Alex Bazin on Empowering Teams With Legal AI

In our Innovation Spotlight series, we interview innovation leaders about how they approach their jobs and how they’ve implemented and deployed Harvey.

In this edition, we chat with Alex Bazin, Chief Technology Officer and Chief Operating Officer at Lewis Silkin LLP.

Alex has spent two decades helping businesses create value using technology. Having worked across the professional services, logistics, and government sectors, he’s now found his home in the legal world. You'll often find him speaking at conferences and to clients about the effect of technology-driven change.

Today, he leads Lewis Silkin's Technology and Operations team, helping to enhance the way clients and people experience their services. His teams are responsible for all client- and business-facing technology, their library and knowledge services, legal design services, and making sure operations run smoothly.

Alex is passionate about developing high-performing, diverse teams and inclusive, agile company cultures. He is a Chartered Engineer and a Fellow of the Institution of Engineering and Technology, and also has a doctorate in Machine Learning and Computer Vision.

I try to avoid the word “innovation” as it can suggest that improvement is the preserve of big initiatives done to people by an innovation or technology team, rather than being something everyone can and should contribute to. I prefer to encourage people to think about how they can reimagine the way they do their work and keep listening to clients to identify unmet needs.

In my day-to-day work, I try to be constantly curious about emerging tools and methods, so that we can continue to do great work for our clients and meet their evolving needs.

I have a love for learning, using running as an opportunity to catch up on podcasts about anything and everything (including technology). I love to travel and have also lived overseas. This has given me a real interest in the cultural dimensions of technology and how we need to really consider how that affects the adoption of new products or services.

It is easier than ever for people to safely experiment and find new ways of doing things without having to ask the technology team to do something for them. Whether it’s our Knowledge Lawyers building new AI workflows to improve a legal process or an Associate building an automation for a specific client’s documents, we’re able to be much more nimble in how we solve problems.

The reaction of my colleagues across our pilot users was probably the key reason. They’d tried other AI tools, but they simply engaged much better with Harvey. I’ve also been incredibly impressed by the pace of change and how client-centric those changes have been.

We’re treating this as a big experiment; we hope that our colleagues will find ways to embed Harvey into their day-to-day practice to benefit our clients and the firm. But we don’t, for now, have a fixed view of what that looks like — I think we’ll discover that as we go along!

I’m probably most surprised that there aren’t clear patterns — we’ve had both solicitor apprentices and senior partners at the top of our usage league tables and broad usage across our legal and business teams. We’ve also had pretty consistently growing usage levels since launch, which is encouraging.

We made a decision early on to put our Knowledge Lawyers front and centre of our adoption approach. Each team has a Harvey Lead who works with champions in their groups to identify valuable use cases and share best practice within and between groups. This is supported by regular firmwide “spotlight” events led by our Joint Managing Partners.

We also found that league tables and “use-case of the month” prizes helped build some friendly competition in the firm during the early days of deployment.

Document interrogation and summarisation has been one of our biggest use cases. Lawyers often face lengthy PDFs or complex contracts that need quick navigation. Harvey allows users to ask natural language questions to pinpoint relevant sections and even generate concise summaries for client emails. This not only saves time but also adds value by making advice clearer and more accessible.

In employment litigation cases involving thousands of documents, Harvey’s Vault enables teams to upload and organise materials for instant retrieval. It can generate timelines, identify key witnesses, and even help draft responses to litigants in person using tone-adjusted workflows that comply with regulatory standards. These features dramatically reduce manual effort and improve accuracy in high-pressure environments.

Our lawyers also spend a lot of time data wrangling and cross-referencing. Tasks like extracting structured tables from unsearchable PDFs or checking defined terms and cross-references in contracts can be tedious and error-prone. Harvey automates these processes, producing clear summary tables and reducing the risk of oversight. This capability is particularly useful in corporate transactions and contract reviews, where precision and speed are critical.

At the moment success is a culture of experimentation and some good use cases embedded in our day-to-day work. Of course we’re tracking usage, but we are also spending a lot of time listening to feedback from colleagues, understanding what’s working well and where there is room for improvement.

The most important thing is leadership. Our Joint Managing Partners have been front and centre of our aim to be a technology-enabled law firm, including in our roll out of Harvey.

The second is building a culture of experimentation — this is a rapidly evolving technology and we need to bring a mindset to match.

I think many of us recognise there is significant latent demand for legal services that cannot be met through traditional legal delivery models. My hope is that GenAI will help expand the market and lead to better outcomes for clients.