For Michelle Mahoney, Innovation Starts With People

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 Michelle Mahoney, Chief Innovation Officer at King & Wood Mallesons (KWM).

In her role as KWM's Chief Innovation Officer, Michelle is at the forefront of leading innovation, digital, and transformation. Her responsibilities include GenAI strategy, legal service design, digital strategy, digital literacy, and the future of work. Michelle's strategic thinking on how technology and legal expertise can be combined to enhance performance, impact, and outcomes is a key aspect of her career.

She has spearheaded many first-to-market initiatives, received numerous awards, and holds several advisory board appointments, including on the MIT Data Board and several global legal technology companies. In 2025, she was recognised for her mentorship and impact on the global LegalTech community and was named in ILTA’s 2025 Influential Women in LegalTech list.

For me, innovation is change that has a positive impact. I believe organisations don’t change, people do. At the heart of innovation are people. Ideas, models, technologies, products, and services must all deeply connect with people in order to have a positive impact. What’s most exciting to me about being an innovation leader today are the possibilities to design entirely new ways of working that create better outcomes.

I love to travel and explore new places, especially with my husband and two sons. I am also endlessly curious and love to learn from those around me — even turning show-and-tell moments into new ideas or ways of working.

I have evaluated a lot of legal tech over my professional career. With Harvey, I was particularly impressed by the pace of development, alignment of future functionality with the KWM GenAI strategy and roadmap, and its engaging UI. I also love the Vault functionality.

When we first got started with Harvey, I was hoping to achieve high adoption and impact across all practice teams. Pleasingly, we were able to observe this during our six-week experiment, during which we captured over 280 use cases.

My team and I are very data-driven, and we use a heat map to visualise how the KWM AI portfolio is adopted across the firm. The Harvey experience has had very high participation in training, with our legal staff achieving an attendance rate of over 86% in the first six weeks.

We are seeing active Harvey use across all teams and peer groups, and it’s one of the most engaged campaigns we have ever run. I can’t call out a leading team — there are three that are too close to call — but we are seeing good habits forming with extensive product functionality usage and increasing daily use.

Perhaps unsurprisingly given my previous “people are at the centre” answers, we have significant change capability. We take the time to first understand any blockers and then design systemic enablement that drives adoption, making it easier for our people to form new habits.

We offer a wide array of enablement, including micro-credentialing, recognised time for legal tech learning and testing, and our Multiplier, which encourages our lawyers to use legal technology and both recognizes and multiples the time they spend. We also have a Harvey Hub that’s full of time-saving tips, tricks, guides for using Harvey for each peer band, and how-to videos to help lawyers get the most out of the Harvey platform.

It's also really important to us to create opportunities for the lawyers to learn from each other. By sharing ideas and experiences in open and accessible forums, we can build skills and deepen knowledge across the board. This helps ensure that everyone is part of the Harvey journey, moving forward together. We have established dedicated Harvey champion groups, where users opt in to share use cases, ideas, and practical approaches to leveraging Harvey.

We have a litigation matter where, every month, parties on the project held a steering group meeting to go through the key issues raised. During these detailed and lengthy meetings, the key joint venture representative covered all the key issues the project encountered and outlined actions.

With Harvey, the KWM team can upload all the lengthy steering committee meeting minutes into a shared legal team Vault, create the review table, and refine prompts in each column. Not only does this save the legal team time because they don’t have to sift through documents manually, it also creates a ready-made resource they can tap into for any future tasks.

There have been numerous additional uses of this Vault shared across the legal team. For example, there are prompts to extract and display which witnesses attended which meetings, and also utilise Vault to assist in preparing affidavits and creating chronologies or timelines from a single dataset.

We have also seen teams create document repositories in Vault of our usual positions, enabling them to reference past approaches and provide reasons for accepting or rejecting them in future deals. This is a great example of harnessing existing data.

These simple examples are a great way to think about Vault. The document set has endless possibilities and can make an impact on many routine activities lawyers will undertake.

I am very data-driven, and we are tracking a lot of metrics at a team level to inform our planning, implementation, training, and progress against our GenAI strategy. Our success metrics roll up and start with overarching goals. Within each goal, we have objectives that each have a metric and target with a baseline.

I hear people talking about adoption, which is essential; however, usage does not equate to impact. We measure a range of elements: adoption, frequency, broad functionality usage, client engagements, the value generated, and change impact, among other metrics.

The key is to be clear about what goals you are seeking and what metrics are the most relevant indicators of success and progress toward those goals. I also believe that it’s important to have a combination of leading and lagging indicators to navigate the impact of change effectively.

The first lesson I’ve learned is that implementation is just the starting point. Prepare for sustained and multi-faceted updates, training, prompt development, use case development, client conversations, and new ways of working. Try to create a change experience rather than a big bang event then silence.

The second lesson is two-way communication and learning are key — from the Innovation team to the lawyers and back. You need to be constantly in practice, picking up on-the-job learning and experiences of your legal staff, proactively solving pain points, and responding to new use cases.

In my opinion, the increased capability and augmentation of legal services could address the gap in access to justice and the pro bono sector. It would be hugely impactful if GenAI could help provide effective services to this unmet sector.