:Harvey: FORUM: Redefining the Future of Legal
Two days of candid dialogue on how AI is reshaping the business and practice of law.
Last week, Harvey FORUM brought together senior leaders from across the legal ecosystem for two days of conversation and practical insight on the future of legal work.
Our goal was to create a space where law firm leaders and in-house legal executives could step back from day-to-day demands and engage in substantive dialogue about what comes next. Together, we explored how AI, new operating models, and shifting expectations are reshaping legal’s role within firms, enterprises, and across the broader professional services landscape.
Two Days, Shared Perspectives
Each day of Harvey FORUM was designed around a different community, but connected by a shared conviction that the legal industry is at an inflection point, and technology’s role in shaping the future alongside legal teams is more important than ever.
Law Firm & Innovation Day brought together law firm and innovation leaders to examine how AI is reshaping firm strategy, talent pipelines, and business models. The day opened with a keynote from Harvey CEO and Co-Founder Winston Weinberg, who previewed long-horizon legal agents and announced Harvey's new partnership with Intapp.
Panels featured David Wakeling of A&O Shearman, Emma Dowden of Burges Salmon, Hilary Goodier and Ruth Ward of Ashurst, Chris Tart-Roberts of Addleshaw Goddard, Bivek Sharma of PwC Middle East, and Cathy Goodman of Kennedys. During their innovation spotlights, Pierre Zickert of Hengeler Mueller, Jana Blount of Norton Rose Fulbright, and Adam Curphey of Macfarlanes each shared how their firm is moving from AI adoption to genuine transformation.
In-House Day convened General Counsel, Legal Operations leaders, and enterprise executives to explore how AI is redefining legal’s role within organizations. Discussions focused on operating models, governance frameworks, and how in-house teams are moving from experimentation to measurable impact at scale.
Sessions featured leaders including John Pope of Equinor, Barbara Koch‑Lehmann of UBS, Henry Gardener of Markel Insurance, Stefan Sulzer of The Adecco Group, Lee Callaghan of Aviva, and Pam Maynard of Microsoft. Sarah-Jane Davies of ArcelorMittal, Russell Davies of Dentsu, and Marie-Cecile Martin of Syngenta shared how their Legal Ops teams are driving adoption, tracking ROI, and rethinking collaboration. Finally, Damon Miño of Ironclad, Huub van der Meulen of Lefebvre, and Paul Walker of iManage examined how data ownership, trust, and ecosystem design will shape the next phase of legal AI.
The two days surfaced distinct priorities, but also a set of themes that cut across both audiences. Five key takeaways stood out.
1. From Experimentation to Enterprise Infrastructure
If there was a single through-line at FORUM, it was that AI is no longer an experiment. For the organizations pulling ahead, it has become foundational infrastructure, and the question has shifted from whether to adopt to how fast to build.
Harvey CEO Winston Weinberg set the tone in his opening keynote, tracing the arc from early AI curiosity to the moment we're in now: where firms and legal teams are being asked not just to use the technology, but to invest in the people and processes around it.
Ryan Samii, Harvey's Head of Product Innovation, mapped the market's evolution as a three-wave shift: tracking AI progress, experimenting with it, and now measuring how it has changed the legal function in concrete terms. With the market evolution comes significant opportunity to meet the moment, rethinking what’s possible together.
“My view is that in professional services, we need to move quicker than others. It's definitely an industry that will be impacted by AI more.”
Bivek Sharma
Chief Technology and AI Officer at PwC Middle East
On the in-house side, leaders at UBS, Equinor, and ArcelorMittal described moving from pilots to enterprise deployments with governance frameworks, KPI dashboards, and adoption infrastructure to match. Across both days, it was clear that the organizations making the most progress have treated AI adoption as a strategic transformation, not a technology project.
2. Collaboration is the Multiplier
The organizations seeing the most impact from AI aren't just deploying better tools, they're building better collaboration structures around them.
Matt Zerweck, Harvey’s Head of Enterprise Product, framed the challenge clearly: legal data is scattered across systems of record, teams are constantly navigating the line between internal and external stakeholders, and the tools lawyers use rarely reflect how work actually happens. Harvey's investment in Memory, agentic workflows, and Shared Spaces is built to solve exactly that.
John Pope brought that vision to life with Equinor's experience. His adoption model rested on three pillars:
- A network of technology and innovation partners embedded across the business
- Pairing deep subject matter expertise with the AI tool
- Sustaining both top-down and bottom-up buy-in.
He shared a formula that ultimately represents an organizational design principle:
SMEs × (Harvey × CSMs + Legal Engineers) = Adoption + Value
John also shared a real-world example that captured this mindset shift. On what was meant to be a day off, his team received notice of a potential contractual breach requiring immediate analysis. They uploaded the relevant contracts into Harvey, ran a live transcript of the call, identified the core legal questions, generated a draft advice note in real time, reviewed it, and sent it before the issue escalated. The result was greater clarity and confidence — and, as he put it, still making it to his family bike ride.
On the law firm side, Macfarlanes' Adam Curphey described building Macfarlanes Amplify, a client-facing tool built on the Harvey API that embeds AI directly into client workflows without requiring a Harvey license. The insight: Durable value isn't created by selling an AI tool; it's created by becoming embedded in how clients work.
3. ROI is Real, but Value Goes Beyond the Numbers
At FORUM, the conversation around ROI moved past "Can AI deliver returns?" to something more nuanced: What are we actually measuring, and are we measuring the right things?
Teams are reporting meaningful time savings, reductions in external spend, and improved work product. The leaders pulling ahead, though, are also tracking harder-to-quantify outcomes like lawyer experience, talent retention, and strategic capacity. As Paul Walker, Global Solutions Director at iManage, put it, "I think we’ve moved into a post-ROI world — if you took my AI tools away, I'd buy them out of my own pocket."
For law firms, Ryan Samii framed the year ahead around two vectors: compressing time to judgment, which makes expertise faster; and force-multiplying the outcomes of judgment, which creates entirely new ways of delivering value. But both he and others were clear that getting there requires discipline upfront.
Bivek Sharma of PwC Middle East cautioned that firms whose AI conversations begin with ROI expectations before doing the foundational learning are setting themselves up to miss the real opportunity. Barbara Koch-Lehmann of UBS put that principle into practice: her team developed a vision and design principles before evaluating any tools, narrowed 80 potential use cases down to three, and set a 140% ROI target on each as a forcing function for prioritization.
4. The Law Firm Business Model is Evolving
Law Firm & Innovation Day generated some of the most direct conversation about the future of the law firm as a business. The picture that emerged was one of experimentation, of opportunity, and of a need to consider how to thoughtfully challenge the current status quo.
Hilary Goodier of Ashurst highlighted that when AI dramatically compresses the time it takes to produce work, billing purely for hours stops making sense. The shift toward fixed-fee and value-based models has been discussed for years, but AI is now making it a practical reality. Clients have noticed, and they've moved from asking, "Are you using AI?" to scrutinizing invoices to understand where efficiency gains are actually going.
Chris Tart-Roberts of Addleshaw Goddard noted that the redistribution of work between law firms and in-house teams is inevitable. The firms that navigate it well will engage clients in collaborative conversations about what that shift looks like, rather than waiting for it to happen to them.
On talent, Ruth Ward of Ashurst was clear that senior leader education is non-negotiable, and supervisors who actively discourage AI use remain one of the most significant adoption barriers. Jana Blount of Norton Rose Fulbright offered the cultural reframe that's working in practice. Rather than letting the conversation center on what AI is taking away, her team shifted the narrative toward what new value they could create — grounding the transformation in a broader moment of societal change that gives lawyers genuine purpose in it.
5. GCs and Legal Ops are Becoming Enterprise AI Leaders
In-House Day made clear that the legal function is undergoing a more fundamental transformation than most organizations have fully reckoned with.
As Stefan Sulzer of The Adecco Group shared, the GC role has evolved from legal risk manager to enterprise-wide strategic navigator. His own sequencing was telling. The first person he hired for his legal transformation was a Legal Ops leader, the second a Process Engineer, and more lawyers came later. Lee Callaghan of Aviva emphasized building malleable teams comfortable with uncertainty, and capable of moving across roles as the function continues to evolve.
A critical thread was that transformation cannot be delegated. GCs need enough AI fluency to defend business cases at the board level and model the behavior they want their teams to adopt. The Legal Operations panel showed what execution looks like at scale. Leaders from ArcelorMittal, Dentsu, and Syngenta each described distinct approaches, but shared a common foundation of governance, measurement, and AI fluency built across the whole team.
Pam Maynard of Microsoft closed with a practical reframe: treat agents as digital colleagues. Define their goals, set KPIs, and hold them accountable the same way you would a human team member.
FORUM reinforced that the next era of legal will be shaped not by tools alone, but by the people and organizations bold enough to transform around them. If you want to learn more about future events and company updates, reach out to your Harvey representative.