London-based law firm Addleshaw Goddard (AG) announced on 9 November that it will adopt Harvey and co-develop the platform with Harvey. Harvey is an AI platform for legal work. From January, more than 3,400 lawyers and business services professionals in AG’s offices across Europe, the Middle East and Asia will use it.

Selection and co-development

AG said the choice followed a three-month assessment led by its 80-strong Innovation Group. In the assessment, 400 partners, lawyers, legal technologists and business services professionals tested leading platforms on real tasks. AG has not disclosed the results or which other platforms it tested.

Kerry Westland, the partner who leads the Innovation Group, told Artificial Lawyer that Harvey’s matter-specific workspaces (‘matter spaces’) were one of the key reasons for the choice. In the co-development work, AG is prioritising features for managing large projects and matters. Westland said AG will not use Legora alongside Harvey. The firm will keep its own AGPT system, but may in future use it more for testing than as its main system.

As an example of results so far, AG cites the Review Tables feature, which lawyers use to organise, compare and check large volumes of information. AG’s feedback helped ensure that work lawyers have already reviewed is preserved, and shaped the feature’s source checking, sharing and performance, the announcement said. Unite.AI points to a post published by Harvey’s engineers on 22 October. The post describes tables in which rows are documents and columns are questions. Each answer includes the model’s reasoning and source citations, and users can mark answers as reviewed or lock them. Unite.AI says its article was written by AI and checked by its editorial team.

AG and Harvey also plan to meet selected clients quarterly and, where needed, develop solutions jointly with them. In the announcement, Westland stressed that human judgement, supervision and accountability remain at the centre.

Who benefits from co-development

A growing number of large law firms are taking part in developing AI tools, Non-Billable reported. Latham, for example, is developing fund formation features with Harvey, and Pinsent Masons is building new features with Legora. Citing Bloomberg Law, Non-Billable said Harvey plans to offer the technology developed with Latham to other firms as well, without sharing revenue with Latham. Such arrangements raise the question of how much competitive advantage firms can keep for themselves, the site wrote. AG’s announcement does not say whether the features developed with AG will be reserved for its own use.

Fieldfisher trialled Legora for six weeks

Fieldfisher, which has around 1,400 lawyers and other staff, is adopting Legora, Artificial Lawyer and Líder Legal reported. The decision followed a six-week pilot in which 137 users in the firm’s European offices used the platform in their day-to-day work. Lawyers use Legora for legal research, document analysis and drafting, Líder Legal said.

Fieldfisher’s AI centre in Berlin is leading the roll-out. The firm said it is developing its own prompts, workflows and guidance alongside Legora to retain expertise and flexibility. Large law firms that have chosen neither Harvey nor Legora are becoming rarer, according to Artificial Lawyer.