5 Questions With Maggie Landers

“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 Maggie Landers, VP of Talent at Harvey. Prior to this, Maggie was the VP of Talent Acquisition at Intercom and Director of Talent Acquisition at Prosper Marketplace.

First, the space. Harvey is a true disruptor company, and I was really compelled by the value of the product. The legal industry is a very traditional sector that isn’t going anywhere, but at the same time it’s ripe for disruption. A lot of the companies that talk about disruption talk about how an industry is broken, how they’re going to blow it all up and start from scratch. Harvey isn’t like that — we’re approaching things in a very collaborative and respectful way where we’re looking to really partner with this industry that we’re trying to transform.

Second, the opportunity to work with motivated and visionary founders like Winston and Gabe. I find that the more ambitious the founders, the longer-term the thinking, the bigger the vision, the more opportunity exists for employees. Founders who think super short-term about getting a company sold or a private equity play limit their own growth. At Harvey, the focus is on big-picture ambitions and a real long-term vision.

The final piece is the opportunity for impact in my particular role. I truly believe Harvey is at an inflection point where, in order to continue to deliver for our customers and actualize our ambitious vision, we need to scale and we need to figure out a way to do that quickly. My job is to figure out how to do that and build a talent machine. It’s a critical role at a critical moment in time.

The short answer is that we’re hiring across every team in all of our existing locations, and also thinking about adding new locations. Currently, we have over 80 open roles and plan to hire over 200 people before the end of the year.

The longer answer is that we’re investing aggressively in scaling our go-to-market operations, as well as scaling and building out our Engineering, Product, and Design (EPD) team so we can move faster to support our customer base.

As we support more and more global customers, we need to bring on folks who have the right language skills, experience, and background to support those customers from within the regions in which they sit. We also need to make sure that we have support coverage from an operations, infrastructure, and technical perspective.

Longer-term, Harvey is growing rapidly. We’ll need to introduce more specialization, and we plan to add new role categories, new capabilities, and more leadership roles.

Alignment to Harvey’s values really matter — simplicity, decisiveness, and “Job’s Not Finished.” We’re looking for people who can move quickly, elegantly, and decisively in the ways that they work. “Job’s Not Finished” is a startup attitude, the mentality that there’s always more to do and to resist becoming complacent. People who move with that sense of urgency and understand that the AI space is so different from traditional software businesses — both from a pace and opportunity perspective — and grasp that this space requires new ways of working will do well here.

The right person for Harvey is somebody who is truly consultative and intellectually curious, who wants to solve problems for customers and deeply understand customer perspectives to inform their strategy instead of leveraging a traditional, one-size-fits-all SaaS playbook. We look for people who don’t need to follow a well-defined path and like figuring out how to solve new problems.

Building a great team requires bringing people in from a mix of different environments. So we look for some people who have a maverick mindset and know the pace and experience of working at a high-growth startup. We layer in people who have truly seen scale and know how to operate at scale and can help us get there. It’s so important for us to have people from traditional law firms and have done the kinds of work that our customers do. And then we seek out people who have come from other companies that are major disruptors. The alchemy of these different backgrounds and experiences creates a really healthy ecosystem.

At Harvey, we’re trying to do something that’s never been done before. So what we don’t want to do is pull a bunch of people from the same companies. We have great respect for a lot of organizations out there that do a wonderful job. But too often, organizations in hypergrowth mode rely on the names on a resume as a proxy for having the right behaviors and experiences when they may not actually be the right fit.

A big focus for us is to build a system that allows us to find folks who are aligned with our values, who are incredibly smart and curious, and will be successful wherever they go for those reasons, instead of recruiting out of a short list of companies that we respect.

My initial impression coming into Harvey was that the resort matched the brochure. What I thought I was signing up for very much felt like what I walked into.

Even though it’s not an explicit value, there’s a real customer obsession that was notable even in the first few weeks. Within my first three weeks, between offsites and all-hands meetings, I organically heard four different customer interviews. That was so helpful in clarifying the “why,” and really helped me figure out what to prioritize and what my strategy should look like.

“Job’s Not Finished” feels very top of mind for the company. We have this Slack channel that records deals won, and even that’s filled with messages asking what’s next for us to do so that this customer will be successful.

I see simplicity and decisiveness in the pace. Those values are a critical lynchpin behind our ability to move quickly. All in the first month after I joined, we launched multiple new markets, created a new grad and campus recruiting process, and kicked off multiple leadership searches. That’s more than many companies accomplish in six months.

People say that Harvey is an intense place, and it is. But I find that intensity manifests in focus rather than an unhealthy, cutthroat competition. People are so open to partnering together to work on difficult problems. They’re friendly and motivated to do well and to support one another and to be open to new things.

There are a few big differentiators that set Harvey apart.

First, we really respect and work to deeply understand the professional services space provided by the legal industry. We have embedded lawyers into so many different parts of our organization, and it creates this unique dynamic where innovation meets tradition. Yes, we’re transforming how legal work gets done, but we also strive to honor the craft and integrity of the profession and bridge the gap.

Second, our obsession with customers. A lot of folks are maybe technical and love tinkering with the latest and greatest technology, but they don’t necessarily prioritize building for a customer. Those are not folks who are going to do well here.

Third, this is an incredible place to grow your career. A lot of candidates are excited about our product-market fit and our great VC backing. Those things are great and accelerate our business, but what we also have here is a leadership team who wants to make this the best place you could work and grow, and to bring employees along on that journey. The time horizon we’re thinking on is not the next five months or even the next five years, it’s the next 50.

For people who want to learn by doing, this is the job. You’re going to learn something new every single day. Our founders want this to be a place where, if you thrive in ambiguity and embrace that, this could be the journey of your life. If you’re a builder and you want to create strategy from the ground up and shape the future of the company, this is the moment to join Harvey.