One Problem, Different Paths: How Legal Teams Expand Capacity
Bitfury, ICL Group, and SUSE take three distinct approaches to expanding their legal teams’ capacity with Harvey, increasing the amount of work they handle internally and freeing lawyers to focus on higher-value decisions.
An in-house legal department’s capacity depends on more than the number of people on the team. It also depends on which work stays internal, where outside counsel contributes the most value, and how effectively lawyers can apply their judgment.
One Problem, Different Paths looks at the different tactics legal organizations use to address a shared challenge with Harvey. In this edition, Bitfury, ICL Group, and SUSE offer three distinct approaches to expanding the capacity of an in-house legal team.
Bitfury: Redefine the Role of Outside Counsel
Bitfury’s shift from a technology provider to an investment firm created a new challenge for its legal department. A team of three lawyers supports global operations across multiple jurisdictions while keeping pace with an active deal pipeline. Before Harvey, routine drafting, review, and due diligence placed steady pressure on the team, often leading Bitfury to engage outside counsel for work its lawyers had the expertise, but not always the capacity, to handle internally.
Instead of involving a full external team from the outset, the legal team now uses Harvey to prepare transaction documents internally and bring them roughly 80% of the way to a final draft. External partners then review the specific deal rather than building the work product from the ground up, concentrating outside-counsel spend on the work where it adds the most value.
The team has extended this approach across its investment work. Bitfury uses Vault to analyze data room materials and identify key risks, obligations, and red flags during due diligence. Lawyers also use Harvey to develop an initial understanding of foreign regulatory requirements, reducing the need to engage local counsel whenever a matter enters a new jurisdiction.
“We expect AI tools to play an increasingly central role in how legal teams operate — enabling small, agile teams like ours to support complex, global operations without the traditional dependency on outside counsel.”
Grigol Abashidze
Head of Legal at Bitfury Group
With more drafting, due diligence, and research handled internally, Bitfury has reduced its reliance on outside counsel by more than 50%. Each lawyer saves at least 10 hours per week, and transactions move as much as 10 times faster than under the team’s previous workflows. Without Harvey, Bitfury estimates that it would need at least three additional full-time lawyers, alongside significantly higher outside-counsel spending, to manage the same workload.
Principles Behind the Path:
- Use AI to develop work internally before outside counsel gets involved
- Concentrate external support on targeted review rather than first-draft work
- Redirect lawyer time toward the strategy and negotiation behind the matter
ICL Group: Establish Cross-Functional Ownership Before Scaling
ICL Group, a global specialty minerals company, introduced Harvey across a legal department spanning five regions that supports a highly regulated, diversified business. With no established playbook for adopting generative AI, the team first needed to determine how Legal, Data Privacy, IT, IT Security, and Procurement would contribute to the rollout. Senior Legal Counsel Mehmet Ocak coordinated that work over several months, creating the internal structure needed to use Harvey across sensitive, multi-jurisdictional matters.
That foundation enabled ICL to bring complex work in-house. During a cross-border restructuring, the legal team used Harvey to review corporate documents for more than eight subsidiaries, draft agreements and board resolutions across jurisdictions, and analyze hundreds of pages of pension materials. ICL completed the matter internally in five weeks, engaging external counsel only for the most complex pension questions and saving an estimated £90,000 to £165,000.
ICL has since applied Harvey to a wider range of work. The team analyzed more than 1,000 legacy contracts to extract missing metadata and improve its contract database. Compliance has started using a Harvey Agent for repeatable risk assessments, establishing a model that the department plans to extend into areas including Data Privacy, Sales, and Procurement.
“The most critical investment is not in technology, but in people. We're not just using :Harvey: as a productivity tool — we're using it as a platform for organizational transformation.”
Mehmet Ocak
Senior Legal Counsel at ICL Group
ICL estimates that Harvey has made each lawyer 30% to 40% more efficient, giving its four-to-five-person core team capacity equivalent to an additional full-time employee. The team has also reduced its reliance on outside counsel by 20%.
Principles Behind the Path:
- Bring relevant stakeholders into the rollout before expanding usage
- Demonstrate value through high-impact work with measurable results
- Convert successful use cases into repeatable workflows that can scale across teams
SUSE: Use Adoption Data to Improve Workflows
SUSE, a global provider of enterprise open-source software, has a lean legal team supporting the business across EMEA, the Americas, and APAC. As the company expanded, the team needed to increase its capacity without adding headcount and bring complex work such as M&A diligence, regulatory matters, and disputes back in-house.
SUSE treated adoption as something to measure and continuously improve. Chief Legal Officer Andy McDonald sponsored the business case for AI, while Legal Operations tracked usage and ROI and four regional Power Users provided local guidance. When a quarterly review of prompt logs revealed variations in prompting and output quality, the team introduced standardized templates and Harvey Agents.
“As AI absorbs the routine, we reinvest that capacity into judgment and nuance — the work only our lawyers can do.”
Anne Wong
Head of Legal Operations at SUSE
During a recent acquisition, SUSE used Harvey to conduct the entire due diligence process in-house in one month. Using Vault, the legal team analyzed the target’s data room and identified 12 high-priority contracts for deeper review of termination rights, liability, indemnity, and limitations on open-sourcing. Harvey completed the first pass and flagged potential risks, which the team verified against the cited sources. This reduced manual review time by 73% and saved up to £80,000 in external fees on a single deal.
Across its broader use of Harvey, SUSE’s legal team saved nearly 1,500 hours over four months, and 70% of users report redirecting that time toward strategic work they previously lacked the capacity to address. The team also delivers legal advice to the wider business 32% faster, giving colleagues earlier guidance as decisions move forward.
Principles Behind the Path:
- Combine central program ownership with regional champions
- Track usage patterns and output quality to identify ways to improve adoption
- Turn effective practices into standardized templates and Agents
Different Paths to Greater Capacity
Expanding capacity requires deliberate decisions about how work should move: where Harvey can support the process, when lawyer judgment should enter, when outside expertise is warranted, and who needs to be involved as adoption grows. Clear roles and handoffs make efficiency gains easier to repeat across matters and workflows.
For in-house leaders, a practical starting point is the constraint limiting the team today. Once that constraint is clear, they can choose an approach that fits their work, resources, and priorities.
To learn more about how AI is changing the capacity, economics, and strategic role of legal departments, read The New Economics of In-House Legal.
