Harvey cofounder Winston Weinberg was honored on the 2024 Under 30 Enterprise Technology list.
Courtesy of Harvey
On July 4, 2022, Winston Weinberg dialed into a call with the entire c-suite of OpenAI. Two weeks prior, the then 27-year-old and his friend Gabe Pereyra had emailed the company about a chatbot they developed to answer legal questions pulled from a public online forum. Boasting an 86% accuracy rate, the tool was promising enough to get OpenAI’s executives working on a holiday.
The July Fourth call marked the takeoff of legal AI platform Harvey, which allows lawyers to upload files and input requests to automate tasks like analyzing documents, consolidating lengthy research or even tracking productivity. Last month, the company closed a $100 million series C round with investments from Google Ventures, OpenAI, Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia Capital and technology investor Elad Gil, bringing the company’s total funding to $216 million. The new deal gives Harvey a $1.5 billion valuation—the highest valued startup in OpenAI’s portfolio.
“I only practiced law for a little less than a year, and I realized that a lot of the work that associates are doing is work that they could have done even before law school,” Forbes Under 30 lister Weinberg says.
After graduating law school, Weinberg began using ChatGPT for tedious and rote tasks assigned to new associates, like picking apart thousand-page documents. It was then that he turned to former Google AI research scientist Pereyra—whom he had met through mutual friends and become roommates with—with an idea: Automate legal tasks so associates like himself could focus on more meaningful work, like crafting thoughtful arguments for their clients.
Weinberg says he worked over 120 hours some weeks—moonlighting on the AI idea while being a full-time litigation lawyer—before announcing Harvey to the public in late 2022.
Upon launching, Harvey announced its first client was billion-dollar law firm A&O Shearman. Its second was Big Four accounting firm PwC. Unlike many business-facing companies that begin by tapping smaller companies as their first clients, Harvey went after the largest players in the game.
“One thing that I had a massive amount of conviction for, that a lot of folks didn’t believe me on, was going after the largest and most prestigious firms first,” says Weinberg, the 2024 Forbes Under 30 alum. “The biggest thing with AI is going to be trust, and earning the trust of those larger institutions early on is crucial given we’re helping these folks with extremely high-profile work.”
To acquire such customers, Weinberg says he found the most recent public legal document that a potential client filed and generated potential counter arguments that could be used against them in court using Harvey’s model. The personalized approach worked—and it only took the trust of one or two big names to get the ball rolling. Since then, they’ve brought on law firms like O’Melveny & Myers, Vinson & Elkins, Gleiss Lutz, ReedSmith, Macfarlanes and more.
It’s a strong start. However, AI is still relatively new and unregulated, potentially causing issues like violating confidentiality or generating false information. Recent headlines—like Donald Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen submitting a court motion with AI-generated fictitious court rulings or rapper Pras requesting a retrial because his previous attorney had misused the tool—are pushing law firms and startups alike to be more careful in adopting the technology, says legal technology strategist Nicole Black.
To overcome the hurdles that come with AI in the legal profession, Weinberg has tapped industry veterans like long-time Google lawyers Andrew Hyman and John LaBarre, who joined Harvey as general counsel, and former Wachtell partner Gordon Moodie as Harvey’s chief product officer. Weinberg says the latest funding round will help to bring on more high quality lawyers and engineers to continue training their model to be more specialized to law firms while maintaining accuracy and data privacy.
Still, there is competition in the legal AI field. While Harvey’s range of offerings have an advantage over legal technology startups with a narrower scope like Spellbook—which solely focuses on contracts—direct competitors like Casetext, which Thomson Reuters bought last year for $650 million, pose a threat. But of the thousands of startups that develop software using Open AI’s technology, Open AI’s COO Brad Lightcap says Harvey’s speed and scale of vision stand out.
“You give them a little bit of context and advice, and they come back a week later 20 times smarter,” Lightcap says. “They don’t see themselves as just selling software, but partnering with an industry.”
For Sarah Guo, one of Harvey’s first investors and Forbes Under 30 alum, the cofounders’ optimism on the value of AI far outshines any challenges.
“[Imagine] taking on more client work because you’ve automated so much of the junior toil, or winning cases more often because your discovery process takes a day instead of many months,” Guo says. “At some point, AI is going to impact your productivity so much and drive competitive edge that you cannot avoid adopting it.”