How :Harvey: Saves Lawyers Time

When new customers adopt Harvey, a common early indicator of success is that they get more work done faster. We’re always excited to hear this, because saving time is the first step to unlocking further business and financial impact.

Given that, law firms and legal teams evaluating our platform often ask us how much time they will save with Harvey. In this post, we will explain how we help customers to estimate time savings, how much time our customers can expect to save, and share use cases and stories of how they achieve a higher quality of work with our platform.

We’ve developed a set of methodologies to triangulate the business impact of Harvey. A central one is the average time saved per query. We focused here because queries drive the work done in Harvey and its outcomes.

We surveyed dozens of customers over the past year about their known time savings. These included both law firms and in-house legal departments, covering a range of jurisdictions, practice areas, and organizational sizes. Then, we related those answers to their query usage. There is a surprisingly consistent convergence of data points that has helped us to calculate the relationship between time saved and queries run.

Harvey is used for a wide range of tasks. We are “eyes off” on customer data, which means we do not have visibility into specific query types because of our security and privacy commitments to our customers. As a result, we took an aggregate approach to create a general average.

We further corroborated those initial estimates with a series of time savings tests from our customers’ lawyers and “time and motion” analyses with Harvey’s own lawyers. We found that most tasks fell within a range of 60-90% more efficient when using Harvey versus not.

Based on our methodology, we concluded that a typical lawyer saves 15-30 minutes of work per query. Time savings can be more significant with particular uses of Harvey (e.g., a large-scale data extraction table can save many hours), but we’ve chosen to lean more conservative to establish this general rule of thumb. The chart below shows a representative sample of customers that informed our heuristic.

Based on Harvey users’ recent usage and our estimated range of time saved per query, the implied time savings ranges from 13 to 25 hours per user per month for the average user.

Our most engaged users (the top decile) save triple that time, from 30 to 88 hours per user per month, highlighting what can be possible with Harvey.

The users on the lower end of the range tend to be newer users who are still ramping usage, or more senior lawyers who more selectively draft and review.

The users on the higher end of the range tend to be associates and in-house lawyers who drive much of the day-to-day output forward for their teams.

Our self-reported customer surveys over the past 12 months corroborate our aggregate calculations.

Our customers care about more than just time-saved. When lawyers can accelerate repetitive tasks, they can focus on higher-impact work. They tell us that while they’re happy to save measurable time on their tasks, they also find that their output is higher-quality because they have room to do deeper analysis and strategic thinking. While those improvements aren’t as easily measurable, they’re just as important as efficiency.

Here’s how some of our customers use Harvey, and how those use cases drive superior client and business outcomes.

Lynn Pinker Hurst & Schwegmann (LPHS) is a Band 1 Chambers-ranked litigation boutique based in Dallas, Texas, which handles high-stakes disputes in financial services, health care, insurance, and other major sectors. LPHS’s lawyers were spending time on essential yet routine tasks, and off-the-shelf AI tools weren’t built for the nuance and confidentiality required in the legal space.

The firm adopted Harvey across a range of litigation tasks: to identify key facts across hundreds of files to speed up early case assessments, to draft arguments and analyses to guide litigation strategy, and to generate winning RFPs using Harvey for factual extraction.

LPHS litigators estimate they now save over 8 hours per lawyer per week. The firm has won new business due to their quick turnaround time (less than 48 hours) in responding to urgent client requests. And in one case, opposing counsel dumped hundreds of documents the morning of a mediation—with Harvey, LPHS was able to analyze these files in minutes.

“Harvey amplifies our judgment, not replaces it,” says managing partner Chris Schwegmann. “It sharpens our insight, speeds our response, and frees us to focus on what wins cases.”

Vinge is a leading Nordic law firm, renowned for delivering long-term, sustainable legal advice. The firm handles a full spectrum of business law matters, from high-stakes M&A and regulatory work to advising high-growth startups.

Vinge uses Harvey to streamline M&A due diligence by reviewing and extracting key terms from deal documents; to assist with regulatory drafting by aligning tone and structure of guidance to complex EU frameworks; and to enhance the consistency and turnaround of high-stakes legal advice.

Since adopting Harvey, over 90% of Vinge attorneys report that Harvey adds value to their work and output.

“With Harvey, we’re unlocking new value at every level: for our clients, for the firm, and for our individual lawyers,” says Chief Innovation Officer Ann-Marie Ovin. “It’s not about just one great use case or outcome—it’s about every task getting better. That adds up to something invaluable.”

Deutsche Telekom is a telecommunications leader that serves millions across Europe and the United States. The in-house legal team plays a crucial role in managing regulatory compliance, high-stakes litigation, and operational support.

Deutsche Telekom adopted Harvey to manage this complexity. Today, the legal team uses Harvey to condense lengthy regulations into actionable insights, accelerate public tender processes by generating precise responses from lengthy agreements, structure complex litigation documents, and enable swift exploration of niche areas.

The team’s lawyers have reclaimed an estimated up to 5 hours per lawyer per week and achieved better business outcomes. In one case, Chief Legal Tech Officer Peter Schichl was able to quickly identify critical sections of a 200-page document, invalidating a multimillion-euro claim.

“The legal industry is evolving rapidly, and AI is essential to keep pace with growing complexity,” says General Counsel Dr. Claudia Junker. “Harvey has transformed how we work.”

Bridgewater Associates is a global asset manager, widely recognized for its operational excellence and innovation. Faced with mounting internal contract review requests and increasing regulatory complexity, Bridgewater’s legal team adopted Harvey.

The team uses Harvey to streamline counterparty contract reviews by flagging regulatory risks and synthesizing contract provisions, analyze vendor agreements and summarize key risks with Vault, and support responses to new SEC regulations with up-to-date analysis to keep Bridgewater compliant.

With Harvey, Bridgewater reports seeing 95%+ time savings on large-scale agreement reviews and cut vendor contract reviews from an average of 2 days to 2 hours.

“Harvey empowers our legal team to engage more effectively with functional units, delivering faster, more reliable support while prioritizing high-value issues,” says Chief Legal Officer Tracey Yurko. “Generative AI has evolved from a convenience to a competitive necessity, and Harvey is helping us lead that charge.”

One of Harvey’s core values is “Job’s Not Finished.” We’re committed to bringing our distinctive experience to help our customers reach even higher heights, through targeted use cases, robust enablement, change management support, and more. As for the business case for Harvey, we continue to partner with our customers on developing a comprehensive view of the value our platform creates.

Curious how Harvey can make your team more strategic and efficient? Request a demo and unlock professional-class AI for your firm or legal team.