What the Data Shows About Legal AI Adoption

Two years ago, the question most law firms asked about AI was whether to adopt it. Today, the questions we get surround how much, how fast, and at which levels organizations are adopting AI, so we thought it might be helpful to ground the discussion in data from our hundreds of thousands of users.

Partners Represent Nearly a Quarter of Harvey’s Law Firm Users

Let’s start with the most common misconception we hear about AI and legal, which is the trope that “only junior associates use AI.” The number of Harvey users who are partners is more than 4x what it was this time last year. Partners now represent 23% of Harvey’s law firm users, nearly a quarter. This is significant for a few reasons: not only are partners regularly using and seeing value with AI, but they are also helping set the tone for their organizations on responsible adoption of AI in their daily work.

In addition to being clear from the data, we see this regularly in our customer feedback and discussions with law firms. At this year’s US Open, a very AI-savvy partner made the rounds to ask about the best agent their team was using regularly. This is not an accident — partners have moved from encouraging their associates to use AI and being open to experimentation and shifted into more daily usage and adoption by the senior partners within firms.

The Tone on AI Starts at the Top

The incentive for partners to use AI is not just their own work product and daily habits. When partners are more engaged, associates are notably more likely to use AI more frequently. Associate utilization rates were 25 points higher when Partner utilization was in the top quartile, which is one of the many reasons we highly encourage partners to join our adoption workshops and training in rollout planning.

We met with a law firm that was considering Harvey who asked if it was okay if a few of the partners who participated in the pilot could share examples and use cases as part of the firm-wide rollout of Harvey. Not only is that welcome, it’s encouraged — there is no one who understands your organization better than the folks who work in it daily, so our approach to training and transformation is always to work deeply to earn and maintain the trust of your partners and your team.

Practice Group Patterns Matter

Among our law firm customers, Corporate (inclusive of M&A) has the highest query volume, followed by Litigation, Banking & Finance, and Real Estate. Some of this is directly correlated to early adopters of Harvey and to the transaction volume associated with their work, but we also see connectivity to how much partners see direct value from AI and set that example for their teams. Not to be left behind, the fastest growing practice groups by query volume include Litigation, Real Estate, Intellectual Property, and Family Law.

Harvey data from June reflects more specificity, noting due diligence and deal management as common go-tos for corporate attorneys, while on the litigation side of the house, we see a lot of case management, regulatory and advisory analysis alongside discovery and trial preparation. The most common tasks we’re seeing with agents are drafting, analysis and review, and extracting information from documents. 

It’s exciting to see the patterns of how different practices are using Harvey, and just as fun to hear about new applications. For example, we’re hearing about how employment lawyers are using Harvey’s agentic capabilities and seeing how horizon scanning helps lawyers across practice areas prepare for legal and regulatory changes.

We also see interesting patterns across our customer segments using Harvey. In both our SMB and Mid-Market segments, more than half of weekly active users use knowledge sources and more than 40% use Vault. For firms planning a rollout, these are useful examples to include in training alongside drafting.

A Global Phenomenon

Harvey serves customers in more than 85 countries, and adoption is up significantly across the board. But there are a few markets that really stick out in terms of sheer year-over-year growth in monthly active users, including Brazil, Israel, Italy, Mexico (roughly 4x), New Zealand, South Korea (nearly 12x), and the United States. The United States and the United Kingdom remain among our largest markets with the highest users overall followed by Germany and Australia, but it’s exciting to see country-level adoption grow across every region, and to see some smaller countries competing on year-over-year growth and usage.

Recently, we saw glowing feedback from a client about the quality and relevance of a training session from a legal engineer in South Korea — her understanding not just of the language but also of the legal nuances made a considerable difference in the overall experience. Local context matters in the work itself, too. At Vinge, lawyers are using Harvey to help adapt their advice to the tone and terminology of EU regulatory work. Language specificity combined with practice area relevance and time in the product can be a powerful trifecta for driving adoption that lasts within a firm.

The data is clear: legal AI is no longer a tool for junior associates, nor is it relegated to drafting, or to a specific practice area. Lawyers are finding new uses for Harvey's agentic capabilities, and we're seeing meaningful growth across countries, specialties, and levels.

For firms thinking about organizational transformation and their next AI investment, we'd start by bringing the partners who participated in the pilot into the rollout. Ask them to share the use cases they found most valuable, and use those examples to shape training for each practice and local legal context. As the rollout progresses, look at usage by seniority and practice area to see where adoption is taking hold, and ask teams where they need more support. At Harvey, that’s how we help firms put AI to work.