Schoenherr was founded in Austria and has expanded to become one of the largest law firms servicing Central and Eastern Europe. The firm has 15 offices working across 26 practice areas on complex, cross-jurisdictional mandates. Last year, the firm ranked first for Central Eastern Europe in terms of deal count, according to Mergermarket M&A league table results, and was named as “Firm of the Year” by the Europe Awards in 2024.

With diverse operations across Central and Eastern Europe jurisdictions—each with different languages, economic, political and legal frameworks—Schoenherr was looking for a legal tech tool to help increase efficiency and support the complexity of their workflows.

Deciding that Harvey seemed to stand out as the leading legal AI platform, Schoenherr kicked off the partnership with a pilot beginning in April 2024.

“We were very impressed by user engagement during the pilot with both our legal tech team and the Harvey team collaborating closely to ensure our users were supported throughout the process,” Salajan shared. “We are strong believers in a close cooperation between our legal tech team and our lawyers when it comes to driving innovation and implementing new solutions. We partnered closely with Harvey to deliver program training focusing on AI education, prompting and navigating a wide range of potential use-cases.”

Schoenherr attorneys are using Harvey across all practice groups for large scale document review, analysis, and drafting.

Harvey has had a notable impact on Schoenherr’s transactional teams, particularly with document review tasks. According to Salajan, “Drafting workflows, comparing contracts, and identifying differences across multiple jurisdictions and languages are where Harvey saves a lot of time.”

Additionally, Harvey has become a valuable tool for the competition team, who regularly uses its EUR-Lex research capabilities to establish relevant case law and summarize European Commission market definitions in merger control cases.

“Harvey’s EUR-Lex research tool is also used for collating cases that impact Foreign Direct Investment screenings,” Salajan added.

Schoenherr’s litigation and arbitration teams are experimenting with Harvey’s summarization functions to manage extensive legal statements. They are also exploring workflows for comparing expert opinions and witness statements.

Finally, the firm is using Harvey to manage tasks like document review in multi-jurisdictional, multilingual contexts. This has been a particularly useful tool as Schoenherr continues to expand its presence across Central and Eastern Europe.

The Schoenherr team has been impressed with Harvey’s fast-paced improvement and development cycle. “Through our experience with Harvey, we have already seen major product improvements, and updates bring a more intuitive user journey. There’s a focus on use cases and increases in performance,” Salajan said.

Beyond the day-to-day improvements to attorney workflows with Harvey, the Schoenherr team is excited to be teaching its lawyers new ways of working.

“The value of tools like Harvey lies in upskilling our legal professionals in tech skills,” Salajan explained. “Embracing a new mindset when it comes to constantly working with different solutions to solve a problem and getting familiar, and even proficient, with working with generative AI allows our teams to provide stellar advice to clients. This extends to offering guidance on regulatory AI topics and challenges that will peak within the next few years.”

In this regard, Harvey is seen internally at Schoenherr as a tool to drive new technological skills for every lawyer at the firm.

Alexander Popp, managing partner at Schoenherr also highlighted the positive internal engagement with the tool, especially from partners. “GenAI and Harvey triggered a whole new level of personal engagement with colleagues across all seniority levels. A lot of our partners are using Harvey themselves, experimenting with it and are excited to share their newest prompt or result with colleagues and the legal tech team.”

To that end, Salajan said he’s focused on keeping engagement high, leading to a more efficient workstyle. “At Schoenherr, we are excited to actively contribute to this evolving landscape, which is fundamentally reshaping legal work and technology,” he said.