How Legal Engineers Would Use Harvey Agents for Outlook

Legal work often begins in an inbox, whether it’s a client question, a court notice, comments on a draft, or documents for a deal. Each message can prompt a series of small tasks: what needs review, who should follow up, and where correspondence belongs. Those tasks keep matters moving, but managing them can take time from substantive legal work, especially when lawyers are receiving hundreds of emails a day.

Unlike generic AI assistants, Harvey is built for the legal work that lands in a lawyer’s inbox. Harvey Agents for Outlook can work across a single email or your entire inbox, acting as your legal AI assistant to handle recurring tasks.

Harvey can prepare a tailored daily briefing highlighting priorities, draft emails using firm knowledge, create tasks, and organize correspondence and attachments in Vault. Lawyers review and approve each action, keeping key decisions in their hands while reducing the manual steps around them

In this post, Harvey Legal Engineers — former lawyers who have managed busy inboxes themselves — share where these agents could have helped in their day-to-day work.

Start the Day With a Clear View of Priorities

Maria Paz Lestido’s ongoing casework included arbitration matters, with steady correspondence from clients, partners, and co-counsel, as well as regular check-ins and team meetings. She started her day on her phone, prioritizing emails from key clients and partners, then messages addressed directly to her or where she was tagged. She flagged anything important or immediately due. During hearings, she sometimes only had time to skim her inbox and organize messages later.

An agent could have helped Maria Paz keep track of the emails competing for her attention, especially on hearing days. In Outlook, a scheduled Harvey Agent can prepare a tailored briefing that summarizes the day’s meetings, highlights emails requiring a response, and flags outstanding follow-ups. It can also recommend calendar changes and draft events for review and approval. With an agent like this, Maria Paz could easily see what needed attention first, what could be delegated, and what could wait, without worrying that she’d missed something.

That inbox-and-calendar connection also mattered in Lisa Pagel’s in-house litigation work at a large insurance company, where she received court orders and emails from opposing counsel with dates for hearings, depositions, and other appearances. She reviewed messages one by one, then had to make sure each date and its relevant details made it onto her calendar. That could mean coordinating reporters, counsel, videographers, and locations with up to 15 people. An agent could surface those messages in her briefing and draft calendar events for her to review against the rest of her schedule.

Kick Off New Work With the Right Context

Former M&A attorney Shelton Oliver typically worked across six or seven matters at once, and her inbox could become chaotic, especially near signing and closing. It filled with comments from specialist teams and partners, documents from the other side, and questions and feedback from clients. She also coordinated meetings amongst clients, opposing counsels, and her own deal team, sometimes trying to align more than ten calendars at once. When she was away from her computer, she wanted a quick way to get context on an email and respond to a client or opposing counsel’s question.

In Outlook, a Harvey Agent can work from an email and, when the Outlook connector is enabled, search across multiple messages. It can also draw on authorized firm knowledge sources to draft a response or create a task. For Shelton, an agent could gather relevant context from a client’s email and firm materials, then prepare a draft reply for her to review. She would decide whether it answered the question and make any changes before sending it.

Ony Rajaona, a former litigator working on cross-border dispute resolution cases also received client questions that needed a considered response. Her inbox also included partner comments, court correspondence, and batches of documents to review. Depending on the request, she might need to research a point of law, review exhibits, prepare written submissions, or mark up a document. An agent could help turn the email into a task, or if it’s a repetitive request like reviewing a batch of discovery documents for references, run one of her specialized agents to do a review. The agent could incorporate client comments directly into her draft as tracked changes, so that she could focus on the strategy.

Keep Matter Correspondence Organized

As a corporate associate working on public offerings and private M&A, Sam Pivnick sometimes received hundreds of emails on a given deal in a single day. He used his inbox as a to-do list, filing emails once he handled them. That meant filing incoming emails and emails he sent into matter folders and subfolders. When preparing for a closing or putting together a closing book, he also had to search back through months of correspondence for a single confirmation or a standalone executed signature page. He described those searches as looking for a “needle in a haystack.”

Harvey Agents in Outlook can take on some of that repeated sorting by categorizing emails and filing correspondence and attachments to Vault. With the Outlook connector enabled, a custom agent can search across the lawyer’s entire Outlook inbox, specific Outlook folder or subfolder, and Vaults for specific documents or answers to questions about a deal.

Imene Hamdi-Cherif worked across employment, technology transactions, and pro bono matters. Her pro bono work brought a high volume of emails from various stakeholders including NGOs, clients, other law firms, and colleagues across the firm. She kept messages in her inbox if they still needed a reply or her attention, then filed others into folders. An agent could help maintain that distinction by flagging messages that still need her attention and filing handled correspondence and attachments into her preferred folders.

The work around an inbox — prioritizing messages, kicking off reviews, and keeping matter records organized — shapes how legal work moves forward. Harvey Agents in Outlook are now available in Harvey, helping lawyers spend less time triaging their email and calendars and more time on critical work.