The Supreme Case for :Harvey:

We have said from the early beginnings of Harvey that our ultimate goal is to increase access to justice and to transform how the legal field works. That includes working with the industry to power how AI changes the landscape, but also more broadly building partnerships with law school faculty and students to help empower the next generation of lawyers for a meaningfully different way of thinking and working.

Arguing a case before the Supreme Court is the Super Bowl of the American legal system. Neal Katyal has argued over 50 cases in front of the Supreme Court, making him a Hall of Fame practitioner in the field. Neal reached out to us last year to ask about how Harvey might be able to help his team prepare for cases. We prepared a Harvey instance for use on any Supreme Court matter and for a company with 20% lawyers, this was a dream project to work on. A small team of dedicated lawyers and AI researchers worked with Neal’s team to create a custom version of Harvey we now call Harvey Moot.

This week, a TED Talk launched outlining how Neal and his team leveraged Harvey Moot to help them prepare for their landmark victory in the Tariffs case. We were honored to be a small part of their intense preparation, but what we are most proud of is the potential this work creates for our academic partnerships and for future case preparation. The work of preparing for a Supreme Court case is inherently apolitical and our objective with Harvey Moot is a meaningful, thoughtful contribution to approaching jurisprudence.

Neal is one of the most respected lawyers in the field. He is the first to admit that he was initially skeptical of how AI could augment his proven, successful methodology to prepare for the most high profile cases. But what he and his team saw was notable: the opportunity for Harvey to be a sparring partner, anticipating not just the likely questions and responses from the Justices, but also how he might consider responding in a manner that resonates. In his TED Talk, Neal calls Harvey his team’s “peripheral vision.” What he experienced at the highest level is true for all of us: AI can help sharpen our approach, refine our preparation, and ultimately, spend more time on judgment and strategy.

Neal is not the only lawyer who has leveraged Harvey to prepare for a case before the Supreme Court. Matt Nelson of Warner Norcross + Judd used Harvey when he argued Pung vs. Isabella County. We hope they are the first of many teams to use Harvey to strengthen case preparation, whether at the highest levels of appellate advocacy or in the classroom.

To make that a reality, we are starting with our law school partners to bring Harvey Moot to the classroom, giving students the chance to workshop real life examples with the same tool Neal and his team used. In so doing, the goal is give students and faculty members alike a unique opportunity to bring a new teaching approach to something that has largely been instructed the same way for decades. Those students’ feedback will also be invaluable as we replicate these tools for other courts and legal systems around the world.

Most lawyers dream of arguing a case in front of the Supreme Court. By democratizing access to a tool that one of the world’s leading appellate attorneys used to refine his team’s arguments in a landmark victory, our goal as a company is to create more opportunities to take the practice of law back to its roots in debate, storytelling, and reasoning. We’ll use the feedback from law students to replicate this model with courts, law schools, and lawyers around the world, and in so doing will move from reading and writing draft arguments to practicing them in real time with highly instrumented inputs on each specific Justice. Access to justice begins when you increase the aperture of what’s possible and who it’s possible for, and this project is one more meaningful step in advancing that objective for our team at Harvey.