AI Governance at :Harvey:: Announcing our ISO 42001 Certification
Harvey’s ISO 42001 certification points to the governance practices and industry-leading security standards that customers rely on.
AI governance is evolving rapidly, and for enterprise legal teams, the rigor involved is increasing. Buyers are no longer evaluating AI vendors solely on model performance, but on whether those systems can be audited and trusted in critical legal workflows.
Today, we’re proud to announce that Harvey has achieved ISO 42001 certification, the leading internationally recognized standard specifically designed for AI management systems.
This certification reflects work we’ve been investing in from the beginning of Harvey: building operational systems, oversight processes, and technical safeguards that ensure the responsible development and deployment of AI in the world’s leading legal and professional services environments.
What ISO 42001 Means
ISO 42001 is a globally recognized standard for responsible AI management. It provides a framework for how organizations govern AI systems across their lifecycle and is increasingly important for demonstrating the level of rigor our customers expect.
The ISO 42001 standard covers areas including:
- AI risk management
- Transparency and accountability
- Responsible data practices
- Human oversight
- Continuous monitoring and improvement
Why AI Governance Matters for Legal AI
Law firms and in-house legal teams should have confidence that the AI systems supporting their work are reliable, auditable, and subject to oversight.
Enterprise buyers are also increasingly asking in-depth and comprehensive questions about how AI systems are governed, such as:
- How are models evaluated before deployment?
- How are AI-specific risks identified and mitigated?
- Are governance practices independently validated or self-attested?
These expectations are only increasing as AI becomes embedded in critical workflows, and regulations like the EU AI Act continue raising the bar. Enterprise teams should assess how vendors handle governance responsibilities directly, and look out when those responsibilities are pushed onto customers.
What AI Governance Looks Like at Harvey
ISO 42001 certification formalizes practices that our teams have been building for a while. We define and enforce rigorous standards for accuracy, completeness, and reliability across the data that powers our systems.
Starting at the data level, every legal document powering our AI platform is traceable from source to response, with versioned provenance records, content integrity checks, and structured quality gates that ensure only verified, high-quality data reaches production. Our knowledge sources span common and civil law systems across the US, UK, EU, APAC, and MENA — and we actively monitor for linguistic coverage gaps and jurisdictional bias to ensure the data underlying our AI is as representative as the legal work our customers do.
Before any knowledge source goes live, it passes a multi-stage review combining automated validation, human legal expert assessment, and LLM-based scoring — reflecting best practices for responsible AI development. This foundation means Harvey's AI outputs are grounded in reliable, well-governed data, giving law firms and legal teams the confidence that the platform's answers are grounded on a trustworthy and reliable knowledge base.
Governance also shapes how products move from development to deployment. Every significant product launch undergoes a structured risk assessment and AI security threat modeling exercise before release, with findings tracked in a risk register and reviewed by executive leadership. These reviews are designed to help identify and evaluate ongoing AI-specific risks to help ensure the firm data you entrust us with is never at risk.
That rigor extends to how we evaluate models. BigLaw Bench is our open framework for testing AI performance on real legal tasks across jurisdictions, while Harvey LAB introduces open benchmarks for legal agents. Together, these evaluation systems help ensure model performance is measured against realistic legal use cases in a transparent and auditable way.
Ultimately, our systems are designed for auditability and human oversight from the ground up. Outputs cite their sources so users can verify results, audit logs are enabled by default, and agentic actions require explicit human authorization before proceeding. All of this ensures legal teams maintain visibility and control over AI-assisted workflows.
AI Governance as Foundational Infrastructure
ISO 42001 provides an independent signal that Harvey’s AI governance practices meet an internationally recognized standard. But governance is not static. AI capabilities, risks, regulations, and customer expectations will continue evolving rapidly.
As Joshua McKibben, Harvey’s Head of Trust, puts it: “AI risk and security sit at the center of every conversation we have with customers — and rightly so. They’re deploying AI in their most consequential work, and they need substantive, independent assurance that it’s being built and governed responsibly. ISO 42001 is the international standard purpose-built for exactly that, and Harvey’s certification is meaningful validation that we meet it. Alongside SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001, the security work beneath these certifications is continuous. The certifications mark the milestones. Earning trust is continuous.”
Harvey’s Security & Trust, Engineering, Design, Product, Legal, and Responsible Business teams are committed to continue investing in the systems, processes, monitoring, tooling, and human oversight required to deploy AI responsibly at scale, and we are excited to share more as this work evolves.
If you want to learn more about Harvey’s security posture, read more or get in touch with our team:
