No Priors Ep. 142 | With Harvey Co-Founder and President Gabe Pereyra

(instrumental music) Gabe, thanks for doing this.

Of course.

Yeah, thanks for coming.

Maybe we can just start with, like, for anyone who hasn't heard of Harvey, what is the company? Can you talk about the scale and who you serve today?

At Harvey, we're building AI for law firms and large in-house teams. We're almost at 1,000 customers, 500 employees. Started about just over three and a half years ago, and so been kinda scaling quickly since then. And kinda you guys were some of our OG seed investors. So, yeah, good to be here.

Maybe from a most basic perspective on the product, why is it not just, you know, Copilot or ChatGPT or Claude?

Yeah. I think that's how the product started. So when we first raised from OpenAI, we got access to GPT-4, and I think GPT-3 to GPT-4 was such a big model jump that the intuition at the time was just give the model to lawyers and have them play with it, and I think that industry was so text heavy that you got so much value from just interacting with the models. And then I think as soon as you gave it to lawyers, you also ran into all of the sharp edges of the models, of they hallucinate, they're not connected to a bunch of our context. And so I would say the past, the kind of first two years of the company were, how do we build essentially the IDE for lawyers around these models that connect it to all of the context you need to be productive as an individual lawyer? But I would say in the past year and going forward, the big problem we're solving is not how do you make individual lawyers more productive, it's how do you make a team of lawyers working on a client matter more productive? And more importantly, how do you make an entire law firm working on thousands of these client matters more productive and more profitable? And so I think when you get to that scale, a lot of the problems you're solving are not just model intelligence problems. They are these orchestration, governance, and kind of all of the enterprise product problems that you run into at, at scale.

Y- you've also been broadening from just law firms into enterprises, into big companies using you in concert with both their in-house legal teams and external, uh, counsel. Can you talk more about that and how that's been evolving as well?

Yeah, so we started selling to the largest law firms, and something that ha- started happening about a year and a half ago was, these law firms started showing Harvey to their clients, and their clients both wanted to collaborate more effectively with their law firms and they also wanted to use this directly in their in-house departments. So we recently announced, we signed Walmart, we're working with AT&T, a bunch of these Fortune 500 large private equity firms, Global 2000, kind of the largest consumers of legal services. And what we're starting to build is a platform for the in-house teams to do the work that they do internally, so things like contracting and this long tail of all of the legal operations you need to do that you typically don't send out to law firms, but also the collaborative tissue of, "I'm working on a large transactional litigation, I need outside expertise, I wanna securely share this data with my law firm." And there's a lot of technical problems there around security, data privacy that we wanna solve so these law firms and their clients can collaborate effectively.