Harvey’s already acquainted with Big Law. Now, it wants to shake up law schools.

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Legal tech startup Harvey offers its tool for free to an expanding group of law schools.
The initiative aims to get future legal professionals to default to its application.
The company faces a debate over the use of AI in the classroom.

To build brand loyalty, get ’em while they’re young.

Harvey, a startup building artificial intelligence tools for lawyers, is taking that creed to college campuses.

The company, last valued at $5 billion, says it now works with half of the country’s 100 largest law firms and is extending its reach to the classroom.

In August, Harvey said it would give six law schools access to the platform as part of a new “alliance.” The next month, it onboarded 11 more law schools. Now, Harvey has added Duke Law and Northwestern Pritzker Law to the roster, the company tells Business Insider. Participation in the program is available to the law schools free of charge.

“What we’re trying to do is make it so they can start integrating that into their training as early as possible,” Winston Weinberg, Harvey’s cofounder and chief executive, said from a conference room in the company’s Manhattan office.

He imagines a not-so-distant future where a private-equity class conducts a mock leveraged buyout inside Harvey; students draft and refine arguments with its tools before a moot court. The simulations he describes aren’t live yet.

Harvey’s program borrows from the “Wexis” playbook. For decades, LexisNexis and Thomson Reuters, which both supply case law to legal professionals, blanketed law schools with free or nearly free access. Students spend years getting fluent in one system and then carry that muscle memory into practice.

Harvey is betting that prompting and directing virtual agents will be the next habits that stick.

Inside firms, Weinberg says Harvey is stripping the drudgery from legal work, and clients are starting to notice. Faster is becoming the expectation. He compares it to the advent of email. “The biggest change it made,” he said, is that “you’ve got to respond way faster.”

That’s the incentive problem at the heart of legal tech: many lawyers are paid by the hour, and saving time can result in a loss of revenue. Weinberg thinks that Harvey’s efficiency gains will prompt firms to move more work off the billable hour and onto flat-fee menus to protect their profits. The price of services depends on the specific legal matter, and doesn’t decrease even as labor costs fall.

Weinberg said law firms could also pass along the cost of using Harvey and other tools to their clients, a familiar move in the legal world. Many firms already include a line item on their invoices for research databases, such as LexisNexis or Westlaw, showing how many queries a matter requires. Asked if Harvey might one day appear the same way, Weinberg said the company is “exploring that right now.”

The caveat is that uptake today skews towards the big corporates and law firms, and even there, Harvey is still seen as an efficiency booster, not a requirement for practice.

A group of Harvey employees pose for a photo in an office setting. — Harvey employees.

Harvey

Law schools aren’t entirely analog. They’ve long run on enterprise tools like Lexis and Westlaw. Where they diverge is on policies around generative artificial intelligence. Some prohibit it. Others allow it with disclosure. A few are weaving it into clinics and practice labs.

Notably, the list of Harvey’s launch partners was missing a few giants, Yale and Harvard among them. Company lore says the name “Harvey” is partly a nod to Harvard.

Asked what he would change about legal education if he were rewriting the first-year curriculum today, Weinberg, a trained lawyer who graduated from the USC Gould School of Law, said his answer would have been the same, even before the arrival of ChatGPT. He argues law schools can do far more to prepare students for the realities of practice.

He has no quarrel with the traditional first-year curriculum. “I think where things actually break down,” he said, “is that there is almost no hands-on stuff in the second and third year.” Summer jobs help. But, in his view, a three-year legal education should more closely resemble the workplace.

Harvey aims to help fix that, though its law school partnership remains light on details. To land on campus, it has to navigate a live debate inside faculties, where purists who want to prohibit the tech to protect core skills are squaring off against pragmatists who want supervised use.

If Harvey can get a foothold in law schools now, the payoff could arrive when today’s second-year lawyers become tomorrow’s associates and in-house counsel.

Have a tip? Contact this reporter via email at mrussell@businessinsider.com or Signal at @MeliaRussell.01. Use a personal email address and a non-work device; here’s our guide to sharing information securely.

Read the original article on Business Insider

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