What AI‑First Mid‑Sized Law Firms do Differently

Today, the advantage in legal AI belongs to the firms that are changing how legal work actually gets done, not just experimenting with new tools.

Recent research reinforces this trend. Legal teams are among the fastest-advancing users of generative AI, with Legal showing one of the largest year-over-year increases in AI expertise, according to Wharton Human–AI Research and GBK Collective’s 2025 AI Adoption Report. Core legal use cases like contract generation, document drafting, and summarization are now both widely adopted and among the highest-performing AI applications.

These dynamics are particularly relevant for mid-sized and boutique law firms. As clients push for faster turnaround, clearer outcomes, and greater transparency, agility is becoming a significant competitive advantage. Wharton and GBK Collective’s research also shows that while nearly three-quarters of organizations are formally measuring AI ROI, mid-sized organizations are more likely than the largest enterprises to report positive returns already, rather than results that are still “too early to tell.”

As highlighted in Pathways: A Roadmap for Law Firms, the firms pulling ahead are not just adopting AI — they’re using it to change how they operate.

Below, we explore what this looks like in practice, highlighting how leading mid-sized law firms are using Harvey to embed AI into core legal workflows, improve quality and speed, and deliver clearer value to clients.

From Individual Experiment to Team-Wide Expectation

When legal AI first emerged, many firms treated it as an individual productivity tool — something a few lawyers experimented with ad hoc to move faster or refine their own work. That approach delivered incremental gains to those specific lawyers, but because AI was used in a silo, it didn’t fundamentally change how work was produced.

Today, leading firms have moved from experimentation to expectation, thoughtfully embedding AI directly and consistently into the daily rhythm of legal work, throughout whole practice groups and workflows. For these firms, AI isn’t a side project or a specialist tool. It’s a default step in how work gets done and how teams collaborate and deliver value to clients.

At litigation boutique Lightfoot, Franklin & White, Harvey is woven directly into drafting, document review, and deposition preparation. Lawyers use it to generate first drafts, summarize large document sets, and extract deposition-ready insights from thousands of pages of records — work that once took hours but can now be completed in minutes with human oversight.

Lightfoot estimates lawyers reclaim up to ten hours per week, reinvesting that time into case strategy, client engagement, and trial preparation. Corey Thomas, Chief Technology Officer at Lightfoot, went so far as to call this, "the most successful software I ever rolled out."

Moses Singer, a full-service law firm serving businesses, institutions, and individuals navigating complex legal challenges, took a similarly deliberate approach. The firm uses Harvey to push down daily commodity work and protect time for judgment-heavy tasks.

Today, roughly 75% of the firm’s lawyers and staff use Harvey across litigation, real estate, and M&A to analyze leases, synthesize records, and draft first-pass diligence and client memos — enabling faster responses, earlier issue-spotting, and stronger partner review.

Firms Flexibly Adapt To Demand

Mid-sized and boutique firms often tackle sophisticated, high-stakes work with leaner teams. As a result, they walk a tightrope between their team size and the complexity and scale of the work they can support.

Because AI tools like Harvey scale up and down as needed, firms can “flex” into heavier workloads — like that from an especially massive set of documents to review during diligence or discovery — without either scrambling to add staff or narrowing the scope of their analyses. This flexibility allows firms to stay nimble, protect margins, and pursue opportunities that would have previously strained their teams or forced difficult staffing tradeoffs.

At B. Cremades & Asociados, this has been essential to competing with much larger firms. By embedding Harvey into document-heavy arbitration and litigation workflows, the firm achieves up to a 90% efficiency boost in critical document review tasks and saves attorneys around seven hours per week, enabling it to take on more matters without increasing staff.

In one construction arbitration, Harvey analyzed thousands of invoices, converted currencies, calculated interest, and produced an organized chart in minutes — work that previously required hours of manual effort. In another matter, Harvey mapped complex corporate ownership structures from an extensive criminal court file in minutes, saving an associate an entire weekend.

Lektou sees similar leverage across complex, cross-border work. Operating across multiple jurisdictions and languages, the firm uses Harvey to support due diligence, multilingual document analysis, and client communications without expanding headcount. Attorneys report saving more than seven hours per week, time that is reinvested into negotiation strategy, advisory work, and client counseling.

In a recent cross-border acquisition, Lektou used Harvey to analyze thousands of contracts, licenses, and regulatory filings across three languages under tight deadlines. Harvey surfaced key risks quickly and structured findings so the team could focus on strategy and negotiation. As Managing Partner Pedro Cortés explains, “Harvey isn’t just an efficiency tool — it’s a force multiplier,” enabling the firm to deliver higher-quality, business-focused advice while competing at a different level.

Associate Work Evolves and Talent Follows

In AI-forward firms, associate roles are changing faster than titles or formal career paths. The most visible shift isn’t fewer lawyers, but how quickly junior lawyers advance past rote work.

By embedding Harvey into daily litigation workflows, associates at Lynn Pinker Hurst & Schwegmann (LPHS) spend less time generating first drafts, reviewing large document sets, or getting oriented on complex matters. Instead, they contribute earlier and more meaningfully: pressure-testing arguments, preparing for depositions, and engaging in case strategy.

By acting as a sparring partner and first-line-reviewer, Harvey also allows associates to polish preliminary work, spot errors, and save partner review time for more substantive feedback and guidance that actually drives associate learning. As Managing Partner Chris Schwegmann notes, younger lawyers see Harvey not just as a time-saver, but as a way to “think deeper, faster — and contribute earlier.”

At Moses Singer, the impact of AI shows up clearly in how lawyers develop, and why they stay. By using Harvey to remove repetitive early-stage work, associates spend more time on analysis, judgment, and strategy earlier in their careers. That shift has become part of the firm’s value proposition to talent. As CEO Rebecca Goodman-Stephens puts it, “With tools like Harvey, we’re able to retain and develop lawyers who want to operate at their highest and best use.” The result is an associate experience that aligns with what ambitious lawyers increasingly expect from mid-sized firms.

Want to see the same impact at your organization? Contact our team below to see Harvey in action.