Harvey today (24 June) announced that Workflow Builder is available to all Harvey customers, enabling legal teams with varying technological capability to capitalise on their proprietary knowledge to create reusable systems.
Whereas until now customers of Harvey’s Assistant or Vault have used ad hoc prompts, or leveraged Harvey’s predefined key use case workflows, now they can develop their own workflows that fit with and around the ways their teams and clients are working.
Speaking to Legal IT Insider, Harvey co-founder and CEO Winston Weinberg said: “There are a lot of firms asking, ‘how do I differentiate myself as a firm?’ and there is a gap between firms that have significant internal expertise and innovation teams, and those that don’t. The goal is to provide something that is between self-build and off the shelf.
“We’ll put a lot of resources into this because firms want to have a system that is specific to how their system operates and how their clients want things delivered. They have been working with clients for many years and have set ways that they want to operate in, so we’re giving them the tools to innovate on top of Harvey. Everything we build will be capable of being in a workflow builder.”
Harvey has been working with a small number of early adopter law firms to develop Workflow Builder, one of which is UK-headquartered global law firm Ashurst.
Ashurst partner and global head of its newlaw arm Ashurst Advance, Hilary Goodier told Legal IT Insider that the impact of being able to create high value workflows was considerable. “In Ashurst Advance we are now going to each practice group and asking where are the pain points and high value use cases, and we’re sitting with the lawyers to develop proprietary workflows around those,” she said.
While Ashurst has shown a high rate of adoption of Harvey, Weinberg observed that proprietary workflows can be expected to help with onboarding, commenting: “If a partner doesn’t know the best way to go about using Harvey but there is a workflow in their practice area, when they open Harvey it might just make it easier for them. The problem can be, ‘I don’t know what to start with’ or ‘I have a problem prompting.’ Because firms can create workflows it will show lawyers the use cases and there’s no limit to how many chains you have.”
It is almost a year ago to the day that Ashurst partnered with Harvey. Ashurst’s global director of knowledge & expertise, Ruth Ward, told us: “A year ago we made a commitment to Harvey by rolling it out to the entire firm in a very equitable way. One really cool element of our business justification wasn’t just the business value but about using the tool to develop confidence and capability. A year in is the perfect time to continue to empower people to develop workflows within their teams – with the support from expert colleagues – which work at the team level.”
Goodier added: “The one thing that has been incredible about this partnership is how much Harvey take on board feedback from firms. We saw being an early mover as an advantage but now we’ve had time to learn about the value this tool can bring, it’s a case of how to leverage being an early mover in terms of our own IP.”
Harvey this week informally announced that they have raised a further $300m Series E at a $5bn valuation. The company is investing a massive amount in engineering and also international growth.
Ward told us: “Those of us who have worked with legal tech for years know about the growing pains not just for tech companies but also for customers. One thing for me is that a marker of our relationship is the fantastic quality of the people that we engage with when Winston isn’t in the room.”
The other firms partnering with Harvey on Workflow Builder are Ropes & Gray, dentsu, King & Wood Mallesons, and Setterwalls Advokatbyrå. There’s more on this to come.