Why Trust Matters More Than Ever
As AI becomes easier to build and deploy, trust is becoming the deciding factor.
We are in an era where anyone, at any time, with very little coding experience, can build and ship an app. That shift is exciting, and it will change the way each of us work. But it also means that every partner, client, and AI committee is having the same conversation behind closed doors: how do we know we can trust this? Not trust it conceptually. Trust it with a motion for summary judgment. Trust it when a client's deal is on the line. Trust it when a judge asks you to defend what's in the brief.
That question does not have a marketing answer. It has a practical one. Law firms are responsible for their own data, but also for their client’s data, meaning they feel accountability on multiple levels to have a thoughtful and credible approach to everything surrounding trust, privacy, and security.
So what does trust actually require? Not confidence scores. Not a well-designed demo. A few concrete things that compound over time.
The first is verifiability. If an AI surfaces a line of cases supporting your litigation position, you need to be able to trace every citation to its source, read the underlying material, and confirm the characterization holds. Trust is not faith. It’s the ability to check, trust, and verify. Any tool that makes that harder instead of easier has the wrong design philosophy for legal work.
The second is consistency across real conditions. A junior associate can produce excellent work on a good day. The question for any tool is whether it holds up across hundreds of matters, under time pressure, across practice areas, with associates of varying experience. Trust gets built through repeated verified performance, not through a single showcase.
The third is a culture and team at the technology partner dedicated to trust, safety, and security. Harvey has always had a deep bench of security engineers, a senior Privacy team within Legal to actively protect customer interests in a rapidly evolving environment, and a culture where we build security into the fabric of how we operate.
Next week, Joshua McKibben will join Harvey as our Head of Trust. Joshua comes to us from Snowflake, where he was Senior Director of Enterprise Security Compliance and Risk, owning the programs behind the certifications and attestations that regulated customers depend on, including SOC 2 and the ISO family. At Harvey, he'll lead the team that sits behind every answer we give our clients on privacy, security, compliance, and audit. In a market where the bar is rising quickly, we wanted someone who has already built a trust function at that scale for the world's most scrutinized enterprises. Joshua has, and we're excited to have him.
When it comes to trust, you need technology you can trust but also a team that is purpose built with deep experience in this space. Harvey is building both. Trust is a core tenet of any technology partner relationship, but in this environment it’s also a business imperative. Joshua's arrival is one step in a deeper investment. Over the coming year you should expect more from Harvey on this front: clearer documentation of how our systems work, faster and more transparent responses to security reviews, and continued investment in the people and infrastructure that make our platform one that firms can stake their matters on.
