How :Harvey: Helps Mid-Sized Law Firms Scale Legal Work

We sometimes hear a misconception that Harvey is only built for Big Law. In reality, Harvey’s 400+ mid-sized customers are among our most innovative. They are using Harvey to reimagine how they enhance client service, scale efficiently, and give lawyers more time to deliver high-quality legal work, win new business, and drive firm growth.

As a category, mid-sized law firms represent extraordinary variety, from specialist litigation boutiques to full-service regional firms with clients across industries. Despite their idiosyncrasies, they share a common experience: They are expected to deliver top-tier legal work with fewer resources and smaller teams. This creates three key challenges related to AI adoption:

Despite these challenges, once mid-sized firms do reach conviction to integrate AI, tools like Harvey are uniquely well-positioned to help address resource constraints, providing them with the flexibility and firepower they need to scale their expertise and deliver additional value for their clients.

Let’s walk through three key drivers for AI adoption at mid-sized firms, and how Harvey supports each.

Mid-sized firms often position themselves as providing a personalized, tailored service at reasonable costs relative to Big Law. However, as the complexity and sheer volume of work required to address a client’s specific matter increases, mid-sized firms are disadvantaged relative to their more amply resourced Big Law peers.

AI gives mid-sized firms the ability to close the gap by delivering service levels that were previously out of reach: faster turnaround times, more thorough analysis, and greater accuracy throughout client engagements. This means mid-sized firms can meet the responsiveness, precision, and client experience traditionally associated with Big Law, without having to scale headcount or overhead.

With Harvey, for example, mid-sized firms can use Vault to conduct diligence on thousands of contracts, applying a consistent review framework and identifying surface clause-level variances at scale rather than being limited to only a sample. At Youssef + Partners, Harvey rapidly accelerates document review. In one case involving over 2,000 documents, Harvey identified key clauses and inconsistencies in under an hour — a process that previously took an entire week.

Mid-sized firms often face a familiar dilemma: hire ahead of demand and risk associate underutilization, or wait and risk overwhelming partners when client work surges. Harvey helps firms break that cycle by acting as an on-demand extension of their team.

By handling repetitive and time-consuming tasks, Harvey enables firms to scale their capacity up or down without over-hiring or compromising quality. Associates can also use Harvey as a first layer of review, allowing partners to stay focused on strategic, client-facing work.

At Cole-Frieman & Mallon, Harvey is helping associates get a head start on initial issue lists and redline analysis, speeding up legal research, and enhancing the quality and consistency of documents.

As Dave Rothschild, a Partner at Cole-Frieman & Mallon, put it: “Harvey has transformed many of our previously manual workflows, enabling us to efficiently scale our firm's client service capabilities and improve the overall productivity of our lawyers.”

For specialized firms operating with a contingency or flat-fee structure, every hour saved directly drives profitability. Historically, teams have tried to increase efficiency by reworking internal processes, but those improvements plateau quickly.

By embedding firm best practices into saved prompts, Playbooks, and Workflows, and sharing them within and across practice groups, Harvey standardizes quality while cutting down on time-intensive work. Firms can take on more cases or matters with the same resources, deliver predictable results, and maintain consistency across their work product — unlocking additional opportunities, increasing win rates, or simply allowing firms to complete existing workloads more efficiently.

Lynn Pinker Hurst & Schwegmann (LPHS) is a Band 1 Chambers-ranked litigation boutique that handles high-stakes disputes in financial services, healthcare, insurance, and other major sectors.

LPHS lawyers were spending too much time on essential yet routine tasks, which pulled focus away from strategy and client advocacy. The firm adopted Harvey across a range of litigation tasks, including: drafting arguments and analyses, research, deposition preparation, and creation of internal memos. As Chris Schwegmann, Managing Partner at LPHS, put it: “Harvey amplifies our judgment, not replaces it. It sharpens our insight, speeds our response, and frees us to focus on what wins cases.”

In addition to increasing efficiency — lawyers report saving over eight hours a week — Harvey helped LPHS win new business. When a prospective client sent hundreds of documents to several firms with an urgent issue, LPHS used Harvey to extract key facts and craft a tailored, persuasive response, delivered in less than 48 hours while other firms needed a week to respond. The client ultimately chose LPHS and went on to become a long-term partner.

Harvey also accelerates how associates get up to speed on complex issues and acts as a first layer of review. As a result, associates can upskill quicker and partners have more time to focus on high-value work.

LPHS's use of Harvey illustrates how a mid-sized firm can adopt AI in a way that enhances, not replaces, legal expertise. Their experience underscores a core message: When deployed thoughtfully, AI becomes a multiplier of skill, efficiency, and firm growth.

At Harvey, we have seen — and expect to see more — AI-enabled innovation in mid-sized firms across business and service models, and we're excited to build alongside them. Interested in learning how other mid-sized firms are using Harvey? Explore this collection of customer stories.