Introducing Harvey’s Pro Bono Program

At Harvey, we help the world’s best legal teams transform how they work with AI. As Harvey scales, we are building responsible business into the core of how we operate. Earlier this year, Harvey became the first application layer AI company to establish a dedicated Responsible Business team spanning the full breadth of environmental, social, and governance work. Our pro bono program will be one crucial part of that effort.

Our founders recognized early that with the change in technology came an opportunity to make the legal industry more accessible for those who need it most. There is a widening access to justice gap that exists in all the markets we serve. The World Justice Project estimates that globally over 1.5 billion people cannot obtain justice. In the US alone, 1.4 million civil legal problems (71% of all cases) brought to legal services organizations cannot be addressed due to a lack of resources.

Today, we are launching our dedicated pro bono program in the UK, Australia and the US to try and do what we can to address that challenge.

In the first phase of this work we are proud to be working with a select group of our law firm customers as design partners. We will be collaborating with senior pro bono leaders from Ashurst Perkins Coie, DLA Piper, and Nelson Mullins.

Together, we will invest to ensure Harvey accelerates and deepens the impact of these leading pro bono practices. By starting with a small pilot group, we can build a detailed understanding of how Harvey’s products can support the vital work they do every day. This practical knowledge will provide the foundations that will enable us to scale.

Key initial priorities include:

• Creating custom agents to accelerate high volume pro bono casework such as housing support, veterans services and social welfare claims.
• Developing templates and knowledge resources that can be utilized across the legal services ecosystem
• Building repeatable workflows to allow pro bono teams to dedicate more time to supporting their clients

In addition to dedicated programmatic support, Harvey will staff legal engineering support specific to the pro bono project in both the US and UK, placing full time focus on this work's impact. Throughout this program, we will closely measure how Harvey affects outcomes and increases the capacity of pro bono lawyers to provide expert advice.

"Ashurst Perkins Coie has a proud history of advancing access to justice through pro bono work that targets systemic change. Through our partnership with Harvey, we will deliver transformational AI addressing the needs of vulnerable justice system users and the pro bono teams and front-line legal service providers who represent them," said Sarah Morton-Ramwell, Global Pro Bono and Social Impact Partner, Ashurst Perkins Coie.

“I’m excited about this collaboration’s potential to build on our national pro bono program, reach more people, meet more legal needs, and deepen our impact,” said Elisa Kodish, Pro Bono Partner at Nelson Mullins.

“We’re proud to deepen our partnership with Harvey and work alongside our legal aid community, using AI thoughtfully to help close the justice gap,” added Jeff Kelly, AI and Innovation Partner at Nelson Mullins.

In parallel, we will explore partnering with organizations that provide frontline legal services. We have identified an initial cohort of organizations that will receive free access to Harvey as part of an in-depth pilot launching later in the year.

This work is one part of our Responsible Business Program. Since we announced the program in February, we’ve been engaging with customers and partners around the world to listen and learn how we can scale with a focus on ethics, integrity, inclusion, governance, and sustainability. Deepening our collaboration with access to justice organizations and practitioners has been one of the clearest themes to emerge.

This step represents just the beginning of our work and investment in this area. We will share more detailed updates on this initiative, what we learn, and the wider Responsible Business program in the months ahead.