Legaltech giant Harvey has announced the launch of Harvey II, creating a platform that promises to accelerate personalised AI work for lawyers and move towards a greater focus on agentic legal tasks.
The firm says the new platform brings together features including Memory, an AI lawyer personalisation tool that enables individual preferences to be carried across Harvey, Word, Outlook and agents.
The platform incorporates a ‘spaces’ technique where documents, tasks, permissions and matter or project history can be brought together in one place. Smarter agents can then work with that context already in place, alongside a refreshed product experience assembled around how the work progresses.
Anique Drumright, chief product officer at Harvey, said: “Memory is a major differentiator for Harvey and a key part of making AI more personalised to the individual lawyer.
“It allows Harvey to learn and retain how a lawyer works, from drafting style and preferred structure to citations, level of detail and other preferences developed over the course of working with Harvey.”
Drumright says Memory is a vital facet of the tool, as legal professionals can approach the same assignment differently. Lawyers can avoid having to repeatedly explain their preferences, as Memory knows how they like to work in context, in a move away from AI responding to individual prompting.
Harvey says Memory is built around user control and transparency, enabling lawyers to see what Harvey remembers, while also being able to change what it recollects.
Drumright explained: “For example, a lawyer could return to an M&A matter and have Harvey already worked through the latest material contracts, providing a first-pass review in their preferred format with findings cited, while surfacing the agreements that need attention, and then open the next step for the lawyer responsible.”
The goal is to ensure less time is spent explaining preferences, finding documents and rebuilding context, and more time on substantive legal work, the firm said, adding that Memory was designed in response to customers wanting a more bespoke legal AI offering.
“For us, that’s an important part of leading this market: building with our customers and delivering the capabilities that have the greatest impact on their work,” Drumright said.
The launch of Harvey II intensifies its agentic approach to its legal AI products, performing multi-step tasks across case processes.
Over the past six months since Memory was first announced, Harvey has hosted ‘listening tours’ spanning the US, UK, Europe, the Middle East and Asia-Pacific.
A cohort of global law firms and in-house legal departments, including AmLaw and Magic Circle firms along with Fortune 500 and FTSE 100 legal departments, have been considered design partners for Memory.
Drumright commented: “Our listening tours and work with law firms and in-house legal teams as design partners helped us understand what Harvey should remember, how those memories should be applied, and where they need to stop.
“That input has been critical to building personalisation that becomes more useful over time while respecting the permissions, confidentiality requirements and ethical walls that legal work demands.”
Memory is being rolled out in three phases, the initial step – ‘personal’ – is currently in an early access stage, focused on lawyers retaining preferences around such issues as drafting.
In the next few months, the ‘space’ phase will be introduced, where relevant ‘memories’ will be applied across a shared area.
The final phase will be at an organisation level, where firms and legal departments can bring broader ways of working into Harvey, sustaining appropriate boundaries between users.
Harvey says that Memory will reach a general access stage for clients during the third quarter of this year.
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