How We Approach Design at :Harvey:

For many of our customers, Harvey is their first experience using AI in a professional setting. Earning their trust starts with how thoughtfully we design every detail. Our platform has to combine the best of consumer-grade AI with the reliability, security, and standards of enterprise software.

Design helps to bring that balance to life by shaping how trust, control, and intelligence are expressed. Getting the details right is essential. Precision in design reflects the precision our customers bring to their work and reinforces the trust they place in our platform. That is why design matters at Harvey.

At Harvey, design is a means to achieve mastery. Our customers operate in environments defined by precision and trust, where polish is synonymous with credibility. The experience of using our platform must feel fast, structured, and dependable, enabling legal professionals to reach expertise faster, not slowing them down.

This commitment to shortening the path to mastery informs every aspect of our brand. From our type system to our tone of voice, every element is crafted to convey confidence, clarity, and trust.

In serving industries where time is the rarest commodity, we design the way lawyers write: saying the most with the least. Every pixel works hard so our users don’t have to. We bridge the familiar with the future and remove friction so lawyers can think, write, and decide without distraction — whether they’re reviewing contracts, drafting documents, or managing matters.

This all takes shape in three core design principles:

Let’s walk through some examples of how these three principles are reflected in the Harvey platform.

We designed Review Tables in Vault to automate repetitive work while preserving the workflows lawyers already know, like assigning tasks and verifying data for accuracy. Documents are automatically classified and organized, so filtering by contracts, litigation documents, or financial materials feels natural and much faster.

While automation helps accelerate and organize the review process, verifying content remains a deliberate human activity. The most critical work, like assessing nuance and applying judgment, is left to professionals. Our design ensures that automation handles what machines do best, allowing lawyers to focus on the parts of their work that demand expertise and care.

Complex work requires tools that simplify the setup without sacrificing control. Workflow Builder is our solution for chaining a series of sophisticated tasks into a single, repeatable process. It allows legal professionals to automate multi-step workflows while retaining oversight over every stage.

In order to make the manual work of creating workflows fast and intuitive, the Workflows team created a chat interface that lets users describe their workflow in natural language. In seconds, the system translates these prompts into structured workflows. Users can then review, refine, and deploy their workflows with confidence, knowing that the tool supports both speed and accuracy.

By combining automation with deliberate user control, Workflow Builder demonstrates how Harvey’s design principles transform complex tasks into seamless, efficient processes.

At Harvey, we build products with focus on transparency and trust. Lawyers rely on our platform to make critical decisions, so they need to understand not only the output, but the reasoning behind it.

To support this, we surface a clear paper trail of Harvey’s thinking steps and citations. Users can backtrack through the logic the AI applied, verify the sources and data used, and confirm that citations are accurate. This makes the system’s reasoning visible, empowering professionals to evaluate and trust the work they receive.

By designing with intention, we ensure that our platform is not a black box. Every interface element, every workflow, and every interaction is built to reflect clarity, accountability, and the rigor that legal work demands.

At Harvey, there are three key practices that help us design better products:

The Design team uses Harvey every day. It’s the best way to understand what’s working in the platform, and more importantly, what's not. We rely on Harvey to research topics, draft documents, and explore ideas, treating the product as both our tool and testing ground. This daily immersion also helps us spot moments where design polish can make a real difference.

Collaboration with customers is made possible by our Product Operations team. They organize feedback loops, schedule regular conversations with lawyers, and help us dive deep into feedback for specific features multiple times each week. This ongoing partnership ensures that our design decisions are grounded in real use cases and that we stay closely connected to the needs of our users.

Many of our colleagues at Harvey come from legal backgrounds, including members of the Product and Engineering teams. Having lawyers embedded across disciplines allows us to quickly validate ideas and design with an authentic understanding of how legal work actually happens.

At Harvey, we’re designing AI tools that understand how lawyers think — helping them work faster, make better decisions, and focus on the parts of their craft that matter most.

If designing the future of legal technology sounds interesting to you, we’re hiring for roles across the Design team.