Addleshaw Goddard partners with Harvey on AI
London-headquartered Addleshaw Goddard has formed a firmwide collaboration with legal AI platform Harvey. It will combine deployment at scale with an ongoing programme of AI co-development focused on legal work and client delivery. From January, the firm will make Harvey available to its entire workforce of more than 3,400 lawyers and business services professionals across Europe, the Middle East and Asia.
Addleshaw Goddard’s Innovation Group will work directly with Harvey’s product and legal engineering teams. Together with the firm’s lawyers, business services professionals and clients, the group will shape and test priority capabilities. It will also develop practical, consistent ways of working for adoption across the firm and create new AI-enabled services.
Addleshaw Goddard and Harvey plan to convene quarterly with selected clients. The sessions will identify shared challenges, explore new approaches to legal service delivery and, where appropriate, co-create solutions.
Assessment process
The collaboration follows a three-month assessment led by the firm’s 80-strong Innovation Group, which draws on a decade of experience developing and deploying AI and legal technology. A total of 400 partners, lawyers, legal technologists and business services professionals tested platforms on real legal and business tasks. From the outset, the firm’s practitioners worked with Harvey’s product and legal engineering teams to test emerging capabilities. They also gave detailed feedback on the demands of complex legal work and of delivery at pace and scale.
The collaboration has already produced concrete outcomes. Harvey’s product team worked with the Innovation Group to develop further Review Tables, a feature that helps lawyers organise, compare and verify large volumes of information. The feature matters on complex matters where large teams must analyse material accurately, consistently and quickly. The firm’s feedback shaped improvements to source checking, the preservation of work already reviewed by lawyers, sharing and performance. The firm also gained early access to AI-led features for creating and updating tables at scale, says Addleshaw Goddard.
Comments from the firms
Andrew Johnston, managing partner of Addleshaw Goddard, said: “This is a partnership with Harvey to co-develop legal AI solutions. It goes well beyond a firmwide deployment as we will work with Harvey to shape legal AI around the demands of complex legal work and the needs of our clients.”
Winston Weinberg, CEO and co-founder of Harvey, added: “Now we’re working together to bring Harvey to its 3,400+ professionals and shape what comes next. Together, we’ll build on the firm’s track record of delivering high-quality outcomes for clients globally.”
Kerry Westland, partner and head of the Innovation Group at Addleshaw Goddard, said: “We have used AI consistently and effectively for a number of years through our buy-and-build approach. This is not simply a technology rollout. By combining the experience of our lawyers, legal technologists and business services professionals with Harvey’s product and engineering capability, and involving clients directly, we can shape practical solutions around real legal work. The opportunity is to deliver better outcomes, greater quality and consistency, increased capacity and new ways of working with clients, while keeping human judgement, supervision and accountability at the centre.”
