Over the past couple of years, Harvey has been a star in the legal-tech universe. It’s the artificial intelligence platform that law firms are suddenly tripping over to talk about, the machine that promises to rewrite legal research, contract drafting and document review at a speed even a first-year associate should be able to keep up with. Investors have already driven its valuation to the stratosphere, to near an $8 billion valuation. But as the bravado grows, so too does a question no one in Silicon Valley or Big Law can ignore anymore: How much money does Harvey actually save lawyers?
And yet talk to partners inside big firms, and you hear two very different stories. The executives’ polished version, in other words — the one they’ll give at conferences. They boast about productivity, speedier turnaround times and how junior associates can offload the drudgery of hours-long research on arcane subjects. They’ll talk about increased accuracy, smoother workflows and the notion that AI makes the entire firm more “strategic.” It sure is nice, particularly to clients who’ve spent years bellyaching about bloated legal bills.
The second story is more muted and infinitely thornier. In private, some lawyers confess they are still trying to determine whether Harvey saves real money or just saves time. And time, in the legal business, is quite literally the product. If a company bills by the hour — and most still do — the economic calculus becomes complicated. Pulling five hours of research down to one doesn’t automatically mean reduced bills. Sometimes, it simply means the associate now spends that time on something else.
That’s where the tension sits. Harvey is, on paper, supposed to be minimizing expenses. The platform says it accelerates due-diligence reviews, contract analysis, compliance checks and complex document drafting. Use cases such as these could easily save hundreds of hours from a major deal or litigation cycle. But law firms are not tech companies. Their income is not based on output or growth — it depends on billable hours. So the question is really whether the firm opts to pass any of those time savings on to clients.
Clients certainly expect it. General counsels are already squeezing firms as never before, demanding flat fees, capped hours and value for money. They view AI tools like Harvey as the ideal bargaining chip. If a robot can parse 5,000 pages of case files in minutes, why should they pay a human lawyer $500 an hour to do it?
That pressure is the reason some companies are pushing Harvey hard. Not because it changes the practice of law overnight, but because it sends a sign that modernization is under way. They can tell clients that they are employing state-of-the-art systems, even if the final savings at the bottom line prove to be highly variable from case to case. But other companies — particularly smaller ones — are not so sure. They view Harvey as costly, unproven at scale and overhyped. They also worry about liability. If the AI screws up, who is at fault? Is it the lawyer employing it — or the software that proposed such a misguided reading?
Even within firms that use Harvey aggressively, the results are not consistent. Some practice groups believe in it. Litigation teams claim it accelerates research by an order of magnitude. Corporate teams appreciate how quickly it cranks out term sheets. Others say the tool is so human-dependent that its efficiency improvements are diluted. AI doesn’t take judgment out of the equation. It only speeds the grunt work in advance of it.
What is certain, however, is that Harvey is making Big Law confront an unhappy truth the industry has long sought to dodge. For years, firms got by stacking up human hours. AI thrusts them into a future where time is no longer the measure — value is.” That transition isn’t just about workflow; it’s a change in culture. Senior partners don’t like tools that shorten the journey from novitiate to maestro. Associates don’t love tools that cut down the hours they must put in to get bonuses. And clients don’t like paying the same rate when the work went faster.
So does Harvey save money? The straightforward response is it’s a question of who you ask. For clients, probably yes. For companies that want to modernize without losing revenue, the answer is murkier. For Harvey’s investors, who have bet on him at billion dollar valuations, the wager is that over time the legal industry will reorganize itself around AI tools — moving away from measuring hours spent in front of a computer screen to looking at outcomes delivered. And that’s when the savings are hard to argue with.
But for now, Harvey lives in the place between those two worlds. Powerful, impressive and genuinely transformative though the movement is — it’s also running into a legal system built on billable time. The companies that are able to put the speed of AI together with profitable pricing will win. Those that don’t could very well end up in the place where Harvey’s creators said they might: staring at a future defined by technology they’re still struggling to comprehend.
In the meantime, however, the $8 billion question is actually not about Harvey. It’s really about whether an industry built on time can afford to adopt a tool designed to annihilate it.
