Building a Frontier In-House Organization
How legal teams are transforming their departments with Harvey to better serve the enterprise and help the business move faster.
Satya Nadella describes the frontier firm as a company built around intelligence on demand, where people and agents work side by side. Inside most companies, the legal department is where that shift arrives first.
For the general counsels we work with, the question used to be how to get lawyers to use AI. Now it’s how to run the department on it.
Behind that shift are four challenges we hear from in-house teams:
- Legal as the bottleneck. Lawyers spend too much time on work that doesn’t need legal judgment, instead of working at the top of their license.
- Rising volume, flat headcount. Demand for Legal grows with the business but headcount and budgets do not.
- Reactive instead of proactive. Regulatory change and contract risk surface late, when they’re already problems.
- No portfolio visibility. Contract history, obligations, and outside matters are scattered across systems, inboxes, and law firms.
None of these problems stay in one lane. A single contract can be a bottleneck, a capacity problem, and a visibility gap at once. And when requests queue up and the business can’t see where they stand, employees bypass Legal and take legal questions to general-purpose AI tools, outside Legal’s controls. Banning that doesn't work. The frontier move is to give the business a better place to ask, with Legal in control of the answers.
The Platform for a Frontier Legal Department
We’re building Harvey as one platform for the business, its legal team, and outside counsel. It connects every request, contract, and matter with the documents, conversations, and context behind it. That knowledge, including the department’s policies, prior decisions, and outcomes, is codified in one legal brain that people and agents draw on as they work. Legal decides what agents can handle and where people should make the call.
Legal puts that knowledge to work across requests, contracts, and matters. It sets what agents can handle, where people make the call, and when to involve outside counsel. Past matters, outcomes, and invoice data help Legal choose the right firm for the work. Requests come in and follow-up questions, updates, and completed work go back through the channels the business already uses. Each outcome adds to the department’s knowledge, informing the next decision.
Harvey’s products and agents draw on that same model. If a sales lead asks whether a customer deal can include a new AI-use clause, Harvey can pull up the original request, the department’s position on AI clauses, the terms the company has agreed to before, and the EU rules that apply, all in one answer.
We've built that connectivity with partners over several years. Harvey runs on Microsoft Azure and works inside Microsoft 365, from Word to Copilot Cowork. It connects to LexisNexis for primary law, to Docusign and Ironclad for contract workflows, and through the Connector Library to the rest of the systems the department already uses.
Resolve Requests Wherever the Business Works
Intake extends the department’s legal front door across email, chat, and business systems, including Outlook, Gmail, Slack, Teams, Jira, ServiceNow, and Salesforce. Harvey gathers context, then routes and assigns work by type, risk, and department. Agents and lawyers send follow-up questions, updates, and completed work back through the same channels.
Legal decides how each request is handled and when to escalate:
- Deflect routine work. Approved agents answer questions or complete work within Legal’s rules, without adding it to the team’s queue.
- Prepare work for judgment. Harvey gathers context, researches, drafts, and flags issues so the assigned team can make the call.
- Bring in outside expertise. Work routes to the firm Legal designates, with the request and relevant company context prepared in a Shared Space.
Legal sets what agents may resolve and when review is required. A full audit log records every agent and human action and decision. Advice and outcomes feed back into the department’s knowledge, helping Legal improve responses and identify more work to deflect.
Move Negotiations Faster and Put Every Agreement to Work
Contracting is where most in-house work gets lost. Legal moves contracts through every negotiation round by hand, where history and next steps are scattered across email threads, systems, and people.
Contract Intelligence, which we launched in May, is the contracting layer for the department. We’re building agents to carry contracts from request through multi-turn negotiation, approvals, and signature, then track what the company has committed to in order to proactively manage commitments and mitigate risk for the business. It works seamlessly alongside existing CLM and procurement systems, so the team can move deals faster without reconstructing their history at every step.
As an example, say a salesperson forwards a counterparty’s marked-up agreement. Harvey connects it to the deal, prior drafts, and related agreements, reviews the changes, and prepares the response. Across each round, it carries forward agreed positions, routes exceptions for review according to rules set by Legal, and coordinates the next steps toward signature.
“When you’re in the kind of sustained, high-growth environment we’ve experienced at GE Aerospace over the past five-plus years, the pressure to move faster on contracts while protecting your people from overburden is real. Harvey’s Contract Intelligence has been one of the most impactful tools we’ve deployed to tackle both challenges simultaneously and upholding our world class contracting standards.”
John Cooke
Senior Director, North America Contracts Leader, GE Aerospace
Every review depends on the department's judgment, and historically most of it has lived in individual lawyers' heads. Two reviewers could give the same contract two different answers. Playbooks and Contract Review Agents standardize and ground reviews in the department’s documents, precedents, and historical judgment. Every decision adds to that history: what Legal changed, what the counterparty accepted, and what was signed. Future reviews learn from those outcomes, while Legal decides which lessons become updates to its standards.
Put Signed Agreements to Work
Before a renewal, an account manager can ask Harvey, “What mattered most to this customer last time?” Harvey brings together the agreement and negotiation history to show what the customer pushed for, what the company agreed to, and which commitments the team needs to honor. That context helps the business better serve the customer and prepare for the next negotiation.
Across the portfolio, that same history helps business teams compare concessions and gives Legal visibility into where unusual terms and risk are accumulating by showing what the business is negotiating and agreeing to. We’re extending that work into obligation management, with owners and deadlines so teams can act before a missed commitment or unwanted renewal becomes a cost.
Turn Regulatory Change Into Action
Contract Intelligence helps teams get ahead of what they have agreed to. Horizon Scanning helps them respond to what changes outside the company.
A global company answers to regulators in every market it operates in, and the rules change every week. Most legal departments find out late, then scramble to work out what a change touches.
Horizon Scanning monitors the topics, regions, and regulators a team wants to follow, drawing on more than 12,000 sources across over 100 jurisdictions. Teams can assess relevant changes and use Harvey to draft policy revisions, guidance, and next steps.
We’re connecting those developments to the department’s contracts, policies, open requests, and past decisions. A new rule should not only inform them of the impact but should reveal which agreements may need amendments and which advice needs revisiting, with work assigned to Legal, HR, or Compliance and a record of what was completed to ensure the risk has been mitigated.
Deutsche Telekom already uses Harvey across its German legal, compliance, and data protection teams, turning regulations such as the EU Batteries Regulation into actionable summaries in minutes.
Give Outside Counsel the Context to Move Faster
Most legal departments struggle to say what their firms are working on right now. The work sits in each firm's own systems, and the department sees it mostly through invoices. Harvey already works with both the legal departments and their law firms. Connecting the two means outside counsel can start with the business context and work the legal department has already done.
In Shared Spaces, legal teams and firms work on the same matter with permissions on both sides. Each firm sees its own work and relevant context; Legal sees progress across matters. Deutsche Telekom and Gleiss Lutz are setting the direction here: after years of using Harvey separately, they brought their collaboration into the platform, on a foundation of shared context, security, and trust.
We’re building toward better decisions about who should do the work. Matter history, performance, and invoice data can help Legal understand scope, quality, speed, and cost across its firm relationships. When work goes to outside counsel, Harvey can prepare a Shared Space with relevant documents, prior advice, and business context from the department’s internal systems, reducing initial context sharing and cold start problems folks have struggled with in the past.
With that shared context, outside counsel can build on the department’s work and tailor its advice to the company’s priorities. That can make outside expertise worthwhile on work once kept in-house because it was too slow or costly to send out. Firms can deliver new services to more of their clients, while departments get more from their outside spend.
Putting Legal at the Center of Agent Governance
Running this across an enterprise requires permissions, approved agents, and a record of their actions. Command Center helps the people leading the deployment understand usage, find gaps, and assess where to expand. The platform’s security controls protect sensitive work, and we do not train models on customer data.
The next shift may be the most important. The policies Legal helps the company follow will also need to govern its agents, from sales drafting order forms to procurement onboarding vendors. Legal, Compliance, Risk, and IT/Security will share that responsibility. We’re building Command Center as their common platform, with Legal at the center: policies turned into rules agents are checked against, limits on what each can do, monitoring of every run, and exceptions routed to accountable owners.
A More Profitable Business
The case for a frontier in-house organization isn't a smaller legal department. It's a faster, safer, more profitable business.
Faster contracts bring revenue and suppliers online sooner. Timely answers keep business teams moving. Acting earlier on obligations and regulatory changes reduces exposure to disputes and avoidable costs. Better allocation across agents, the internal team, and outside counsel gives Legal more capacity to advise on strategy, products, and growth.
In RSGI’s research, 92% of surveyed in-house teams using Harvey report faster turnaround for the business, 91% save time on contract review, and 88% spend more time with the business on higher-value work. In its latest report, nearly half describe Harvey as foundational to how they deliver legal services.
Built for Every Industry
Every frontier in-house organization will look different, because every industry does. The platform underneath will be the same. The priorities vary by industry: regulatory work at a bank, commercial contracts and product counsel at a technology company, suppliers and workforce issues at a consumer business. Each department brings its own context and standards.
Harvey works with five of the Fortune 10 and one in five of the Fortune 500, across more than 1,600 in-house teams. Some of the largest run it across the whole function. The Adecco Group’s legal and compliance department has more than 300 professionals, and over 80% of its lawyers report better quality and speed. It’s also spreading beyond Legal: Repsol’s legal department reached 96% adoption, and its tax and labor departments have since adopted Harvey too.
Frontier Research for In-House Work
This vision depends on agents doing the work reliably. In June we added 500 in-house contracting tasks to our open-source Legal Agent Benchmark (LAB), across ten contract families. Each tests whether an agent can advance a negotiation from a given point, with every criterion required to pass. In Artificial Analysis’s launch evaluation of LAB, the leading model setup fully passed just 14.2% of tasks. Reliable legal work remains a hard research problem.
Harvey is model-neutral: We work with models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google, route each task to the model system that handles it best, and train our own. Harvey Tenet is our first model post-trained for long-horizon legal work. It completes nearly twice as many held-out LAB tasks as the model it started from, and about 20% more contracting tasks.
We are also working to make reliable legal work more economical. Post-training improves how efficiently models use tools and reason.
LAB and Harvey Tenet use synthetic matters, public legal data, and expert review. Customer data is not used to train the models.
What Comes Next
A legal department can start with one repeatable workflow: define the risk it is willing to delegate, connect the relevant context and channels, and measure whether the business gets good work back faster. Legal reviews the results, improves its guidance, and expands from there.
We’re extending Intake into more of the places the business works, Contract Intelligence across the deal lifecycle, and search and models around the department’s own work. The business gets answers and completed work where it operates, backed by the department’s judgment.
We’ll show more at a live demo for in-house teams on October 29 and at FORUM Chicago on November 5. The legal departments we work with are already building this. If you’re building it inside your company, we’d like to build it with you.
