LegalTech Diaries Volume 19
Christopher Hook
Global Head of Responsible Business
Harvey
LegalTech Diaries Volume 19
Christopher Hook
Global Head of Responsible Business
Harvey
Harvey’s founders made responsible business a priority as the company grew. What drew you to lead the program, and where did you decide to focus first?
The opportunity to build this programme within Harvey appealed for a few overlapping reasons. The first was the commitment from the founders and the leadership team. They recognised that if you’re going to create a company that reshapes how something as fundamental as law gets done, there is both a duty and an opportunity to consider your impact from the outset. The second was the chance to get started so early in the company’s life cycle. Harvey is the first application-layer AI company to put together a program of this nature. It’s unusual to get to do this kind of work at this stage, so I was excited by the chance to build it in as the company scales, rather than retrofit it later. And the third was the industry. I had worked with plenty of lawyers, but never within the legal industry, and it felt like the right place to attempt to create an ambitious long-term programme of work at the intersection of sustainability, responsibility, and generative AI.
Where to start has largely been driven by customers and partners. They’ve been fantastically helpful and open in providing a detailed view on what they focus on in their equivalent programmes and what they’d expect to see from a partner like Harvey. We’ve deliberately tailored our work to ensure we mirror and match those expectations. That is why we are ensuring we build on our strong governance foundations, put in place a sophisticated measurement framework for our emissions and ensure we can partner effectively with pro bono and educational organisations.
As Harvey scales quickly, how do you and the product team think through moments where responsible AI considerations and speed to market might pull in different directions?
In any fast-growing business, and Harvey is certainly that, there will be tension over what gets prioritised and how you keep shipping the products and features users expect at pace. So far, there haven’t been any cases where a clear tension has materialised between speed and our responsible business work. I attribute that to two things. Firstly, Harvey’s core product has to maintain exceptionally high standards on data privacy, confidentiality, security, and responsible use. Given the industry we serve, we would have no business without them, so we don’t compromise on them to move faster. Secondly, as usage rises, there is a strong technical and financial incentive to deliver a high-quality product experience without consuming more computing resources than we need. Given that compute is the single most important factor in our emissions footprint, any work to make its deployment more efficient should pay dividends for our environmental goals.
Harvey has launched a Law Schools Program and, more recently, a Pro Bono Program. How do those initiatives connect to the broader ambition for responsible business, and what do you hope to learn as they develop?
A core part of our responsible business strategy is figuring out how to have the broadest possible social impact. As a technology with such huge potential we are being thoughtful about how we deploy it and who we are working with to do that. The Law Schools Program, which started a year ago, and our new Pro Bono Program are both examples. On the law school side, we provide free access to Harvey for law students and faculty at more than 100 schools worldwide. That lets us play our part in helping students move from study to practice, where AI fluency is increasingly a baseline expectation. It also means law faculty and scholars can get to know the fast-changing capabilities of the world’s most sophisticated legal AI and decide how best to bring them into their teaching environment. We partner closely with these experts to make sure what we provide is of lasting use to the next generation of lawyers and legal scholars.
On the pro bono side, the need is even more urgent. Millions of people go without much needed legal assistance each year because there isn’t capacity in the system to support them. The technology that Harvey is building has the potential to be hugely impactful on this intractable issue. But that won’t happen without careful planning and design. That’s why, for this pilot phase, we’ve joined forces with the pro bono practices at Ashurst Perkins Coie, DLA Piper, and Nelson Mullins. We think combining their experience, our technology, and dedicated legal engineering and customer success support will let us build something that improves access to justice for those who need it most.
