Markets Innovation Group, R&D] head David Wakeling said in a statement yesterday: “I have been at the forefront of legal tech for 15 years but I have never seen anything like Harvey. It is a game-changer that can unleash the power of generative AI to transform the legal industry. Harvey can work in multiple languages and across diverse practice areas, delivering unprecedented efficiency and intelligence. In our trial, we saw some amazing results.”
Harvey—unlike most AI-based legal technology offerings to date—really doesn’t require a lot of work to get it live. A spokesperson for A&O told me (Wakeling is away this week—why law firms make big announcements during school holidays is beyond me): “One of the brilliant things about Harvey is that you don’t need to train people to use it; you just need to provide them with a short, simple list of parameters and tips (which we’ve done). So it’s quick, pain-free, and inexpensive to roll-out.”
…What contracts is Harvey trained on and useful for? Harvey can be used for any sort of background research and first pass drafts. The examples I have been given is that you can ask Harvey questions such as:
- “I’m at a German law firm and am going to present to an Indian bank about the EU market abuse regime. Suggest the skeleton of a 5-slide presentation, and for each slide include 3 bullet points on its content.”
- “Draft me an email to my Silicon Valley private equity client regarding what is the difference between what constitutes a material adverse effect in an M&A deal under Delaware law as compared to New York law.”
- “Draft me a research memo examining how the Supreme Court’s Janus decision affects private sector unions.”
…This is a fear shared fairly widely in the market. Law firm technology heads are not keen to be seen to publicly challenge A&O, and many are looking at their own GPT-based solutions, but one Am Law top 100 CIO told me privately: “It’s not the pace that concerns me. We are all trying to move faster, and the pandemic reset expectations on what is possible. However, there are certainly a lot of unknowns in the models. That’s why I worry about the user behavior aspect and how it is put into service.