Engineering a Global Legal Backbone: How Bayer Is Building a Smarter, Faster Legal Function with Harvey

About Bayer

Bayer is a global leader in life sciences with a mission that defines both its business and its purpose: Health for All, Hunger for None.

Across pharmaceuticals, consumer health, and crop science, Bayer’s teams are transforming how the world treats disease, cultivates food, and improves lives.

Bayer is working on breakthroughs like cell and gene therapies for Parkinson’s disease, precision oncology, and hormone-free therapies to treat menopause symptoms. Behind this innovation is a company-wide transformation: a shift from traditional hierarchies to dynamic shared ownership that empowers teams to make faster decisions, innovate with agility, and shorten innovation cycles to as little as 90 days.

That same transformation is now redefining how Bayer’s Legal function operates.

Opportunity

As Bayer accelerated its business transformation, its global legal department faced a dual challenge: complexity and scale.

Thousands of contracts, multi-jurisdictional and multilingual regulations, and research-driven intellectual property required constant review and analysis. Manual processes slowed responsiveness, while fragmented systems made it difficult to connect insights across divisions.

“Our teams were spending too much time on repetitive work — reviewing, comparing, translating,” recalls Melanie Künzel-Wieczorek, Head of Legal Chief Digital Office & Contract Center. “We needed consistency, speed, and a way to share knowledge globally without reinventing it in every region.”

The mandate from General Counsel Thomas Laubert was clear: build a unified digital backbone for Bayer Legal — one that could scale quality as quickly as the business itself.

Solution

Laubert’s vision is taking shape through the Chief Digital Office, led by Künzel-Wieczorek and her team. In partnership with IT, they are digitizing the full spectrum of legal work — connecting people, data, and processes through a single intelligent layer.

A broad testing program brought together representatives from across Bayer Legal, ensuring every function — from corporate and IP to regulatory and compliance — had a voice in shaping adoption.

“At first, people were curious but hesitant,” says Künzel-Wieczorek. “Today, AI is part of our everyday rhythm. It’s our second pair of eyes — helping us research, draft, and challenge our own thinking.”

Harvey is now embedded in Bayer’s global legal operations — standardizing, accelerating, and connecting work across continents as part of Bayer Legal’s digital transformation. Its capabilities accelerate expertise development, improve efficiency, and deliver measurable time savings in all sorts of activities that arise in a legal department — giving each member of the team back on average about three hours every week. Below are some of the key use cases where Harvey supports the Bayer Legal Department:

• Contract Review and Risk Analysis — Harvey identifies risks, suggests mitigation language, and standardizes clauses across templates, freeing lawyers for more strategic work across Confidentiality, R&D (including clinical trial), M&A, and Procurement contracts.
• Document Summarization and Translation — Harvey summarizes and translates long contracts and filings in minutes, improving cross-border turnaround and accuracy across multiple languages.
• Patent Drafting and Portfolio Review — Harvey helps analyze patent portfolios, draft claims, and generate claim charts, saving time and enabling deeper insight into Bayer’s innovation pipeline.
• Complex Analysis & Case Analysis — Vault enables rapid bulk analysis — from extracting and structuring data to summarizing facts, building chronologies, and checking contracts for key clauses.
• Contract Center Use — Connected with Bayer’s global Contract Center team, Harvey supports the creation, negotiation, and maintenance of harmonized contracts — ensuring consistent terms and governance across every division.

Harvey’s flexibility and workflow integrations have made it a catalyst for digital transformation across Bayer’s legal operations — matching the company’s scientific precision with legal intelligence.

Impact

By automating repetitive review and analysis tasks, lawyers now spend more time on complex matters, strategic risk management, and partnering with the business.

One IP team member reported avoiding outside counsel costs by using Harvey for patent drafting and redlining. Others highlight faster turnaround on contracts and compliance summaries that once took days.

The result is a legal function that operates with the same rigor and efficiency as Bayer’s scientific divisions: precise, data-driven, and globally harmonized.

For Laubert, the transformation is about more than productivity — it’s about positioning Legal as a catalyst for innovation.

“Generative AI is changing how knowledge is created, shared, and applied,” he explains. “With Harvey, we’ve accelerated expertise development, enabling lawyers to manage increasingly complex work with confidence.”

As Bayer continues its company-wide reinvention, its legal team stands as a model for what’s next: a smart, connected legal organization that scales precision, insight, and impact — at the speed of science.