:Harvey: Power Users: Embracing the Simple Wins

I'll be honest — I use Harvey a lot. It's become embedded in my workflow, whether that's drafting documents or simply getting through emails. I used to dictate everything the old-fashioned way: speak it out, wait for it to come back, then spend ages formatting. Now I just speak directly into Harvey and it handles all of that. It sounds small, but these little efficiencies really stack up.

When our team crunched the numbers, they reckoned I'd saved something like 60 working days over the past year — roughly two months. I suspect part of that is down to the fact that typing things out longhand just isn't an efficient use of time anymore. The real value, though, is that it lifts what I call the intellectual handbrake. It frees up headspace for the stuff that actually matters.

Over time, I've developed a few follow-up prompts that I rely on — things like "make this sound less robotic" or adding specific refinements based on the context. The more you feed it, the better the output. It's become second nature now. I'll often say to colleagues, "Just run that through Harvey first," and more often than not, it smooths out the edges.

One scenario that comes up constantly is scope creep. You know the one — you've quoted 70 hours and somehow it's ballooned to 78. Lawyers don’t relish having that conversation with a client. But Harvey handles the diplomacy beautifully. You put in the context, let it draft a measured update, and nine times out of ten the client just says, "Thanks for keeping me posted." Job done.

Something people don't always think about is how useful it is for calibrating messages depending on your audience. If I'm writing to a startup, I'll ask Harvey to make the language accessible for a startup. If someone's reading in their second language, I'll adjust for clarity. It's a small thing, but it makes a big difference.

I've also started using it to analyse investor pitch meetings. Harvey can analyse meetings and ask something like, "What are they really worried about here?" It's surprisingly insightful. When you're too close to something, you lose a bit of objectivity — Harvey brings that perspective back.

If I had one bit of advice for anyone looking to get more out of AI, it would be this: go for the low-hanging fruit. Everyone's holding out for the magic moment where you press a button and it writes you a 70-page lease perfectly.

Start simple. Throw a messy nine-email chain into Harvey and ask it to pull out the key points. Take a transcript from a call and get it to produce four bullet points and a summary email. That's something that would've taken an hour before. Now it takes minutes. The biggest blocker I see is this all-or-nothing mentality — people expecting perfection or refusing to engage. It's not perfect, but then again, neither is any lawyer I've ever met. It's a tool. The outputs get really sharp when you bring your own knowledge and context to the table.

If I were a sole practitioner, this would be like having a PA, a paralegal, and a one-year-qualified assistant rolled into one. Honestly, why wouldn't you use it?