Top Harvey Use Cases

Our clients frequently ask us, “What are the top use cases of Harvey?” This post highlights the most common applications across practice areas and groups within law firms, professional service providers, and enterprises. For transactional work, our research found the most common use cases to be in drafting (generating clauses and documents), due diligence (reviewing documents and identifying risks), and deal management (planning and coordinating processes). Similarly, litigators frequently use Harvey for drafting, case management, and regulatory advising.

All data was collected anonymously, with explicit customer approval, adhering to Harvey’s stringent security and data privacy standards. Below, we outline our data analysis methods and findings. The data was treated as “eyes-off,” meaning the Harvey team never viewed the queries. Instead, machine learning classifiers grouped queries into use cases, ensuring no risk of data contamination or leakage.

We analyzed tens of thousands of queries from our Assistant product, which enables users to upload documents and receive responses to complex legal questions or tasks. Based on our sample size and mix of customers, we believe this is representative of use cases across levels of seniority in BigLaw and other professional services. 

We created two heat maps to highlight the frequency of common use cases in transactional and litigation practice areas. The heat maps were generated by using classifiers to group queries by practice group and by use case. We then assigned queries to cells in the heat map based on both practice group and use case. The percentile and color shading represents how prevalent both the practice group and use case are. For example, the cell at the intersection of Tax and Legal Research would represent queries regarding legal research with substance reflective of tax practice.

To facilitate visualization, we selected the most prevalent transactional and litigation practice groups, though it's important to note that Harvey is utilized across all practice groups within our customer base (there are more than 500 practice groups & use cases in our underlying data). The top use cases identified are as follows:

Transactional Use Cases

For transactional work, the heat map reveals broad use cases for Harvey in drafting (generating clauses and documents), due diligence (reviewing documents and identifying risks), and deal management (planning and coordinating processes). We also see substantial use cases in research and strategy, with additional use cases in broader corporate advising and compliance.

Litigation Use Cases

Like transactional lawyers, litigators frequently use Harvey for drafting and case management. They also consistently find use cases in regulatory or advising—reviewing and providing strategic analysis of regulation and legislation and how they apply to particular fact patterns. Other substantial use cases include case law research, review of discovery and litigation documents, and advocacy strategy for both trials and oral arguments.

We trust this analysis will be valuable for both existing and prospective clients aiming to leverage Harvey effectively. We remain committed to improving transparency and understanding of our product while respecting customer privacy and security. As such, this will be the first of many of these studies as we further break down categories and look at even more specific use cases. We welcome your feedback on how your firm is using or plans to use Harvey, as we strive to support our clients in adopting generative AI.

Credits: Gordon Moodie, Winston Weinberg, Gabriel Pereyra, John LaBarre, Julio Pereyra, Niko Grupen, Aatish Nayak, Lauren Oh, Shawn Farsai, David Murdter, Boling Yang