Harvey CEO Winston Weinberg on expanding beyond big law as 41% of revenue now comes from corporates

Good job.

We have Yo, Tom,

Sierra, and then we have Josh Wolf to cap it off. So, uh,

let's bring in Winston Weinberg, the CEO and co-founder of Harvey from the Reream waiting room

into the TVP Ultradome. Winston, good to see you. How are you doing?

What's happening?

Good. I like that cloud. It's crazy.

It's powerful.

I want one of those.

It's powerful.

It's like Thor coming in.

Yes. Yes. Uh, I mean, you do have a nice background. It's clean, but not nearly enough.

No thunder, no lightning, no

We have a guy. We have a We have a cloud guy. Help you out.

This is a huge problem. Yeah. If you guys could hook me up with your cloud guy, that'd be great.

Yeah, it's actually a blimp guy.

Yes, it's it's [laughter] uh it's pulsating right now. Um well, thank you so much.

So So this was really well timed because uh we just got our December [laughter] legal bill. Uh and I love I love our I I genuinely our our uh lawyer is like very good friend of mine. I love love

But he handwrites everything. Not quite using a typewriter.

Not quite. He's being as efficient as he can, but but you know, every company has a lot of work and

interestingly, I just I just feel like legal bills because they are variable and the work is important. But I just feel like it's always a surprise. The number is always bigger than you expect it to be. And I'm excited to head uh head into a world where uh that bill can be smaller for a lot of companies and get better work. Um so hopefully uh I know the work that you're doing is

But yeah, kick us off with the state of the union. Where is Harvey today?

Yeah. So, uh, started three and a half years ago. Um, so I mean, God, it's I think it's felt like every day it either feels like it was yesterday or it was like 50 years, something like that probably. And just kind of oscillating back and forth. Um, started selling to kind of like very large law firms. Um, now we've expanded to selling to large corporations as well. Um, and mid-market. Um, and what we're really trying to do is kind of have like a operating system that's in between. So, it's for all lawyers and it helps them basically provide those services um, you know, more cheaply and can do the the work faster. I think to be honest, your legal bill uh, and I'm a little laggy. I don't know if that's on me or you.

Uh, I think that's just the the you're you're watching the show. So, so

maybe I you seem like you're in real time.

Yeah, yeah, you look fine. I'll take it. Um, I think the reality is probably your legal bill, the stuff that they're charging for, that's going to not be as expensive, but there will be other type of legal work that you're going to need done.

And so, your overall legal bill will probably be the same, but the line items will look different is my guess of how this goes.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. More more more hours spent on the actual high lever work versus, you know, just generating a document here or there. what changed last year with heart like what were the big inflection points for the business last year because I just noticed this you know t having friends that were lawyers I saw like a huge difference in how they even thought about Harvey at the beginning of the year versus the end of the year just like they had the they they were kind of like oneshotted by Harvey at some point during the year which is like that is what you're bu if you're building an AI company you want to build a product that's so magical and powerful that people are like whoa okay I I really believe And you also want to start building it when it's a little rough around the edges and then let the models get better and then and then that moment hits. You're ready.

There's Yeah. There's you basically like there's two things that happen. One is the reasoning ability of the models get better and then two is your orchestration into the correct context gets better. Right. So I think of this is honestly like there's three type of employees or like folks that you work with like colleagues. One is you have to give them all of the perfect context in every single piece of information to do the job and then they can do it. The second is you say, "Hey man, the same way that we did XYZ last week, could you do it again?" And then they do it. And then the third is folks just do it without even any of the context. And so a lot of what we're doing in the product actually is how do you make sure that for a specific task all of the correct context is being pulled and put into the platform and then how do you run the models over that context to get the right output right and it's actually like a very hard problem at scale because if you think of what you're doing you're kind of building like a

like a legal brain or like a partner brain. This is what they do. They get a task from you know one of you guys and they break that task down into all these like 10 subtasks and then they you know give that to other associates etc. It's a really hard thing to build.

Uh Chat GPT launched chat GPT health yesterday. H how do you think the consumer proumer legal advice category will evolve? People are probably going to LLM consumer LLM today. They're definitely going

and just ask hey write this write this thing. And is that is that an area that like you guys don't have any

in-house council product or something?

Yeah. So, so in-house council we definitely do. So, we serve a lot of Fortune 500s. Um, and that's that's actually that's growing. I think last quarter

fortune 500.

Thanks. Give it up for them. Yeah. Let's give it up for

I think last quarter it was like 41% or something like that was actually corporates. Um, so that's [laughter] that's there we go. Yeah. Give me one more though. That's the cloud. If you could you combine the cloud with that combine the cloud [laughter]

and the Saturday.

Well, I to be honest I thought you said 41% of the I I thought you were saying 41% of the Fortune 500 but that'll be soon I'm sure.

Here I'll come back on when that happens hopefully soon and we can do like a blimp cloud and that sound all combined with some like Thor lightning strikes.

Um so we are interested in this and like helping consumers out. One thing we have right now is actually if you're a citizen of Singapore um and you're filing a claim below 20,000, you can use Harvey to help you file that claim and then the magistrate judge can actually use Harvey to review that. And one of the Yeah. One of the things

the like Spider-Man meme. [laughter]

Well, so what we're actually ending up wanting to do eventually is in other stages both parties can decide. They have to both consent to this, but they say, "Hey, I'm going to submit these facts and Harvey is going to help me draft it, right?" It's hard as a consumer to like know when your rights have been violated and what to put into the the complaint and things like that.

But both of us will agree that we're going to submit this into Harvey and then the outcome is going to be binding. Um, and that's like eventually would be actually incredible because a huge problem in Singapore is and it's a even bigger problem in the United States is just access to justice in general, right? Where people actually can't get any of their claims met. One, because the average price of a lawyer is $353 an hour in the US, which is astronomically too high, right? Um, and then the second reason is the courts are just like absolutely overburdened, right? Um, and so any of those systems that you can do to help that really moves this along. Um, and so we're doing some of it with kind of work with different governments. Um, and I think eventually we'll look into this, but it's not on our road map right now.

What are your big predictions for 2026 just in terms of AI progress? Uh, are you building the business that expects another jump in uh, capabilities? It feels like a lot of people were talking about cloud code being uniquely enabled by Opus 4.5. Have you seen a similar step change in any particular model? Are you waiting for that or uh is it sort of just business as usual?

Yes.

No, I mean we we we you have to build everything assuming that it's going to get better. Um, and what you do is you actually just try to create a culture of trying to build really complex things and we have a lot of how we do this is we have a lot of like design partners and so work with like private equity or a law firm or something like that to try to build like a really extreme use case. A lot of the times it fails. Uh and that's actually okay because it fails and then we realize oh if the models improve XYZ then it would actually probably work and then we bucket that and we wait and then we try it with a new model and eventually that stuff starts to work right. So a lot of it is like how can you go out and try to do the frontier level tasks get the feedback of what needs to improve to to actually complete that and then you have that set and ready to go as a use case.

Yeah.

How much how much do you think the legal system can actually speed up? any anybody that has had any, you know, experienced a lawsuit will understand that like, you know, something that that really should be a decision that hypothetically if you got a few the right people in a room and everybody was like mature, you could just kind of like figure it out and and obviously people try to do that with settlements, but then you end up getting like, you know, these dates that get pushed farther and farther and farther out. Hypothetically, if you know, two different parties are putting stuff into Harvey, you know, you can you can basically theoretically kind of like decide something almost instantaneously, then in theory, you could then appeal it and Harvey like basically [laughter] run it again and then appeal it again, you know? Um, and so it just feels like there's going to be uh you're kind of like fighting hundreds of years of like precedent in the way that things are done. And so in some ways like even if we have the technology maybe lawsuits are still these uh and any type of like legal process could still end up taking months or years in some cases.

Yeah. I think there's a lot of stuff that needs to happen on the actual court system to like facilitate this. Like I guess maybe a better way to think about this is like there's three categories. One is like the process and the system, right? And hopefully you move that along by just the technology advancements are so high that the process and system breaks and then it has to change. The second is like all of the context that's relevant. So can you like collect all the data that's relevant to actually doing the task? And then the third is actually just like the underlying technology, right? Like you need all three of those. I think there's going to be a lag. I think exactly right. Um but there are a lot of you know we just talked about what we we do in Singapore and there are a lot of kind of forward-looking folks that are looking at this. Um, the other thing I'd say too is like we see more movement on the transactional side because at that point it really is just up to the principles, right? So both sides of the deal want to do something. You can do it, right? And honestly like a lot of the best lawyers on earth, they're dealmakers. Like that's what they're doing, right? They actually like the reviewing of the documents. Yeah, that's kind of just like table stakes. It's actually they give massively really valuable business judgment advice, right? And it's because they've just been in those rooms so many times that they've seen so many different private equity deals done that they can actually

Yeah. You have the greatest the greatest entrepreneurs in history that maybe only sell their company one, you know, they sell their company once or they start another company, they sell it again, but that's nothing compared to the the lawyer that's been through 200, you know, transactions.

Yeah, that makes sense.

Tons. And they're in the room. And that's that's happening more and more. The lawyers are in the room even more than the bankers are actually increasingly, right? And so I think that all of this goes to say that I do think the profession is going to change. I think that's good for consumers of legal services. I also think that's really good for lawyers because the reality is like people go to law school because they see TV shows like Suits. Um and they want to be like the lawyer on that TV show, right? Or the Lincoln lawyer or whatever. I don't know. Yeah. I love Matthew McConna. Um and so they they want to be a lawyer like it is on TV, right? And I think what's important is if these tools start saturating the market, the your career is going to look closer to that. It's going to look closer to like working with clients and to actually going to trial and working on these big deals. So that's why I'm really excited about it. And we work with a lot of law schools on kind of figuring out what that career path is going to look like.

Yeah. What's happening like law school applications are uh is at like local like a local top. Tons of people are are deciding to go to law school. Some people are concerned by that because people are going to saddle themselves with with debt or spend a lot of money and and

they I feel like there's a lot of uncertainty. How how have you been processing that? Are some of these law schools like I imagine they're trying to get access to Harvey and maybe you have relationships with them.

So we we work with a lot of law schools. Um, and so we announced our like program last year and at this point I'd have to give you the stats, but I think we're at like 15 of the top 20 law schools or something like that. So we're we're definitely moving pretty quickly there. Thank you. [laughter] Um, I would also one one thing I want to say to this is I think that a lot of folks have said that that's actually like a bad sign for the economy when more people apply to law school. I actually don't think that's why more people apply to law school. I think a lot of people apply to law school because they think that being a lawyer you can make a change in the world. I I I genuinely believe that and you can

and I think actually what happens is when you're in like tumultuous times a lot of people say hey I actually want to change this especially you know when you're applying to law school you're younger right you're in a younger generation and I think that's actually a lot of the reason why you know these applications increase over time.

That makes a ton of sense. Uh well thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show today.

We could talk for so much longer but I'm sure we'll have you on many times this year.

Yeah. Congrats to the whole team on on all the progress

and thank you for hopefully reducing our legal bills. We will [laughter] talk to