PwC Next to Adopt Harvey AI
In February 2023, Magic Circle law firm, Allen & Overy (A&O) announced that it would be introducing Harvey AI to assist its lawyers in due diligence tasks. Although founded only seven months earlier, the start-up was entrusted with some of the most important legal work in the UK. This month, Harvey is in the news cycle once again as PWC decides to adopt the product for its legal staff.
What is Harvey?
Harvey is an AI platform, designed to assist lawyers with everyday tasks such as contract analysis, due diligence and regulatory compliance. As an investment by OpenAI, it is built on the same foundations as ChatGPT. In contrast to the freely available consumer GPT-3 technology, Harvey utilises the more recent and powerful GPT-4 model.
The team behind Harvey is made up of engineers, entrepreneurs and former lawyers. This includes co-founder Gabriel Pereyra, an Oxford graduate who previously worked on AI for Google as well as Meta. The second co-founder, Winston Weinberg, joined the project after 11 months as an Associate at O’Melveny and Myers LLP. Some have raised questions about the length of his experience as a lawyer. Nonetheless, the adoption of the AI by the biggest names in the industry seems to dispel these concerns.
What does this mean for the future of the legal sector?
David Wakeling, the Head of the Markets Innovation Group at A&O, believes that the system will enable his firm to significantly increase productivity. However, he is cautious about the technology and particularly the information returned from the chatbot as well as the prompts inputted. Wakeling’s comments suggest that lawyers will soon need to become well-versed in operating AI. Here, soft skills may become less important. Together with PwC, Harvey will be accessible to nearly 8,000 lawyers. PwC’s latest move signals that AI will be introduced more widely across the sector and lawyers will have to adopt universally.
As AI capabilities continue to improve, an increase in competition may produce an ‘AI arms race’. Further issues may include confidentiality. To create the most effective legal AI, the technology should be trained on the work of lawyers. However, this must be balanced against releasing too much confidential information to prevent breaches.
Conclusion
Overall, the implementation of Harvey by A&O and PwC serves to demonstrate the meteoric growth in the prevalence and viability of AI. It seems to be only a matter of time before other firms adopt Harvey or announce new developments of their own.