5 Questions With K-Ming Lee

“5 Questions With” is our blog series where we interview senior leaders at Harvey about the things our customers and partners care about most.

In this edition, we chat with K-Ming Lee, Head of Customer Engagement at Harvey. Prior to this, K-Ming was the Global VP of Customer Success at Templafy and Head of Customer Success, East at Dropbox.

I’ve worked at SaaS organizations for a long time, and for most companies it takes a very long time to figure out their ideal customer profile (ICP). Winston and Gabe had an immediate focus on who they were building Harvey for, in terms of taking large language models and applying them specifically to one vertical. That focus was really important to me.

As a founding team, Winston and Gabe have a great balance — Winston has the experience of being a lawyer, and Gabe is more of the technical founder. I thought that was the perfect blend to bridge strategy into execution.

I also started talking to innovation leaders in big law while I was meeting with Harvey, back in fall 2023. I wanted to get a sense of whether they’d heard of Harvey and used it. And across the board, people said they felt the legal industry was going to get disrupted by AI. Many were already convinced that Harvey was the real deal, and that these were the guys who were going to lead that transformation. So hearing that from insiders was especially validating for me.

A lot of companies say they’re customer-centric, but we are genuinely customer-obsessed. Many businesses operate as if they know more than their customers and build what they want to build. That’s not Harvey — we want to focus on building to our customers’ needs.

From a community standpoint, our customers really want to be part of this moment and this movement. They want to not only help us grow, but also connect with and learn from each other — and that’s both at in-house teams and law firms. So it’s really important for us to invest there and enable those kinds of connections. We will start doing more community programming, starting with key markets such as New York, London, and Sydney. We want to have our own marquee events that are filled with thought-provoking and educational content, and provide customers a space to connect with and learn from each other.

My main goal is to bring the voice of the customer to everything we do. Every new employee or new hire we onboard needs to understand who our customers are, what they do, and how we serve them. Whether they’re in engineering, go-to-market, or even G&A, they have to really understand the customer. We’re building our first customer advisory boards — one for in-house legal teams and one for law firms — composed of customers who represent the value we’re trying to create and want to be part of shaping Harvey’s future. That’s something we’re looking to launch over the next quarter.

We’re constantly bringing in customers to speak to us. Whether that’s at an all-hands or what we call “customer field trips,” where we go and visit or bring in a customer to speak live with us so we understand not only how they use the platform, but what a day in the life of a lawyer looks like and what they care about. What problems are they facing? What are the big things they need solved to help their practice and better the profession?

Another priority is helping our customers shine. We want to make them look like heroes to their bosses by helping them define the business impact of Harvey or featuring them on panels at events, and really shine the light on them and the successes they’ve had.

We spend as much time with customers as possible. Personally, from events and conferences, to lunches with GCs or going on runs with innovation leaders, I make sure I’m always listening. Recently, I spoke with a partner at a customer firm who shared that across the business, his employees feel that Harvey’s service and enthusiasm to help is what truly distinguishes us. Making sure each and every interaction we have with a customer is meaningful is the bar we’ve set for ourselves.

It’s important to understand the good, but the critical feedback is even more important. As someone that buys tech, I know how frustrating it is as a user to give feedback and feel that it’s gone nowhere. So we have a ton of different listening posts and processes to capture customer feedback and share it back with the team so that we can take action.

For example, translation has been a major improvement area for us and thousands of users rely on it daily. We started with a handful of supported languages, and today we have over 30. We expanded those language options based on customer feedback. Understanding those nuances is really important to doing business internationally, and feedback helps us prioritize what matters most to our customers.

Product feedback is heavily run by the Product team, in conjunction with GTM who make sure that there are avenues for them to listen directly to customers. When customers are in San Francisco, we try to get people into the office so we can run UX and hands-on-keyboard sessions and learn how people actually use Harvey.

If a customer is walking us through a pain point, we schedule calls where members of EPD can join and ask questions to understand the problem firsthand. Clients love the opportunity to share their insights and get direct access to and investment from our team.

I also do a lot of work to organically connect Firm X with Firm Y if one has solved a problem that the other is dealing with. That kind of bridge happens regularly, and we’re seeing it as an impactful way to foster community

One feature we built because of customer feedback was user profiles. Users and admins can edit user profiles and filter by title, practice area, and language, which helps tailor their Harvey experience. Harvey should understand who each and every user actually is, what year associate they are, what language they practice in, and more. An example is if you are using British English versus American English, Harvey should conform to this without you needing to prompt it. And having that information helps us ensure every user sees the workflows most relevant to them.

The home base right now is our customer stories page. It’s fun to work at an organization where so many customers are eager to highlight their successes with us. We plan to evolve to more video formats later in the year, like this one from Michelle Mahoney, Chief Innovation Officer at King & Wood Mallesons.

We’ve also begun publishing Innovation Spotlights on LinkedIn, where we highlight the humans behind innovation. It’s a great opportunity for the innovation community to learn about their peers and the tactics and successes they’ve had in driving adoption of legal AI.

At conferences, we design panels where we feature two to four customers who share their experience with Harvey and how they evaluated AI solutions — everything from general tips to change management to use cases. Many times, audience members will line up to speak to our panelists. They’ll have more questions and just want to learn from the people who have done it before.

AI is in such early stages that everyone is trying to figure out how to get the most value from it and deploy it. We want to create opportunities for customers to highlight their wins and successes.

My goal is that every customer looks at Harvey as not just another solution provider, but that we feel like true partners in their success. We’re all on this journey together, and it’s a privilege for us to be working with some of the most prestigious organizations in the world. We’re learning from them just as much as they are learning from us.