How AI is Expanding Legal’s Role Across the Business

When I managed an in-house rollout of Harvey at NBCUniversal, I had two workflow imperatives: how could AI help our legal team get involved earlier in business decisions and how could we make our legal guidance easier for teams across the company to use? For us, that might’ve meant being brought into the creative and dealmaking processes that drive the entertainment industry.

Now, as an Innovation Partner at Harvey, those same imperatives are front of mind for legal teams I work with across many industries.

Legal teams are balancing a steady flow of requests with the need to advise while business decisions are still taking shape. AI can take on parts of high-volume work such as first-pass review, redlines, research, and regulatory monitoring, giving lawyers more room for judgment-heavy advice. The choices leaders make about that added capacity, including where Legal gets involved, what work it takes on, and how its guidance reaches colleagues, shape how the function contributes across the company.

That contribution also often includes helping the company decide how to adopt AI more broadly. As AI moves into more functions, legal leaders are increasingly asked to guide rollout, governance, and measurement. Their experience applying AI within Legal gives them a practical perspective to bring to those decisions.

Put New Capacity to Work

When legal teams use AI, faster turnaround is often the first result the business notices. RSGI’s latest report, based on a survey of 25 in-house Harvey customers, found that 92% of respondents reported faster turnaround to the business.

The same survey found that 88% of respondents said they spend more time with the business on higher-value work. Legal teams can direct that time toward judgment-heavy advice, bring more work in-house, and make approved guidance available for recurring questions. The right path depends on where Legal’s expertise can have the greatest impact.

One financial services legal team in RSGI’s research used time freed through Harvey to advise on entering new markets and launching new products. At Repsol, the legal team completed a mid-sized M&A transaction in-house using Harvey; outside counsel quotes for the work averaged €200,000.

From Individual Use to Business Workflows

In my work with Harvey customers, I see adoption move through three stages.

It often begins with individual legal professionals using AI for familiar tasks such as reviewing contracts against a playbook, researching a legal question, or preparing a first draft. As they find useful, repeatable applications, they can bring them into shared workflows within the legal department. This gives the legal team a consistent way to handle similar matters, even when different people are doing the work, and clarify where legal professionals need to review AI’s output.

The broader shift comes when Legal connects its workflows to the places where other teams handle recurring work. With Harvey, legal teams can make approved guidance available through Spaces and Playbooks, so teams like Finance or Procurement can check routine work against Legal’s guardrails. Standard matters can move forward within those guardrails, while exceptions return to Legal for review.

At Carrefour Spain, the legal team created self-service tools to help business colleagues generate certain contracts and answer common legal questions. Colleagues get a faster path through standard matters, while Legal has more time for questions that benefit from legal judgment.

At Dentsu, Group General Counsel Alison Zoellner describes how Harvey helped her team build capacity and stay connected with the business:

“With Harvey, Legal and Compliance is the pacesetter in a race. We have turbocharged our capacity without additional headcount; added efficiency by reducing external spend; and enhanced flexibility by reallocating lawyer time to high value activities and doubling down on our promise to be connected and consistent as a large distributed team operating globally and covering 120 markets.”

Choose a Workflow, Then Measure its Impact

Broad instructions to use AI can be hard to translate into day-to-day work. A defined workflow makes the operating change concrete: identify a recurring task or manual step, determine which parts AI can support, and set expectations for review and escalation. At ASML, the legal team automated part of a data protection impact assessment process that had required employees to navigate a privacy tool manually.

Before rolling out a workflow more broadly, decide what improvement to track. For faster responses, measure turnaround. For greater in-house capacity, count the matters of increased complexity that Legal can now handle. For earlier advice, record when Legal joins a decision. Pairing usage data with the relevant outcome measure helps teams see whether the workflow is improving the process it was designed to support.

AI gives Legal a chance to contribute closer to where business decisions and processes take shape. As that happens, its role can become part of how the company moves work forward, with legal judgment built into the moments that need it.

To dig deeper into how AI is changing in-house legal teams’ work and impact, read RSGI’s report, The New Economics of In-House Legal.