At Harvey, we’re very lucky to be hiring across most of our teams. Because of how rapidly we are growing, we want to give potential candidates as much information as possible to learn about us and make a considered choice regarding Harvey’s stage, culture, and growth plans. To that end, I’ve taken the top 25 questions we get from candidates and answered each question in detail. We hope it helps you or someone else you highly recommend learn more about Harvey’s team and culture.

How did Harvey get started? Our co-founders, Gabe Pereyra and Winston Weinberg are a former DeepMind AI researcher and securities and anti-trust litigator at O’Melveny and Myers, respectively. They were experimenting with ChatGPT on their own and quickly discovered how it might transform the legal industry. They sent a cold email to OpenAI (now one of our investors), and the rest is history. For the full story, I recommend listening to Winston on No Priors or Grit.

How big is Harvey? As of this date of publication, we are just north of 300 employees across 3 locations: San Francisco, New York City, and London. We shared all of our public metrics in our Year in Review here, but you can see some more recently reported ARR metrics in this story by Business Insider if you’re interested. I like our size because it’s small enough that you can still get to know most people personally, but big enough that the business has some level of product-market fit and a brand we can continue to build around.

Why should someone join Harvey now? I mentioned why I like our size above, but there are a few other reasons you might consider it:

What’s on your product roadmap? AI is rapidly evolving and Harvey’s product roadmap does too. Our big themes for this year include customization, collaboration, and simplicity. Essentially, how do we help teams embed their expertise into Harvey, collaborate within a firm and with outside parties, and reduce the barrier to getting a great work product through agentic workflows, smarter routing, etc. I highly recommend watching our blog for regular product updates, videos, and launches.

Who are Harvey’s competitors? The success Harvey has seen in the legal tech space means it’s now a really well-funded space from a venture capital investment point of view. With that said, we still view our biggest competition as the status quo (customers waiting to buy an AI solution) or our own lack of speed and execution; this is why we believe so strongly in our value of Job’s Not Finished, which I’ll talk more about below.

Can you describe the culture at Harvey? A few words that come to mind for me are fast-paced, collaborative, and ambitious. I find folks at Harvey to be serious about their jobs but very helpful to their peers and focused on customers. One specific thing worth highlighting is that Harvey sits at a unique intersection: we’re a rapidly growing application-layer company in the AI space, which naturally attracts fast movers and early technology adopters. At the same time, we serve the legal industry and have many attorneys and former attorneys on our team helping to build Harvey. That gives us a deep respect for precedent and for the complex, thoughtful work that law firms and professional services organizations do every day. It’s this blend of forward momentum and grounding in rigor that defines us, and it often shapes the kinds of people who thrive here.

What are your values? Our founders shared our values here, but to summarize, they are 1) decisiveness 2) simplicity and 3) Job’s Not Finished. We infuse our values in our performance review process, and when we evaluate deals or projects, we include a “Job’s Not Finished” component, because we believe we can always be doing better and evolving as a company.

One of my favorite stories about our values is around decisiveness. Winston, like many founders, is always pushing on time horizons, and he often pushes us “not to take the square root of the weather.” Basically in his mind, we have so many things to do to build a great company that we can’t spend cycles overanalyzing simple problems with clear answers, and thus, decisiveness became one of our values.

Job’s Not Finished is how our founders sign off most of their emails to the company. I find it really inspiring because while we have done a lot in our almost three years as a company, there is still so much to evolve, and the default setting at Harvey is to consider what we can improve versus taking winning for granted.

What surprises most people when they start at Harvey? For this question, I asked Tia Thomson for advice because she oversees our onboarding process globally at Harvey, and she said two themes emerge from most of our new hires:

How has your culture evolved over time? My teammate Calvin, one of our early engineers, answered this question to a new hire panel last week by noting that in the early days we focused solely on speed, and now there’s a focus on quality and “how” we do things. I think that rings true across Harvey – we remain really fast-paced in everything we do, but there’s a sense of how do we build this engine so it scales without adding undue process that would slow us down.

What are your benefits like? We offer comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance alongside a company-sponsored retirement plan and 401(k) match, paid parental leave (you are immediately eligible following your start date), an annual professional development stipend, and in-office lunch daily – among other benefits.

What does internal mobility look like at Harvey? We already have a lot of great examples of Harvey employees who have grown considerably internally, taking on an internal assignment in another Harvey location, becoming a team lead or manager, or transferring roles within the organization. Our CEO Winston is a big believer in betting on people for big opportunities, so I think we’ll continue to invest here as we scale and augment our internal mobility with strong external hires to complement the skills we have internally.

How do you invest in employees at Harvey? We do a program called Lessons in Scale that features a monthly talk with a business leader we can learn from, available to all employees. Then this year we have experimented with programming from The Leadership Consortium and LifeLabs and with an in-person program called Harvey Academy, which included case-based learning, and time with our leadership team and a member of our board. Finally, on the more “fun” front we have a program called Harvey Hangouts that allows “captains” in each location to plan a social event for people from across teams to do an activity. Recent examples have included pottery, puppy yoga, woodworking, an art gallery tour, pizza making, and a day spa visit, so you never know what our employees will suggest next (within reason of course). Photo of the dumplings crew below for posterity:

Does everyone come into the office? If you are hired near one of our three locations, the expectation is that you’ll go into the office 3+ times per week. We believe in in-person collaboration and want to maintain that velocity as we scale. With that said, for select roles within Harvey we hire remote talent. That designation will be clearly marked on our careers site for clarity, and those individuals typically travel to Harvey locations a few times a year to connect with their team.

What does work-life balance look like at Harvey? I value transparency, so I’m not going to sugarcoat it: Harvey is likely not the right match for someone who wants a classic 9 to 5 with a lunch break every day. Many of our Go-to-Market team members travel 1-2 times per month to prospect or client sites. Some of our engineers will often eat dinner together in the office to finish off a project before heading home. And I definitely respond to candidate questions and get writing done on the weekends. With that said, we are reasonable and care about people having lives outside of work, so people take their vacation time uninterrupted by work. I find these hard to answer in platitudes, so here are a few very specific examples that might help:

What are your headcount plans for this year? I am not looking to get in any trouble with our CFO Alan Ghelberg with this piece, so I won’t share the exact numbers, but given our ambitious goals as a company, we plan to continue to invest in global growth and scaling the business. We will likely always be hiring engineers and Account Executives, then be thoughtful about when and how we invest in the rest of the company. I would also just say that one of the regular refrains from our CEO, Winston, is that we are operating in a period of accelerated technology growth in the AI space, so if we only look at three year time horizons or plan annually, we will fall short. As a result, almost everything we do has a tendency to be annual but with a touchpoint halfway through the year so we maintain the agility our industry and this space requires. 

How do you handle performance reviews at Harvey? We are still a startup, so this is evolving, but we completed our first full company-wide formal review process in May of this year. Our current plan is to do a more thorough review in the spring each year and a lighter check-in in the fall, but we are conducting our employee survey in just a few weeks, and we’ll use feedback from that to inform minor adjustments to that plan.

What are Winston and Gabe like? The first word I would use to describe Winston and Gabe is ambitious. They have high standards for themselves and for all of us, and that’s reflected in our culture. But I would also say that they operate very much with a long-term orientation, are open to feedback, and are very customer-oriented. They also care a lot, both about building a great company but also about the people who work here.

When/where/how does Harvey hire lawyers to work at Harvey? Good question, let me see if I can help. We have three primary vehicles for hiring folks with legal experience at Harvey:

Finally, it’s worth noting that our CEO and Chief Business Officer are both lawyers, so we hire lawyers for non-legal roles as well. While I’ve outlined the three most common hiring paths, we welcome individuals with legal experience across the company.

Do you need legal experience to work at Harvey? The short answer is no– we hire a lot of people who have never worked with lawyers before but have a passion for AI or for transforming industries. That said, you do need to be curious about our customers and their day-to-day challenges. We bring customers into company meetings and host regular field trips to Harvey locations, so if you’re open and willing to learn, you’ll quickly build that customer empathy.

How does Harvey think about candidates who bring deep legal expertise but don’t come from elite law firms or the traditional legal tech world? We have a mix of legal professionals on our team from a wide variety of backgrounds. In general, my advice is that when we’re hiring for our EPD and GTM teams, we need a thoughtful balance of people who bring the right legal expertise and are located in the places that matter most to our clients. As an example, we may already have someone who is an expert in corporate M&A on our GTM legal team in London but still need someone with a different background to complement the needs of our customers in that region. Because of this, it’s hard to say definitively what will be a fit at any given time. So don’t be discouraged if it doesn’t work out on your first try – hiring is often a function of skillset, geography, and evolving customer needs.

Why is the legal industry exciting if you’re not a lawyer? As Bret Taylor said on Grit, "if you look at the amount the world spends on legal advice and doing contracts for your supply chain or doing antitrust review... the long tail of those things are quite valuable," so it's not just the legal industry that we're transforming - it's businesses around the world who partner with lawyers too. When you think about that broader opportunity, it’s a lot easier to get excited about this industry and our potential for impact.

Does Harvey eliminate the need for lawyers over time? Isn’t that confusing/problematic? Harvey replaces a lot of the busy work associated with being a lawyer, which allows lawyers to focus on more strategic work and deeper partnership with their clients. The legal profession was originally designed as an apprenticeship model - junior associates would learn by working closely with senior lawyers. But over time, the sheer volume of drafting, revising, and documentation eroded many of those learning opportunities.

For the firms we work with, Harvey enables greater efficiency for clients and creates more space for mentorship and coaching, making it easier to attract and retain top legal talent. It also allows law firm lawyers - from senior partners through to junior associates - to spend more time on the high-impact client advisory work for which they are uniquely suited, and less time on mechanical, time-consuming tasks.

For in-house legal teams, Harvey saves valuable time and energy for General Counsels and their teams, many of whom are under pressure to do more with less when it comes to headcount and budget.

In short, Harvey helps lawyers spend more time on the work that matters most, rather than replacing the strategic thinking and problem-solving they do on behalf of clients or their company.

Who are Harvey’s customers? Harvey’s ~337 primary customers include a mix of top law firms (34% of AmLaw 100 firms use Harvey) and leading-edge companies, like Verizon, Bridgewater, Comcast, PwC, and KKR. We have customers in 45 countries and counting, which makes our global growth opportunity significant. While our current focus is primarily on lawyers and law firms, our long-term ambition is to transform professional services more broadly.

How do most customers hear about Harvey? When we ask, most customers say they heard about Harvey through media coverage, a recommendation from someone they know who uses it, or an introduction to our GTM team via a trusted contact. As we continue investing in marketing and expanding globally, I imagine the responses to our “how I heard about Harvey” CRM field will only get more interesting.

If you already have such a high percentage of law firms, where will your customer growth come from? We see a massive global opportunity as we expand both within and beyond the 45 countries where we already have customers. Within companies, we currently work with only a few dozen in-house legal teams — which means there’s substantial room for expansion, especially within the Fortune 500 and other top companies pursuing AI transformation in their legal teams.We are also seeing a ripple effect: in-house legal teams who buy Harvey are often asked by colleagues in finance, HR, or business development to expand access, since those teams frequently collaborate on contracts, M&A, and similar work. In short, we are just getting started on what’s possible for Harvey, and see notable opportunities to continue to grow with existing and future customers.