Mori Hamada & Matsumoto (MHM) is one of the Japanese “Big Four” full-service law firms headquartered in Tokyo with offices across the Asia Pacific region and New York. The firm handles transactional, regulatory and disputes work— with specialized, local law practices throughout Asia—and was recently named “Japan Law Firm of the Year 2024” by Asian Legal Business/Thomson Reuters.

The MHM team is focused on building cutting-edge solutions to tackle new problems and breaking down barriers between geographies and practice groups. Though MHM already had rolled out its own generative AI platform to its team, the firm was looking for a more specialized platform focused on legal workflows with wide applicability to all practice areas and languages.

“We have a strong and established legal tech practice, which has been active in exploring the latest legal tech to improve our offerings,” said Reiya Nakano, Partner. “As a firm, we are committed to being at the forefront of legal innovation, so that we can ensure we are always providing our clients with the highest quality advice, as efficiently as possible.”

MHM rolled out Harvey firm-wide through introductory training sessions, highlighting the use cases that mattered most to the firm.

Attorneys at MHM rely on Harvey to complete a variety of different types of work, allowing them to provide faster and even higher quality services to their clients.

Since Harvey is able to analyze complex and lengthy documents, MHM lawyers have deployed Harvey to undertake a first analysis of new laws and government policies across varied jurisdictions.

“In a regional office, a partner used Harvey to understand a new energy law and then prepare a first draft of a client update,” Julian Barendse explained. “We were able to get this pertinent new information out to our clients very quickly; Harvey significantly accelerated our review and publication workflows.”

Harvey creates useful summaries and tables of documents, saving the team hours of having to prepare them manually from scratch.

“Now, with Harvey, lawyers can spend their time on the more important issues for our client, rather than just the mechanical preparation of documents, tables, and summaries,” Julian said.

Operating across offices (including affiliate and member firms) in Japan, Thailand, Singapore, Vietnam, Indonesia, Myanmar and the Philippines, MHM attorneys need an efficient and effective way to communicate with each other and their clients in native languages.

“With Harvey, we are able to further reduce barriers to working together as one team, as we are able to supplement legal analysis and provide output in different languages,” Reiya said. “Harvey allows MHM attorneys to quickly analyze documents in different languages and gain an initial understanding of the documents, driving meaningful efficiency gains.”

For example, one MHM partner used Harvey to analyze a potential foreign investment and prepare a recommendation for their client. Rather than sending the advice to the client in a different language, the partner used Harvey to translate it to Japanese, review the response with MHM’s native Japanese speakers and then send the final recommendation to the client.

The firm is also using Harvey’s translation capabilities to take on more complex, cross-border work.

“In the context of an investigation, documents and correspondences often need to be translated from an Asian language and summarized in English,” Julian said. “With Harvey, our attorneys across the firm can more easily highlight particular terms of importance to ensure our work is focused for our clients.”

MHM estimates that Harvey power users are reducing the amount of time they are spending on basic tasks and reallocating this time to more impactful client work.

“As with the introduction of email to legal services, generative AI will be a significant driver of change across our industry,” Hugh Kennedy, Head of Business Development at MHM, said. “This will lead to greater efficiencies and new ways of providing legal services.”

Given how intuitive and easy Harvey is to use, many MHM lawyers are running multiple queries a day to improve their efficiency and effectiveness.

“Harvey is an always available sounding board to assist with solving problems such as drafting a particular clause or dealing with a specific legal issue,” Hugh said. “The practice of law is always evolving, and our partnership with Harvey has been an important part of our strategy."